CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO, MARIO

CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO, MARIO (1895–1968), composer, pianist, and music critic. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a member of an old Florentine family, studied piano with Edoardo del Valle and composition with Pizzetti at the Istituto Cherubini. His first opera, La mandragola (1920–23), won first prize – a performance at La Fenice – at the first Concorso Lirico Nazionale in 1925. He worked as a music critic for La Critica Musicale (1919–23), Il Pianoforte (1921–27), and La Rassegna Musicale (1928–36). In 1939, forced by the Nazi racial laws to leave Italy, he settled in Hollywood, where he devoted some of his time to writing film music. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was one of the foremost Italian composers of his time. His early music was impressionistic, but his later style tended toward neo-classicism. In 1925 he found in his grandfather's house a notebook containing Jewish melodies. These made a great impression on him and he started to write Jewish compositions. He became, like ernest bloch , one of those European musicians who tried, deliberately and successfully, to create Jewish music. His Jewish works include: La Danza del Rei David, a rhapsody for piano (1925); Tre Corali su Melodie Ebraiche, choral arrangement (1926); a violin concerto, The Prophets (1931); Sacred Service (1943); the oratorios Ruth (1949), Jonah (1951), Naomi and Ruth (1959), and the opera Saul (1960). Among his other works are The Song of Songs (1954–55, subtitled "A Rustic Wedding Idyll"); Tobias and the Angel (1964–65); Two operas based on Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well and The Merchant of Venice (1956), which won first place in the Concorso Campari Internazionale sponsored by La Scala. He also wrote a series of lectures on opera: Under the Sign of Orpheus. -ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grove online; MGG2; Baker, Biog Dict.; Sendrey, Music, index; M.L. Holmberg, "Thematic Contours and Harmonic Idioms of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco," Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern Univ. (1974); H.M. Rosen, "The Influence of Judaic Liturgical Music in Selected Secular Works of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco," Ph.D. thesis. UCLA (1994); C. Ponsillo, Musica Espressione di Vita. Pensiero Estetico di Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Analisi e Catalogo delle Opere per Chitarra, Carteggio (1996). (Claude Abravanel / Israela Stein (2nd ed.)