In the afternoon 180 years ago, on May 27, 1840, the Genoese violinist and composer, who surprised the world for his splendid technique and the great innovations brought to his instrument, died in Nice, then part of the kingdom of Sardinia (Savoy-Piedmont), at the age of 58: Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840). His biography states that when…
A late romantic, restless, and sentimental Russian composer, was born 180 years ago, on May 7, 1840, at Votkinsk, a town in Russia’s Ural Mountains: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). He studied composition, we read in the biography, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein, pianist and composer attached to German Romanticism. After earning his…
Twenty twenty is the 640th year since the death, on April 29, and the 50th since the proclamation as Doctor of the Church, on October 4, of a woman who played a primary role in the Church of her time: St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380). How can we fail to be filled with wonder at…
On April 11, 250 years ago, on Holy Wednesday, when the Eternal City is the most crowded with pilgrims and visitors, attracted by the papal liturgy of Holy Week and Easter, that musical genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, fourteen years old, and his father Leopold, a good musician, arrive in Rome. The young Amadè — as…
On the night between March 26 and 27, 250 years ago, the great painter, interpreter of the splendors of the Venetian aristocracy, died suddenly: Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770). While the Vatican Post Office celebrates him with a stamp, we approach the greatest artist of the eighteenth-century Venetian painting in our usual way: through passion for music.…
This year marks the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520), the painter who left us a vast legacy of inestimable beauty and grace. This outstanding artist died, “having sunk under continuous acute fever which carried him off in eight days” — as Alfonso Paolucci sadly writes in Rome to Alfonso…
This year — traditionally, he was born on March 15, 270 — marks the 1,750th anniversary of the birth of the bishop of Myra in modern-day Turkey, whose relics have been resting in Bari since 1087, equally venerated for his holiness and his intercession to God both in the Greek and Slavic East and in…
Two hundred and ten years ago, on March 2, 1810, Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, who would remain in the memory of the Church as the great pope of the “social question,” was born in Carpineto Romano, south of Rome — Leo XIII (1810–1903). The wisdom and foresight of this supreme pontiff was well underlined by Benedict…
Two hundred fifty years ago, on February 26, 1770, “following a gangrene that developed in one foot,” the one who at the end of his career was called the “first violin-player in Europe” and “master of the nations” died in Padua (P. Petrobelli, Giuseppe Tartini — Le fonti biografiche, Universal Edition 1968, p. 13-14): Italian…
If he lived today, would Mozart have composed a cantata like Davide penitente (The Penitent David), K. 469? Performed successfully for the first time on March 13, 1785 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, it was soon forgotten. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was asked by the Vienna Musicians’ Society (Wiener Tonkünstler-Societät), a pension fund founded in 1771 to…
A theological dispute between Catholic and Protestant students in a tavern in Wittenberg? It happens in the second scene of the German opera Doktor Faust by Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), complex figure of German-Italian musician, pianist, composer, and writer, “the most extraordinary performer that piano literature has had” (G. Cattaneo, Esperienze intellettuali del primo Novecento, Mondadori…
