A child prodigy is defined in psychology research literature as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert.[1][2][3]
The term wunderkind (from German: Wunderkind, literally "wonder child") is sometimes used as a synonym for child prodigy, particularly in media accounts. Wunderkind also is used to recognize those who achieve success and acclaim early in their adult careers.[4]
Contents
1 Examples
2 Memory capacity of prodigies
3 Working memory/cerebellum theory
4 Development
4.1 Special needs of gifted children
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
Examples
Main article: List of child prodigies
Memory capacity of prodigies
PET scans performed on several mathematics prodigies have suggested that they think in terms of long-term working memory (LTWM).[5] This memory, specific to a field of expertise, is capable of holding relevant information for extended periods, usually hours. For example, experienced waiters have been found to hold the orders of up to twenty customers in their heads while they serve them, but perform only as well as an average person in number-sequence recognition. The PET scans also answer questions about which specific areas of the brain associate themselves with manipulating numbers.[5]
One subject never excelled as a child in mathematics, but he taught himself algorithms and tricks for calculatory speed, becoming capable of extremely complex mental math. His brain, compared to six other controls, was studied using the PET scan, revealing separate areas of his brain that he manipulated to solve the complex problems. Some of the areas that he and presumably prodigies use are brain sectors dealing in visual and spatial memory, as well as visual mental imagery. Other areas of the brain showed use by the subject, including a sector of the brain generally related to childlike "finger counting", probably used in his mind to relate numbers to the visual cortex.[5]
Working memory/cerebellum theory
"My mother said that I should finish high school and go to college first."
Saul Kripke in response to an invitation to apply for a teaching position at Harvard[6]
Noting that the cerebellum acts to streamline the speed and efficiency of all thought processes, Vandervert[7] explained the abilities of prodigies in terms of the collaboration of working memory and the cognitive functions of the cerebellum. Citing extensive imaging evidence, Vandervert first proposed this approach in two publications which appeared in 2003. In addition to imaging evidence, Vandervert's approach is supported by the substantial award-winning studies of the cerebellum by Masao Ito.[8]
Vandervert[9] provided extensive argument that, in the prodigy, the transition from visual-spatial working memory to other forms of thought (language, art, mathematics) is accelerated by the unique emotional disposition of the prodigy and the cognitive functions of the cerebellum. According to Vandervert, in the emotion-driven prodigy (commonly observed as a "rage to master") the cerebellum accelerates the streamlining of the efficiencies of working memory in its manipulation and decomposition/re-composition of visual-spatial content into language acquisition and into linguistic, mathematical, and artistic precocity.[10]
Essentially, Vandervert has argued that when a child is confronted with a challenging new situation, visual-spatial working memory and speech-related and other notational system-related working memory are decomposed and re-composed (fractionated) by the cerebellum and then blended in the cerebral cortex in an attempt to deal with the new situation.[11] In child prodigies, Vandervert believes this blending process is accelerated due to their unique emotional sensitivities which result in high levels of repetitious focus on, in most cases, particular rule-governed knowledge domains. He has also argued that child prodigies first began to appear about 10,000 years ago when rule-governed knowledge had accumulated to a significant point, perhaps at the agricultural-religious settlements of Göbekli Tepe or Cyprus.[12]
Development
Further information: Nature versus nurture
Daniel Barenboim, age 11, with Conductor Moshe Lustig and the Gadna Symphonic orchestra 1953
Some researchers believe that prodigious talent tends to arise as a result of the innate talent of the child, and the energetic and emotional investment that the child ventures. Others believe that the environment plays the dominant role, many times in obvious ways. For example, László Polgár set out to raise his children to be chess players, and all three of his daughters went on to become world-class players (two of whom are grandmasters), emphasizing the potency a child's environment can have in determining the pursuits toward which a child's energy will be directed, and showing that an incredible amount of skill can be developed through suitable training.[13]
But on the other hand George Frideric Handel was an example of the natural talent ... "he had discovered such a strong propensity to music, that his father who always intended him for the study of the Civil Law, had reason to be alarmed. He strictly forbade him to meddle with any musical instrument but Handel found means to get a little clavichord privately convey'd to a room at the top of the house. To this room he constantly stole when the family was asleep".[14] Despite his father's opposition, Handel became a skillful performer on the harpsichord and pipe organ.[15]
Prodigiousness in childhood is not always maintained into adulthood. Some researchers have found that gifted children fall behind due to lack of effort. Jim Taylor, professor at the University of San Francisco, theorizes that this is because gifted children experience success at an early age with little to no effort and may not develop a sense of ownership of success. Therefore, these children might not develop a connection between effort and outcome. Some children might also believe that they can succeed without effort in the future as well. Dr. Anders Ericcson, professor at Florida State University, researches expert performance in sports, music, mathematics, and other activities. His findings demonstrate that prodigiousness in childhood is not a strong indicator of later success. Rather, the number of hours devoted to the activity was a better indicator. [16]
