Vittorio Gnecchi

Gnecchi was the son of a wealthy industrialist. Thanks to his solid financial position, he was able to take private lessons, and had among his teachers Michele Saladino (who was also the teacher of Pietro Mascagni and Victor de Sabata), Tullio Serafin, Gaetano Coronaro and Carlo Gatti.

As soon as he was nineteen years old, he achieved success with the pastoral action Virtù d'amore, which allowed him to publish his work with the prestigious publisher Ricordi. The next work was the opera Cassandra, whose libretto, taken from Oresteia by Aeschylus, was first set by Gnecchi himself, then entrusted to the librettist Luigi Illica. Cassandra was completed in 1903 and premiered on 5 December 1905 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna under the direction of Arturo Toscanini with Solomiya Krushelnytska and Giuseppe Borgatti.

Shortly after the first performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss (25 January 1909), an article appeared in Italy by musicologist Giovanni Tebaldini, entitled Telepatia Musicale. In this article, Cassandra and Elektra were compared, and the author concluded that Strauss must have known Gnecchi's work, and may possibly have plagiarised it. Strauss denied plagiarism and, although there appear to be established correspondence about the work between him and Gnecchi,[2] critics are inclined to believe that the similarities are coincidental.[3] Gnecchi never commented on the case, but his name was linked to it throughout his life. The uproar caused by the article curbed the circulation of Cassandra in Italy, while abroad there were several performances until 1933 (including at the Wiener Volksoper, in Philadelphia and in numerous German theatres).[2] In more recent times, the opera was revived in Montpellier on 13 July 2000 in a concert that resulted in a recording. It then arrived in 2011 at the Teatro Massimo Bellini, with performers Giovanna Casolla (Clytemnestra), John Treleaven (Agamemnon) and Maria Pentcheva (Cassandra) and conductor Donato Renzetti.[4]

Gnecchi's next opera was La Rosiera in 1927, which was followed by the ballet Atlanta (1929). The composer, whose style is characterised by the use of post-wagnerian chromatic harmonies within classical forms,[3] came late to the honours of the Salzburg Festival, in which some of his works were performed, including the Missa Salisburgensis (1933), the Cantata Biblica (1934) and the opera Giuditta (1953), also as Cassandra with a libretto by Illica, the composition of which had begun almost forty years earlier, in 1914.

Gnecchi died in Milan aged 77.

• Cassandra - Denia Mazzola (Clitennestra), Alberto Cupido (Agamennone), Arnold Kocharyan (Egisto), Tea Demurishvili (Cassandra), Pierre Lebon (Oreste), Andzella Kirse (Una Coèfora), Jean Marc Ivaldi (Il Fazionario del Porto), Jean Marc Ivaldi (Il Navarca), Nikola Mijailovic (Il Prologo) - Direttore: Enrique Diemecke - Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. Latvian Radio Chorus - Registrazione dal vivo - 2000 - Agorà Musica AG 260.2[7][8]

• Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 57: Giulini–Gonzaga (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. 2001. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
• Raffaele Pozzi, Gnecchi, Vittorio, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001
• Tebaldini, Giovanni: Telepatia Musicale. A proposito dell'"Elettra"' di R. Strauss, in Rivista Musicale Italiana, XVI (1909), pp. 400–412
• Horwarth, Michael: Tebaldini, Gnecchi and Strauss, in Current Musicology, vol. 10, New York, 1970
• Marco Iannelli (2004). Il caso Cassandra: Vittorio Gnecchi, una storia del Novecento. Bietti. ISBN 9788882482015. Retrieved 24 December 2020.