Ottorino Respighi

Goodness! What a nasty, petty, vindictive and small-minded entry this composer gets in the 1980 edition of the New Groves (and in subsequent editions, too)! Written by one John C. G. Waterhouse, it's full of such gems as: The undeniable limitations of Respighi's art are closely bound up with the limitations of his personality; or He was not so much a thinker as an avid observer of things; or [His 'Roman Festivals'], despite certain fascist overtones basically reflect nothing worse than the uninhibited self-indulgence of an infant with a box of gaudy toys; or his arrangements of early music tend, typically enough, to be decorative rather than scholarly. Even of his operas, this critic can only bring himself to begrudgingly state that [They] usually reflected his basic nature in being better in the picturesque or idyllic than in dramatic or passionate scenes. You get the idea: Ottorino Respighi was a bad man and thus a bad composer, unable to do more than exhibit shimmering orchestration to no great drammatic end.

It's rare that I declare 'bollocks' on a New Groves biography, but that one is certainly that.

Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, northern Italy, in 1879. His father encouraged him in music, though he was a poor piano student. He became a much more successful violinist and violist: his first job was as violinist in the orchestra at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, around 1899. He was to go on to accept the role of principal violist in the orchestra of the Russian Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg during its opera season in 1900. It was here that he met Rimsky-Korsakov, studying the finer points of orchestration with him: these lessons were to resume in 1902. He wrote his first opera in 1905; the following year saw him compose his first transcription of 'ancient' music: his reworking of Lamento d'Arianna, by Claudio Monteverdi became his first international success when it was performed during his visit to Berlin in 1908.

He moved to Rome in 1913 and took up the post of professor of composition at the Conservatorio di S. Cecilia (appropriately enough!), a position he kept until resigning as Director in 1926, so that he could devote his time to composition. His first great orchestral tone poem, Fountains of Rome dates to 1917, a piece which was picked up by Toscanini and propelled him to international fame. Another opera, Belfagor followed in 1923, the follow-up to 'Fountains' came in 1924 with The Pines of Rome, which is probably his most well-known composition these days. He worked under the fascist regime of Mussolini, and accommodated himself with it, but he was no fascist himself, despite continuing criticism from the left, long after his death, for allowing his music to be co-opted by the regime. He was an advocate for Toscanini, for example, who was an outspoken critic of the fascist regime.

Respighi fell ill towards the end of 1935, whilst trying to complete his last opera Lucrezia. He was suffering a bacterial infection of the heart and was to die four months later, in April 1936, of subacute bacterial endocarditis. His wife was to outlive him by some 60 years, dying in 1996: she organised the completion of Lucrezia and promoted his work for the rest of her life.

Clearly, a lot of Respighi's work involved the (brilliant) re-orchestration of the works of others (such as Rameau, Monteverdi or Rossini) but Waterhouse's petty critique that he had no musical personality of his own is clearly idiotic: just a few notes of almost any piece by him are enough to tell you precisely who you're listening to. His orchestrations are indeed brilliant, as you'd expect from a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, but brilliance does not denote vacuousness: this is a trite claim often made of Benjamin Britten, for example, without foundation in either case. His technical mastery allows him to paint vividly and vibrantly and always in a language that is attractive and appealing. Whether it lacks 'scholarly' authority or not, and is merely “decorative”, is just a nonsense distinction that should be given no weight at all: if music is not appealing, it is worthless, no matter how scholarly its foundations! His decorative charms should not obscure the fact that his music can pluck at the heart-strings perfectly well: there is emotional depth as well as surface dazzle.

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