Rosemary Callard-Szulgit and other educators have written extensively about the problem of perfectionism in bright children, calling it their "number one social-emotional trait". Gifted children often associate even slight imperfection with failure, so that they become fearful of effort, even in their personal lives, and in extreme cases end up virtually immobilized.[17]
Special needs of gifted children
Gifted children will sometimes have their own unique set of needs and can often struggle in nonacademic areas. Since these children are usually viewed as natural achievers it can be even more difficult for them to receive the special assistance they need in areas not directly related to academic performance.[18] In most cases there are five specific special needs common to children who are identified as gifted:
Gifted children often struggle with interpersonal relationships with peers. They may find it difficult to relate to others and may recognize that they are different from most children and might view themselves as needing to be separate.
Gifted children often have trouble paying attention in class which can result with a mixed diagnosis of ADD or ADHD. Although it is possible for a gifted child to have these disorders, careful diagnostic measures must be taken. Gifted children often lack motivation to complete certain tasks if they feel that they are not being challenged enough. When gifted children are not provided with engaging material, their lack of focus may be perceived as an attention deficit disorder.[19]
Children who equate their performance with their self-worth often become perfectionists and struggle to perform to their own ideal standard, often setting bars for themselves that are too high and becoming angry, upset, or even depressed when they fail to meet their own expectations.
Specialists theorize that the spoken word can be difficult for some gifted children because they have the added task of translating the complex ideas in their heads into language that others of similar age can understand. This process can lead to abnormal hesitation when speaking, stuttering, and frustration on the part of the child.[20]
See also
icon Education portal
Psychology portal
Chess prodigy
List of child music prodigies
List of child prodigies
List of fictional child prodigies
Genius
Gifted education
Intellectual giftedness
Late bloomer
Malleability of intelligence
Polymath
Savant syndrome
Ferruccio Burco, Italy's 9-year-old prodigy conductor, will appear at the War Memorial Opera House, Friday evening, May 28, at 8:30 p.m., conduction a 60-piece symphony orchestra. Ferruccio has appeared twice in Carnegie Hall, making his debut there January 20 of this year-has appeared 16 times in the United States. Burco travels with his mother and father, maestro and tutor. His mother, Anna Burco, is a lyric soprano, and appeared with her son in Carnegie Hall May 2. Claudio Burco, his father, is an artist-painter. His maestro is Orfeo Rossi of Rome, and his tutor is Albert Pizzi of Boston.
Ferruccio Burco: Child Prodigy--Childhood
Figure 1.--Here we see Ferruccio bxing during March 1948. It looks to us like it was during his American tour. We are not sure if it was a publicity shot or if Ferruccio had a real nterest in boxing.
Unlike many child prodigies, little information on Ferruccio turns up on internet searches. And virtually nothing about his childhood. Ferruccio was born in 1939. His father was Russian. Mis mother was a gifted soprano. We are not sure why he was in Italy, presumably he was a Russian emigree, opposed to the Soviet regime. His name sounds Italian. The images we have found of Ferruccio show him at his performances. We do not see many snapshots of him in everyday life. We do note one image of him boxing. We do not know to what extent this was an activity he especially enjoyed. A reader writes that it is an interesting indication as to the boy's character. Another readr writes, "I thought the same about it being a photo set up for Ferruccio to show boyish activities. From working with children who take an interrst in boxing I would saw Ferruccio liked this sport. His movements and positions of his boxing movements are those of a boy experienced in boxing technique. His American partner is less experienced. It was most likely a publicity shot in which passing boys were invited to join in the boxing game. Ferruccio may not have been to boxing matches but simple enjoyed it has a work out or as something he found relaxing." It is also possible that he was being hosted by an American family and the boys are the host children, fiends, or neighbors. We beliwve that he would have been best knownin the Italian-American community so the American boys are likely to be Italian-Americans. Amother reader writes, "Due to Fernuccio wearing the particular outfit which I doubt he would wear to box if it were not a publicity stunt or maybe someone wanted him to try it and have fun with the other boy, I think it is staged. What are your thoughts?" We think the photograph definitely a publicity shot. Staged is a little more difficult to answer. What we don't know is how he was dressed when not on stage or not touring. This may have been the outfits mom brought along for the tour. I just don't know. I do agree with the comment that he does seem to know how to box based on his posture. It is possible that they just let him have a little fun and snapped some publicity shots. Actually, we think a Life Magazine photographer took the picture. Our reader replied, "If that is the case, I remember reading something like 30 years ago that Life would tell the photographer to take 100s of images hoping for one that is good. So it is probable they just let the kids have fun and took the shot, but I have no way of knowing if that is true."
