Italy’s great orchestrator
A portrait of Ottorino Respighi Italy’s great orchestrator A portrait of Ottorino Respighi

A quiet observer, he listened to the world around him with a painterly sense of sound. Ottorino Respighi loved transforming everyday scenes into music – children playing in a park, the splashing of a fountain and the songs of birds. His musical tableaus would influence some of the greatest film composers, such as John Williams and Hans Zimmer. His Rome Trilogy remains one of the most successful orchestral cycles of the early twentieth century. A portrait.

“Children are playing among the pines in the grounds of the Villa Borghese. They are playing ring-a-ring o’ roses and staging mock parades and battles, while growing intoxicated on the sound of their own screams, like swallows in the evening; they then run away and the scene swiftly changes…”

This is Respighi’s poetic account of the opening movement of his Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome). The description is typical of a composer who was regarded by his compatriots as the most successful Italian composer of orchestral music since Vivaldi. Typically, Respighi did not base his music on literary sources or retell stories in sound. Instead, he translated individual scenes and images into music. The parallels with the emerging art of cinema are striking. Respighi’s music is, in fact, remarkably cinematic. His famous programmatic tone-poems, Fontane di Roma and Pini di Roma, paint vivid scenes from the Italian capital.

A forerunner of Hollywood film music

His influence has not gone unnoticed. The film composer John Williams, for example, has cited Respighi as one of his most important influences, while other Hollywood composers such as Bernard Herrmann and Hans Zimmer have likewise been inspired by his characteristic sound world with its powerful brass, its sweeping strings, and its flair for dramatic climaxes. Pini di Roma was even used in Disney’s Fantasia 2000, which is a testimony to Respighi’s lasting influence on visual storytelling.

Respighi did come under fire for his music’s resemblance to film scores. His critics accused him of valuing effect over substance. But is this not equally true of Wagner and Richard Strauss? Respighi was undoubtedly a brilliant orchestrator who used all the opportunities afforded to him by a modern symphony orchestra to create his large-scale musical canvases. Lavish orchestration and vivid musical storytelling combined in a style that is unmistakably his own, often touched by Impressionism but never obscure.

From Bologna via Berlin to Rome

Respighi was born in Bologna in 1879. By the time he was twelve years old, he had enrolled at the city’s Conservatory, where he studied the violin, viola and composition. He also spent a number of seasons performing in the orchestras of the Imperial Opera in St Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. During his first visit to Russia he took lessons with Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, whose sophisticated approach to orchestration left its mark on Respighi’s scores.

Respighi also visited Berlin on several occasion – including for the successful 1908 performance of his orchestral arrangement of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna by Arthur Nikisch and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Three years later he was appointed professor of composition at the Bologna Conservatory. In 1913, he moved to Rome, where he took up a similar position at the city’s Liceo musicale Santa Cecilia.

Right from the start of his career as a composer, Respighi was regarded as a talented arranger of early music and as a master of orchestration. But it was not until Toscanini conducted the triumphant first performance of his symphonic poem Fontane di Roma in Milan in February 1918 that Respighi found overnight fame. From then on he was seen as the leading figure in Italian music after Puccini. Between 1918 and 1928 Respighi followed Fontane di Roma with two similarly-conceived and equally successful works inspired by Rome’s pines and festivals. Respighi’s Roman Trilogy was admired by audiences but divided critical opinion. Some dismissed it as a “musical guidebook” to Rome, while others celebrated its dazzling orchestration and vivid pictorial imagination.

Italian music beyond opera

Respighi’s principal concern as a composer was to seek out a new approach for Italian music outside the world of opera: opera, after all, continued to dominate the country’s life of music. Respighi found a solution to this problem in early music and in plainchant; this can be heard in Antiche danze ed arie per liuto (Ancient Dances and Arias for Lute) and in his orchestral arrangements of a number of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works.

Respighi’s fascination with Gregorian chant is especially clear from his 1921 violin concerto, Concerto gregoriano. In her biography of her husband, the composer’s wife, Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo, who was a singer and a composer in her own right, recalled how the work came into being: “Plainchant had become an addiction, and not a day passed when he did not ask me to intone some passage or other from the Roman Gradual.” Another journey into the past produced Gli uccelli (The Birds), in which Respighi reworked harpsichord and keyboard pieces from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that imitate birdsong.

“Atonality? – Thank goodness that’s over!”

Respighi had no time for any of the new tonal systems or for the twelve-note music developed by Arnold Schoenberg. “Atonality? – Thank goodness that’s over! The future of music? Who knows? I believe that every composer must be an individual first and foremost,” Respighi wrote in 1925. He was never a musical modernist, but remained firmly rooted in the past. “A logical bond links the past and the future – the Romanticism of yesterday will again be the Romanticism of tomorrow,” we read in a manifesto that Respighi signed.

The Fascist regime readily appropriated Respighi’s music, but his own relationship with Mussolini’s Italy remained more ambiguous. Respighi died of heart failure in Rome on 18 April 1936. He was only fifty-six.