Succeeding Puccini

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth, this first critical biography of Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952) offers fascinating new insights into the life and work of an important opera composer, seventeen years younger than Puccini, who became internationally famous with L'amore dei tre re (1913). From 1905, when he was signed up by Puccini's publisher, Casa Ricordi, Montemezzi was often seen as Puccini's heir apparent. Inspired most of all by late Verdi, and by Wagner's works, Montemezzi sought to create a distinctively new kind of Italian opera that was, in his own words, "different from anything that had been done before-a real Italian music drama, with dynamism, drama, poetry-all of it bathed in an atmosphere of musical rapture." To numerous critics, especially in America, Montemezzi achieved his lofty goal, many of them agreeing with fellow opera composer Vittorio Gnecchi that L'amore dei tre re was "the modern opera most deeply worthy of being considered a continuation of the shining path marked by Verdi." Yet after La nave (1918), the opera Montemezzi himself considered his masterpiece, his career faltered; his marriage to a New York heiress in 1921 removed any financial incentive to compose, and he found himself increasingly out of sympathy with musical developments in Fascist Italy. This book offers, for the first time, detailed discussion of all seven of Montemezzi's operas, as well as his other music, and sets the compelling story of his life and career-from his childhood in the agricultural Italian village of Vigasio to his final years of affluence in Beverly Hills, California-in the context of the tumultuous times in which he lived.