Ferruccio Burco: Child Prodigy
Figure 1.--Ferucco Burco made a U.S. tour in 1948. This wire service photograph was captioned, "Eight-year old conductor: Ferruccio Burco, 8. raises his baton here yesterday as he conducts 80-piece symphony orchestra in rehersal for his debut today in Carnegie Hall. The lad conducted 75 concerts in Europe bedore coming here from Milan., Italy, last month." The photograph was dated February 28, 1948.
Unlike many child prodigies, little information on Ferruccio turns up on internet searches. Ferruccio was born in 1939. His father was Russian. Mis mother was a gifted soprano. We are not sure why he was in Italy, presumably he was a Russian emigree, opposed to the Soviet regime. The name sounds Italian. His father first became aware of his son's gift when the boy protested an off key note hit by his mother's accompanist. Ferruccio performed as a child prodigy in the role of a conductor of major symphony orchestras in Italy. Ferruccio only a few weeks after his 4th birthday debuted in Milan in 1943, conducting the orchestra by memorizing gestures to give cues. He was reportedly active at age 7 in 1947. He was billed as "Ferruccio Burco, age 7, the world's youngest orchestral conductor." He toured the United States in 1948, appearing in Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York (Carnegie Hall). He conducted the the Philharmonic Symphony orchestra. [Life] One review of his concert at Carnegie Hall read, "Ferruccio Burco, 8-year old conductor who began his rise to fame in Rome, made his American debut in short 'stove pipe' pants before a packed Carnegie hall audience, which applaued enthusiatically." ["Italian reserves genius ...] The reviewer commented thgat Ferruccio liked his music loud and lively, but noted that the orchestra was proficient and wondered just how much talent the boy had. A special performance of "Cavalleria rusticana", featuring his mother in the role of Santuzza, was given at New York's Randalls Island. Ferruccio when he performed as a child prodigy had a full head of curls and performed in a variety of short pants outfits. Ferrucio did not wear standard short pants suits, but rather specially made outfits--rather like a minature tuxedo suitable for a formal symphponic concert. This was also how he dressed when he performed in America during 1948. Here we see him in New York during 1948 (figure 1). He made many other appearances such as with a symphonic orchestra in Irem Temple, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (September 20, 1948). HBC believes that the photograph on the previous page was taken in Italy during 1949. In America he was impressed by comic books and hamburgers. We have no information about his subsequent performances.
Childhood
Unlike many child prodigies, little information on Ferruccio turns up on internet searches. And virtually nothing about his childhood. Ferruccio was born in 1939. His father was Russian. Mis mother was a gifted soprano. We are not sure why he was in Italy, presumably he was a Russian emigree, opposed to the Soviet regime. His name sounds Italian. The images we have found of Ferruccio show him at his performances. We do not see many snapshots of him in everyday life. We do note one image of him boxing. We do not know to what extent this was an activity he especially enjoyed.
Talent
His father first became aware of his son's gift when the boy protested an off key note hit by his mother's accompanist. At the time he hd not yet received any musical training.
Performances
We have some limited information about Ferruccio's many performances, mostly his American trip in 1948. We note that only a few weeks after his 4th birthday, he debuted in Milan in 1943, conducting the orchestra by memorizing gestures to give cues. Ferruccio performed as a child prodigy in the role of a conductor of major symphony orchestras in Italy. He was reportedly active at age 7 in 1947. He was billed as "Ferruccio Burco, age 7, the world's youngest orchestral conductor." He toured the United States in 1948, appearing in Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York (Carnegie Hall). He conducted the the Philharmonic Symphony orchestra. [Life] A special performance of "Cavalleria rusticana", featuring his mother in the role of Santuzza, was given at New York's Randalls Island. In America he was impressed by comic books and hamburgers. We have no information about his subsequent performances.
