Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence into a prominent banking family with roots in Tuscany dating back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. He grew up with his father Amedeo and his older brothers Ugo and Guido. Introduced to the piano by his mother Noemi Senigaglia, he composed his first pieces at the age of nine. After completing his piano diploma in 1914 with Edgardo Del Valle de Paz, he studied composition with the renowned Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, receiving his diploma in 1918.
The composer and pianist Alfredo Casella soon became one of his early supporters, performing his works and including them in the repertoire of the Società Nazionale di Musica. As a result, Castelnuovo-Tedesco gained recognition throughout Europe as one of Italy’s rising young composers. His music was featured at the first festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Salzburg in 1922.
In 1926 he premiered his first opera, La Mandragola, based on a play by Niccolò Machiavelli. Literature became a lifelong inspiration, leading to works influenced by Aeschylus, Virgil, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Miguel de Cervantes, Federico García Lorca and especially William Shakespeare. Another important source of inspiration was his Jewish heritage, reflected in works connected to the Bible and Jewish liturgy. His Violin Concerto No. 2 (1931), written for Jascha Heifetz, expressed pride in his origins during a time of rising antisemitism in Europe.
At the 1932 ISCM Festival in Venice, Castelnuovo-Tedesco met the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. Encouraged by this encounter, he began composing for the guitar, starting with Variazioni attraverso i secoli, Op. 71 (1932), followed by his Guitar Concerto No. 1 (1939). He eventually wrote nearly one hundred works for the instrument, many dedicated to Segovia, establishing himself as one of the major guitar composers of the twentieth century.
Even before the announcement of the Italian racial laws in 1938, he was banned from radio broadcast, and performances of his music were canceled. After the laws were enacted, he decided to leave Italy. He wrote to Arturo Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz, both of whom offered immediate support. Heifetz, as an American citizen, initiated the immigration process, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco left Italy in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
He composed his Cello Concerto in G minor, Op. 72, for Gregor Piatigorsky, who premiered it in New York in 1935 under Toscanini. For Piatigorsky he also wrote a Toccata (1935) and Greeting Card, Op. 170/3.
After immigrating to the United States, Castelnuovo-Tedesco settled in Hollywood and, with the help of Heifetz, secured a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Over the next fifteen years, he composed music for around 200 films. Actress Rita Hayworth commissioned him for the score of The Loves of Carmen (1948).
As a teacher, he influenced a generation of film composers, including Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein and André Previn. His students also included Jerry Goldsmith, Marty Paich, John Williams and Scott Bradley. Although ambivalent about Hollywood’s impact on his own work, he acknowledged cinema as an essentially American art form, just as opera was European.
He became an American citizen in 1946 but remained closely connected to Italy, which he visited frequently. In 1958 he won the Concorso Campari with his opera The Merchant of Venice, which premiered in 1961 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni.
