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Composer, born in Parma in 1880 and died in Rome in 1968. He was G. Tebaldini’s student at the conservatory of Parma, he made himself known through the stage music for "La Nave" of D’Annunzio, performed at Rome in 1908. In the same year he took up the teaching post of harmony and counterpoint (the art or practice of combining melodies according to fixed rules) of music at the conservatory in Florence, which he then directed from 1917 to 1923.

After having performed "La Pisanella", the stage music for D’Annunzio’s drama of the same name the " Requiem Mass" and other important compositions, he became director of the conservatory of Milan in 1924, which he then left in 1936 for the the position of perfectioning compositions at the Accademy of Saint Cecilia in Rome. To his intense creative work, the musician added right from his youth, the job of critic and music historian and that of director of this own theatrical and symphonic tours even in North America.

In 1939 he was given the title of ‘Italian Academic’ and in 1949 he became the president of the national Academy of Saint Cecilia. Being gifted with an essentially drammatical nature, he succeeded right from the beginning of his creative activity in aesthetically renewing melodrama, working on a drammatical style based on the idea of an absolute balance between words and music, this derives from his deep synthesis of traditional Italian music, and independent from the forms of the tardoromantic and veristic theatre. This conception of drama was most successfully performed in "Assassinio nella cattedrale" (1958) Eliot’s tragedy. Other significant works were "Fedra" (1915), using D’Annunzio’s text), "Debora e Jaele" (1922) using his own text. In the area of Pizzetti’s vast symphonic production "Concerto dell’estate" (1928), "I canti della stagione alta" (1930) are to be mentioned.

(Contribution by <richardscott3993.fslife.co.uk>)