Reviews
One review of his concert at Carnegie Hall read, "Ferruccio Burco, 8-year old conductor who began his rise to fame in Rome , made his American debut in short 'stove pipe' pants before a packed Carnegie hall audience, which applaued enthusiatically." ["Italian reserves genius ...] The reviewer commented thgat Ferruccio liked his music loud and lively, but noted that the orchestra was proficient and wondered just how much talent the boy had.
Performance Outfits
Ferruccio when he performed as a child prodigy had a full head of curls and performed in a variety of short pants outfits. Ferrucio did not wear standard short pants suits, but rather specially made outfits--one rather like a minature tuxedo suitable for a formal symphponic concert. This was also how he dressed when he performed in America during 1948. Here we see him in New York during 1948 (figure 1). He made many other appearances such as with a symphonic orchestra in Irem Temple, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (September 20, 1948). HBC believes that the photograph on the previous page was taken in Italy during 1949. We also notice a formal white outfit with a fancy blouse.
Sources
"Italian genius, 8, directs orchestra in Carnefie Hall, The Picket Line Post (June 18, 1948), p. 2.
Life (March 15, 1948).
Ferruccio Burco ( Milan , 1939 - Ostuni , April 27, 1965 ) was an Italian conductor .
Already at the age of 8 he conducted large orchestras in the performance of operas of the lyric and symphonic genre, without a reference score.
His talent was also known in the USA , where he performed in large theaters such as the Metropolitan .
Burco's career was lucky, but short: in 1965 , returning home from an artistic commitment, he died in a road accident, at just 26 years old, during a tour with the musical group "Città di Squinzano [1] .
16 pro ópera septiembre-octubre 2019
MEMORIAS DEL PALACIO
por Octavio Sosa
El director huésped del primer concierto
de la temporada 1951 de la Orquesta
Sinfónica Nacional (OSN) usaba
pantalón corto y lucía unos rubios caireles
que parecían coronar su cabeza. Se llamaba
Ferruccio Burco y tenía once años. De
origen veneciano, había nacido en Milán en
1939; aunque se decía que era bisnieto del
compositor Vincenzo Bellini en línea directa,
su padre fue un artista plástico y su madre
una modesta cantante de ópera.
Como director huésped de la OSN se
presentó el 19 de enero, dirigiendo de
memoria un programa que incluía las
oberturas de las óperas Guillermo Tell de
Gioachino Rossini, Il Guarany de Antonio
Carlos Gomes y Tannhäuser de Richard
Wagner, además del preludio del acto I de
Lohengrin y la Sinfonía número 5, opus 67
de Ludwig van Beethoven.
El cronista Hans Sachs (Miguel Bueno)
publicó a propósito de ese concierto (El
Universal, 22 de enero de 1951): “Cuando
el niño Burco atravesó las puertas del foro
en el Palacio de Bellas Artes, mismas que han dado el paso a
tantas figuras del arte mundial, el público pudo contemplar un
extraño espectáculo: una figura infantil se dibujaba desde un par
de rollizas y descubiertas piernas hasta el remate de una melena
cuidadosamente enchinada que le daba al bambino un aire de
este tipo de músico, ya periclitado, que floreció en la bohemia
del romanticismo. La reducción miniaturista, envuelta en un
severo y delicado trajecito negro, hacía de Ferruccio Burco
un personaje con más tipo de músico que cualquier músico
verdadero. El muchacho entró alegre. De ojos vivaces, andar
seguro, visiblemente acostumbrado al aplauso y las multitudes,
robó más escena que muchos dirigentes profesionales. Le sobra
simpatía, y el público fue justo en comprenderlo, primero
como niño y luego como director. Los músicos, habitualmente
hoscos y reservados, se dejaron llevar por la misma corriente
emotiva…”
Por su parte, Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (El Nacional, 23 de
enero de 1951) escribió: “De memoria empezó con la obertura
de Guillermo Tell, de Rossini. La dirigió con detalles de muy
buen gusto. Nada de exageraciones ni de efectismos. Burco es un
músico serio, pendiente de las entradas de los instrumentos que
cantan, de las intervenciones de los instrumentos de percusión y,
sobre todo, de que el ritmo no decaiga un solo instante. Por estas
cualidades, su interpretación de la Quinta sinfonía de Beethoven,
salvo al final, que a todos les dio la impresión de lentitud,
fue reveladora de que hay una personalidad que madurará
en los años de receso dedicados a estudiar en los grandes
conservatorios. Burco obtuvo su mayor éxito, seguramente, con
la obertura de El Guarany”.
