Alfredo Catalani

Alfredo Catalani was an Italian composer known for his operas Loreley and La Wally. His implementation of Scapigliatura ideals played an important role in the development of opera. He was born in Lucca, Italy in 1854 to a musical family and received his first musical instruction from his father Eugenio, who taught solfege at the local music school in Lucca, l'Istituto Musicale Pacini. Later, Catalani became a student there and studied composition with Fortunato Magi, the uncle and music teacher of Giacomo Puccini. After he graduated in 1872, he left Italy to study with Antoine François Marmontel and Francois Bazin in Paris. The following year he returned home to join the military but was turned away because he had tuberculosis. He enrolled at the Milan Conservatory and began studying composition with Antonio Bazzini. While in Milan, Bazzini introduced him to the Salotto Maffei, a salon where artists, writers, and musicians gathered to share ideas. There he was exposed to the music of Richard Wagner, which had a profound influence on him. He finished his studies at the Milan Conservatory in 1875 and became prominent with the followers of the Scapigliatura movement in Milan. They were seeking to reform opera using the aesthetics and compositional techniques of Wagner. Catalani's first two large-scale operas, Elda (1877) and Dejanice (1883), were composed in the style of Wagner and they were not very popular. By 1886 he was experiencing financial difficulties and began working as a composition professor at the Milan Conservatory. His position there did not become official until 1888 because of suspicions regarding his health. He also began reworking his first opera, Elda, into Loreley, in which he combined a lively dramatic style with a score that was much more original and mature. The 1890 premiere in Turin was very successful, and he immediately began working on another opera, La Wally, while also dealing with declining health. Catalani used the same dramatic style that he developed in Loreley, with a sophisticated Wagner-influenced harmonic structure. The premiere of La Wally at La Scala in 1892 was hugely popular, and attracted the attention of his friend Arturo Toscanini, who went on to conduct many successful performances of it. Catalani passed away the following summer. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi