‘Tutt' ora vivente’: Petrassi and the concerto principle

Abstract

Italian masters seem habitually to survive to a ripe old age. The proverbial example is Verdi, dying at 87, but Gianfrancesco Malipiero had turned 91 by his death in 1973, and his longevity has now been equalled, and seems likely to be surpassed, by Goffredo Petrassi. Long an eminent and respected figure in Italian musical life, and routinely named in the reference books as a significant 20th-century composer, Petrassi has never been well known in this country. His international reputation was at its height in the 1950s and 60s, and probably reached its apogee here with the London premiere, in 1957, of his Sixth Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the BBC for the 10th anniversary of the Third Programme. During those decades he travelled, conducted and adjudicated widely; he was closely associated with the ISCM (and was its President in the years 1954–56); as Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, he exercised a powerful influence on his country's musical life. He is especially celebrated as a teacher: his Italian pupils have included Aldo Clementi, Riccardo Malipiero, the film composer Enrico Morricone and the conductor Zoltán Pesko, but composers of many nations have studied with him. Among his British pupils, one need only instance Peter Maxwell Davies, Cornelius Cardew, and the late Kenneth Leighton to see that his teaching was never stylistically prescriptive.