Su afición por la música comenzó tras presenciar una función
de ópera en La Scala cuando tenía cinco años. Sus biógrafos
aseguran que a esa misma edad dirigió una orquesta en Bérgamo
con enorme éxito; otros dicen que fue a los ocho. Durante la
Segunda Guerra Mundial se consignan actuaciones del niño
Ferruccio Burco en Florencia, Lucca, Milán, Padua, Turín y
Vercelli y posteriormente en los Estados Unidos en donde la
prensa, tras su exitosa presentación, escribió: “¿Un monstruo,
un genio? ¡Que Dios nos ayude a definirlo!”
En 1944-45, debido a su extraordinario éxito como niño
prodigio, incursionó en el cine con las cintas Bacicin diventa
milionario y Bacicin poliziotto, ambas dirigidas por Domenico
Valinotti. En 1947, tras su debut en la Arena de Verona, en
los teatros San Carlo de Nápoles, el Regio de Parma, el de la
Ópera de Roma y el Châtelet de París, la crítica lo define como
el nuevo Mozart, a lo que Ferruccio respondió: “Mozart era
Mozart, Burco seguirá siendo Burco…”.
Un año después efectuó exitosos conciertos en Suiza, Egipto,
Inglaterra y en el Carnegie Hall de Nueva York, principalmente
de música sinfónica y también la ópera Cavalleria rusticana de
Mascagni en la ciudad de Livorno. En el comienzo de aquella
meteórica carrera musical conoció a Arturo Toscanini, que lo
saludaba como: “Querido colega”, y Víctor de Sabata, mucho
más relajado, le decía: “Después de tu concierto podemos ir a
jugar y escondernos…”.
Para 1954, sus presentaciones se habían extendido a Chicago,
San Francisco, Brasil, México y Cuba. La segunda de tres
presentaciones en el Palacio de Bellas Artes como director
huésped de la OSN (enero 23) estuvo dedicado a Giuseppe
Verdi en el cincuentenario de su fallecimiento. El programa
se conformó con la obertura de La forza del destino y el aria
‘Pace, pace mio Dio’ que cantó la soprano Ana Burco Gentile,
que también era la madre de Ferruccio, la obertura de I vespri
siciliani; el preludio del acto I de La traviata, la “Marcha
El niño Ferruccio Burco
Ferruccio Burco (1939-1965) El niño prodigio dirigió la Orquesta
Sinfónica Nacional en 1951
septiembre-octubre 2019 pro ópera 17
digital
www.proopera.org.mx
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triunfal” de Aida, los coros ‘Va pensiero’
de Nabucco y ‘O Signore, dal tetto natio’
de I lombardi, acompañado por el Coro
del Conservatorio Nacional de Música
que dirigía Luis Sandi.
Se despidió del público de México el
28 de enero dirigiendo un programa
que abrió con la obertura de Norma
de Bellini, el preludio de Carmen de
Bizet, la obertura de Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg de Wagner, la marcha de
La damnation de Faust de Berlioz, el
“Intermezzo” de Cavalleria rusticana de
Mascagni, la obertura de Il barbiere di
Siviglia de Rossini y la Sinfonía número
1 en Do mayor, opus 21 de Beethoven.
En el auge de su éxito como director, y
tras haber dejado sus estudios regulares,
ingresó al Conservatorio de Milán donde
se graduó en 1960, época en que reanudó
su actividad como director orquestal
en Estados Unidos y Europa, y un año
más tarde se planteó la creación de una
caravana musical para difundir la música
clásica por todo el mundo. Ese mismo
año se dio tiempo de tomar un curso de paracaidismo y de
practicar rugby.
En 1964 se unió al movimiento europeo de extrema derecha
“Jeune Europe”, liderado por el belga Jean-Freançois Thiriart.
