Luciano Chailly was one of Italy's musical giants. Thanks to his prodigious energies as composer, teacher and artistic director, he enjoyed one of the most colourful careers in the music. Chailly managed to coincide a successful career as one of Italy's leading composers of the 900. For sixteen years he was at the hub of Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), from 1951 to 1967 as organiser of musical programmes.Born in Ferrara on 19 January 1920, studied with the eminent composer Carlo Righini, and Renzo Bossi.At the Salzburg Mozarteum, from Hindemith Chailly learned the command of counterpoint that informs his twelve Triple Theme Sonatas or Sonate Tritematiche, for a wide range of different instruments and ensembles [listen -- Sonata No 3, opening], and the Improvisations, a valuable series of a dozen works for various solo instruments, ranging from violin, flute and harp to piano, organ and saxophone.Chailly was one of Italy's most established opera composers when in 1968 he made the leap into opera taking on the Artistic Directorship of La Scala, Milan, where he worked (from 1968-71). Chailly returned to La Scala in 1977 as organizational director. His other administrative roles included overseeing a season or two at the celebrated Verona Amphitheatre, acting as adviser on the restoration of the Teatro Regio in Turin and serving as artistic director, from 1983-5, of Genoa's opera house, the Teatro Carlo Felice.In the mid 1970s he also directed Milan's Angelicum Choir and Orchestra, and later (into his seventies) served as Artistic Director of the Orchestra and Chorus of RAI in Turin. At the same time he was a respected teacher of composition in Milan, Perugia and Cremona, and a board member of the opera section of SIAE, the Italian Society of Artists and Publishers.
Chailly presented a copy of the Mass to the new Pope in person [listen -- Benedictus (Missa Papae Pauli, extract)].Some of his anti-war works are a real cri-de-coeur : the Serenata a Mauthausen for mandolin and piano, the Liriche della resistenza Vietnamica for baritone and eleven instruments and the striking ballet Anne Frank (Verona, 1981) all reflect Chailly's deeply humanist concerns. So, especially, does the poignant Kinder-Requiem, first heard in Turin in 1979 -- a Mahlerian funeral lament for Italian children slaughtered in front of their parents' eyes as a wartime Nazi reprisal for partisan activity, akin to the massacres of Lidice (in Czechoslovakia) or Oradour (in France). The later De Profundis di Cefalonia is dedicated to five thousand fellow Italian soldiers massacred during World War II on the Greek island.
Other large works included the substantial Es-Konzert (Berlin, 1984), a double concerto (Triplum) for violin, piano and orchestra, and the Newton Variations, premi..red in London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in June 1981 by the London Sinfonietta.
One (No 9) of the Sonate Tritematiche, Chailly's series of major orchestral and chamber works of the 1950s, was converted into a ballet, Il Cappio (Naples, 1962). His orchestral work Sequenze dell'Artide (1960) provided material for yet another new ballet, Shee, performed by the Australian Ballet in Melbourne in 1967.
But opera was what really made Luciano Chailly tick. Over twenty years (1955-75) he produced twelve operas (a thirteenth followed in the 1980s), mainly one-acters, by turn buffo and chilling, which gave vent to his delight in surreal black comedy and what he called 'grottesca' -- the darkly paradoxical, surreal and grotesque. Having read Literature at Bolgna University he was vastly well-read (his close friends included the novelist Giorgio Bassani). His abiding passion was Chekhov, on whom he based four one-act operas, Il Canto del cigno and Una domanda di matrimonio (both 1956), Vassiliev (1963) and Il libro dei reclami (1975). Possibly the one that gave him most pleasure was the first, Una domanda di matrimonio, a hilarious bit of Russian tongue-in-cheek irony.Markheim is based on Stevenson's dark tale of brusque, premeditated murder and the terrifying onset of conscience, a story as black as Edgar Allan Poe -- or indeed Dostoievsky. Dostoievsky's The Idiot, staged by Rome Opera as part of the composer's fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1970. It was this surreal sense of humour that brought Chailly together with the Italian novelist and short story writer Dino Buzzati, which helped redefine modern Italian Opera. Chailly and Buzzati soon became close friends, and collaborated on four operas and a ballet.Il Mantello ('The Cloak'), (Florence, Maggio musicale, 1960),Procedura penale (Como, 1959), Ferrovia soprelevata (a 1954 RAI commission premi..red in Bergamo), Era proibito (Piccola Scala, 1961) . The relationship did not end there : from Buzzati also came the idea for Chailly's ballet Fantasmi al Grand-Hotel.
