Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
was born in Florence and came from a prominent banking family that had lived in Tuscany, specifically in Siena, since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 until the mid-19th century. His father was Amedeo and his older brothers were Ugo (born 1890, lawyer) and Guido (born 1891, engineer). Castelnuovo-Tedesco was first introduced to the piano by his mother Noemi Senigaglia and composed his first pieces when he was just nine years old. After completing his piano diploma in 1914 with Edgardo Del Valle de Paz (1861–1920), the well-known composer and student of pianist Beniamino Cesi, he began studying composition with the renowned Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti and received his composition diploma in 1918. Soon the composer and pianist Alfredo Casella took notice of him and included the works of the young Castelnuovo-Tedesco in his repertoire. Casella also ensured that Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s works were added to the repertoire of the Societa Nazionale di Musica (later Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche), which made him known throughout Europe as one of Italy’s rising young composers. His works were included in the first festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, held in Salzburg, Austria, in 1922.
In 1926 Castelnuovo-Tedesco premiered his first opera, La Mandragola, based on a play by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was the first of his many works inspired by great literature and included interpretations of works by Aeschylus, Virgil, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Miguel de Cervantes, Federico García Lorca and, above all, William Shakespeare. Another important source of inspiration for him was his Jewish heritage, especially the Bible and Jewish liturgy. His Violin Concerto No. 2 (1931), written at the request of Jascha Heifetz, was also an expression of his pride in his Jewish origin, or as he called it, the “splendor of bygone days,” in the face of the growing anti-Semitism that was spreading across much of Europe.
At the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Venice in 1932, Castelnuovo-Tedesco met the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia for the first time. This encounter inspired Castelnuovo-Tedesco to write for the guitar, beginning with his Variazioni attraverso i secoli (Variations through the Centuries), Op. 71 (1932), and later his Guitar Concerto No. 1 (1939). In total, he wrote nearly one hundred compositions for this instrument, which earned him the reputation as one of the leading composers for guitar in the twentieth century. Some of them were written for and dedicated to Segovia, who was an enthusiast of his style.
Even before the Italian government announced the Italian racial laws at the end of 1938, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was banned from radio broadcasts and performances of his work were canceled. The new racial laws, however, convinced him that he should leave Italy. He wrote to Arturo Toscanini, the former music director of La Scala, and to the violinist Jascha Heifetz to explain his plight, and both responded with support. As an American citizen, Heifetz began the paperwork to help Castelnuovo-Tedesco immigrate to the United States. Castelnuovo-Tedesco left Italy in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.
He wrote his Cello Concerto in G minor, Op. 72, for Gregor Piatigorsky. It was premiered in New York in 1935 with the dedicatee under Arturo Toscanini. For Piatigorsky, he also wrote a Toccata (1935) and a piece called Greeting Card, Op. 170/3, which was based on the spelling of Piatigorsky’s name.
Like many artists who fled fascism, Castelnuovo-Tedesco ended up in Hollywood, where, with the help of Jascha Heifetz, he secured a contract as a film composer with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In the following fifteen years, he worked there and in other major film studios on the film music for around 200 movies. Rita Hayworth hired him for the music to The Loves of Carmen (1948), which was produced by Hayworth for her Beckworth Productions and released by Columbia Pictures.
As a teacher, Castelnuovo-Tedesco had a significant influence on other important film composers, including Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein, and André Previn. Jerry Goldsmith, Marty Paich, and John Williams were all his students, as was Scott Bradley, who studied privately with him while both were employed at MGM. He also had close contact with the film composer Robert Strassburg. His relationship with Hollywood was ambivalent: later in life he downplayed the influence Hollywood had on his own work, but he also believed that it was essentially an American art form, just as opera was European.
In 1946 he became an American citizen, but he remained very close to Italy, which he visited frequently. In 1958 he won the Concorso Campari with the opera The Merchant of Venice, which premiered in 1961 at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino under the direction of Gianandrea Gavazzeni.