Su militancia fue en extremo radical y,
convencido de esa doctrina, no dudó
en enfrentarse, incluso físicamente,
contra sus adversarios. A causa de
esto, fue atacado a golpes en la Plaza
de la República en Milán, junto con
Renato Cinquemani, miembro de
“Jeune Europe”, y semanas más tarde
su automóvil fue destrozado mientras
asistía a una reunión del movimiento.
El 27 de abril de 1965 Ferruccio
Burco regresaba de una gira por el
sur de Italia cuando sufrió un terrible
accidente que precipitó su automóvil
contra un árbol en la localidad de
Ostuni, provincia de Brindisi en la
región de Apulia. Iba acompañado por
dos amigos músicos, Pasquale Fusilli y
Armando Bonanno. Los tres murieron
de forma inmediata. Burco tenía 26
años.
Se manejó la versión de un atentado,
por lo que la fiscalía de Milán ordenó
al Tribunal de Apulia abrir una
investigación contra quien resultara
responsable por “asesinato múltiple”. Nada se comprobó
y el caso se cerró, quedando todo en un misterio absoluto.
Los seguidores de Burco, de Ferruccio Burco el niño músico
dotado, el que fue aplaudido y admirado en los escenarios, lo
despidieron con los más altos honores. o
MusicWeb International April 2018
Forgotten Artists: An occasional series by Christopher Howell
26. Willy Ferrero (1906-1954)
Index of all articles in this series
Child prodigy conductors
Never have the young had it so good. Some such banal phrase comes to
mind during the not infrequent TV programmes involving cutthroat
competition between miniscule musicians, popular and classical. In the case
of not-yet-teen boy tenors and similarly diminutive girl soul singers, I pass to
vocal experts who are better equipped than I am to assess the physical
damage being done. Child prodigy instrumentalists, usually pianists or
violinists, have speckled the pages of musical history. Psychologists will have
different views on where the borderline falls between outrageous
exploitation and allowing the child to express a natural gift, which obviously
should not be repressed. A reasonable number of ex-prodigies do become
professional musicians later on. A few become the great musicians of their
age. But what about child conductors?
The TV contests seem to have spared us child conductors, but a spot of
googling brings a few contemporary instances to light. A long way further
back, the ferocious young man in the image above comes from a French
postcard of 19041
. If it is based on a real prodigy conductor, he might have
been the youngest and the first. It could, however, be the artist’s subtle take on the infantile tantrums of
some mature maestros.
Looking over the twentieth century, the case everyone remembers is that of Lorin Maazel, who conducted
the University of Idaho orchestra at the age of eight and the NBC Symphony Orchestra when he was eleven.
Another subject of this Forgotten Artists series, Anatole Fistoulari, conducted the Pathétique symphony at
the age of seven. Bruno Maderna, arguably one of the conducting greats, directed a small band called The
Happy Grossato Company at the age of seven and conducted regularly in his teens. Musicians, at least, will
know the names of Piero Gamba (debut aged 9) and Roberto Benzi (debut aged 11). Both made good
careers without becoming household names. Across the Atlantic, Joseph Alfidi first conducted at the age of
1 Visible here hml with another three views of
the maestro, captions and comment.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p2 April 2018
seven and appeared with the Symphony of the Air when he was eight. He achieved considerable success
later as a pianist. Back in Europe, Milan-born Ferruccio Burco conducted at the age of eight and then
appeared successfully in New York. The beginnings of a promising career as a mature conductor were cut
short by his death in a road accident when he was only 26.
But what of Willy Ferrero? A Google search for “child prodigy conductors”
produced 278 hits, but Ferrero’s name did not emerge – neither did all of
those listed above. What the research did reveal is that a remarkable number
of leading conductors, past and present, made child prodigy appearances on
the piano or the violin. It also revealed a number of “youngest conductor
ever” claims made by press, parents and teachers, on behalf of conductors
older than most of the above. Any google search I can do, can be done by
others, so people should spare a few minutes at the computer before making
wild claims. As far as I can discover, Willy Ferrero’s record-breaking first
conducting appearance in Paris at the age of four, attended by Jules
Massenet, who afterwards kissed him repeatedly on the forehead,
murmuring, “History will speak of you, my child”2
, may have remained unique
until Jonathan Okseniuk’s debut – visible on YouTube – at about the same
age.