The same sense of dark, biting irony drew Chailly to those two poets of paradox, Ionesco (1912-94) and Pirandello, on which he based two further stage works. Chailly's taste for mischief and grotesquerie accorded well with Ionesco's.
La Cantatrice calva (based on Ionesco's 'Anti-Comedy' The Bald Prima Donna) was staged in 1986 by the Vienna Kammeroper, and was recently revived at Bordeaux and at Paris's Op..ra-Comique. Chailly said that Sogno -- ma forse no (A Dream -- or maybe not?).' This 'third', or 'deformalised' phase was, he felt, one of expressive 'hallucination in sound'.La riva delle Sirte. Based on Julien Gracq's Goncourt Prize-awarded third novel Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951), Chailly composed this for Monte Carlo in 1959. Another shorter opera, Il Libro dei reclami (Vienna 1975), was revived by Rome Opera at the Teatro Nazionale in 2001, the same year that Florida State Opera mounted the US premi..re of Procedura penale.Chailly wrote four highly revealing and entertaining books of memoirs (including the engrossing Le Variazioni della Fortuna) and was awarded the President's Italian State Prize in 1984. He spent much of his composing life with his wife Anne Maria at the family home in Pieve di Ledro, near Lake Garda .. There Chailly passed many happy hours, swam and played tennis, and was revered by villagers as the local 'Maestro'.
Luciano Chailly died on Christmas Eve, 2002, aged 82. His lasting place in musical history is doubly assured : not just by his vast array of challenging, elegant, sympathetic and expressionistic compositions in so many musical media, but as father to three of Italy's most engaging and successful artistic personalities. Each of them followed some aspect of his career. Of his daughters, Floriana became a leading RAI and independent Radio and Television producer. Cecilia is an internationally acclaimed composer and harpist. His son, the internationally renowned conductor Riccardo.
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-----------------------------------------------BIOGRAFIA ITALIANA------------Autore di lavori teatrali, sinfonici e cameristici, Luciano Chailly .. nato a Ferrara nel 1920 e si .. diplomato in violino a Ferrara nel 1941 ed in composizione a Milano nel 1945; si .. inoltre laureato in Lettere presso l'universit.. di Bologna nel 1943. Nel 1948 segu.. un corso di perfezionamento a Salisburgo con Paul Hindemith.
Dal 1951 al 1967 .. stato impegnato presso la RAI, in qualit.. di consulente e programmista, mentre in seguito ha svolto attivit.. di direttore artistico presso vari enti lirici italiani, tra cui il Teatro alla Scala di Milano (dal 1968 al 1971, l'Arena di Verona (dal 1975 al 1976) ed il Teatro Carlo Felice di Genova dal 1983 al 1985; ha inoltre svolto attivit.. di critico musicale e di docente di composizione presso diversi conservatori italiani (Milano, Perugia, Cremona, ecc.).
Nel 1954 ha iniziato un importante sodalizio con lo scrittore Dino Buzzati, il quale ha scritto per Chailly quattro libretti d'opera, ed ha spesso curato gli allestimenti scenografici dei loro lavori.
.. padre del direttore d'orchestra Riccardo Chailly e dell'arpista Cecilia Chailly.------------------- --------------------------------------- --------------------------------
Chailly fu un compositore dal gusto eclettico, partito da posizioni vicine al neoclassicismo, utilizz.. per breve tempo la dodecafonia per poi indirizzarsi verso uno stile liberamente atonale e molto contrappuntistico.
Compositore che non si .. mai schierato con un movimento preciso, Luciano Chailly ha sempre mantenuto le distanze dallo sperimentalismo, pur non rifiutando di inglobare nel suo stile alcune particolari tecniche che si andavano a sviluppare nella sua epoca.
Oltre alle tredici opere ed ai cinque balletti, Chailly ha composto musica solistica, cameristica, corale (da ricordare la Missa Papae Pauli, dedicata a Paolo VI), e vari lavori sinfonici.
