RESPIGHI, OTTORINO

20th-century composer famed for his orchestral colorism; b. Bologna, July 9, 1879; d. Rome, April 18, 1936. Following musical studies at the Liceo Musicale of Bologna (1891–99), he was active until 1908 as violinist, but continued to study composition, first under Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), then under Max Bruch in Berlin. From 1913 on he taught composition at the conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, for two years as its director. In 1932 he was elected to the Italian Royal Academy. Eclectic in his approach, he was associated for a time with the movement around Casella and Malipiero to revive Italian neoclassic instrumental music, and he produced a number of transcriptions of 17th- and 18th-century works. In his most successful style, notably in the symphonic poems The Fountains of Rome (1917) and The Pines of Rome (1924), he used a more conservative harmonic language and the sumptuous orchestration identified with Richard Strauss. At the same time his interest in Gregorian chant (encouraged by his wife and former pupil, the composer Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo), emerges in the modal melodies of many works from c. 1920. The opera Lucrezia (1935) and Concerto a cinque (1934) tend toward linear structure and reduced performing media, thus approaching the progressive features of style prevailing among his contemporaries. Among his operas, Maria Egiziaca (1931), first produced at Carnegie Hall, New York City, is probably the best known.

Bibliography: e. respighi, Ottorino Respighi, tr. g. morris (London 1962). r. de rensis, Ottorino Respighi (Turin 1933). p. alverÀ, Portraits of Greatness: Respighi (New York 1986). l. bragaglia and e. respighi. Il Teatro di Respighi: Opere, Balli e Balletti (Rome 1978). a. cantÙ, Respighi Compositore (Torino 1985). d. m. randel, ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge 1996). n. slonimsky, ed. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (8th ed. New York 1992). j. c. g. waterhouse The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed. s. sadie (New York 1980).

[h. braunlich]