I have to confess that, until fairly recently, I only knew Willy Ferrero as a
name that cropped up as the conductor of several Italian film scores – most famously Ladri di biciclette
[Bicycle Thieves]. Some accounts of his career imply that he had no great success as a mature conductor.
This is emphatically not the message that comes across from the few recordings available – spanning from
his mid-twenties to his last years. As so often with Italian artists, the fullest easily accessible single account
of his career is that in the Treccani Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani3
. If you can find it, the booklet to the
2-CD Musica Classica tribute4
contains a wealth of information. I have added to these whatever else I could
find.
Acknowledgement
For many of the articles in this series I have limited myself to generalized
acknowledgements of the various blogs and YouTube channels which have
enabled me to hear out-of-print recordings or otherwise provided valuable
information. In the case of Willy Ferrero, the present article contains, at the
very least, double the information it would otherwise have thanks to the
collaboration of the Australian-born, German-based conductor Alexander
Negrin5
. Negrin was himself a child prodigy conductor and made his debut
at Sydney Opera House when he was nine. Some years ago he became
interested in Willy Ferrero in whom he found, not just an “interesting case”,
but a mature conductor whose very considerable gifts have been virtually
forgotten even in Italy. He consequently undertook to amass all the
material he could find, which he has now made available to me. This
includes copies of documents from institutions such as the Vienna Academy
and interviews with people who are no longer with us, or are no longer
available for interview. It also includes simple memories of things people
2
So Ferrero himself recalled in Willy Ferrero ricorda la sua infanzia, Il Mattino, Naples, 24 June 1930. According to the
article by Michele Selvini in the booklet accompanying CD Classica MC 2005-6, a 2-CD tribute to Willy Ferrero,
Massenet’s words were “My child, you begin where others leave off “.
3 Article by Letizia Lavagnini in Volume 47 (1997): hto)/
4
See note 2.
5 Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p3 April 2018
told him. As he explained to me in an e-mail, “I am no researcher and still less a writer, but I hoped to at
least preserve what information I could find in the hope that it would not die with the people who knew
him”. With this last consideration in mind, I have gratefully incorporated the documents and information
he has provided. I realize that, by modern research standards, some of this material would not pass proper
tests of verifiability. For that matter, much of the printed material that has emerged, from wherever, is of
the “somebody-told-me” variety, and the simplest facts often exist in several versions. On the other hand,
“somebody-told-me” facts, if not taken too literally, can have their own verity. The number of people who
can tell us anything, even about Ferrero’s very last years, is substantially smaller now than it was when
Alexander Negrin made his investigations, and is dwindling by the day. It would be a pity to exclude, and
lose for ever, nuggets that, provided we look at them critically, can help flesh out the picture. I list my
sources in every case, so readers can see for themselves what is verifiable fact, what has been said in print
and what somebody has told somebody else. The Willy Ferrero story related below is as complete as I can
make it. If anybody knows anything more, I should be glad to hear from them.
Willy Ferrero – child prodigy
Willy (William)6
Ferrero was born in Portland, Maine on 21 May 1906. Looking at old press cuttings later in
his life, Ferrero was amused to find that his precocity had hit the news on his first day in the world – he had
been born with two teeth7
. His parents, Vittorio and Nerina (Gemma) (née Moretti) were from Turin. The
father has been variously described as an acrobat, clown or musical juggler in a travelling circus8
. One
account says he was an orchestral musician9
. Another says he “played various instruments”10. Maybe he
had several strings to his bow. One of them is described by the conductor Massimo Freccia:
This gentleman appeared in a most successful act. After ten white ponies, ostrich feathers on their
heads and a lady trainer in command, had jumped, walked on their hind legs and knelt to the
audience, Signor Ferrero made his elegant appearance – black cape lined in white silk, top hat, white
tie, tailcoat and monocle. He was about to conduct the Intermezzo of Cavalleria Rusticana with an
orchestra formed by eighteen hens lined up in a pen, facing a revolving cylinder concealed by fake
flowers. The starving chickens had their eyes glued to the revolving roller, so that they could peck up a
grain of corn which corresponded to a musical note. The result was the performance of Mascagni’s
Intermezzo11
.
This sounds like first-hand experience, yet it cannot be, or not entirely. Freccia makes the point that Ferrero
senior began to exploit his seven-year-old son’s potential as a prodigy conductor after the novelty of his
chicken band, and public acclaim for it, began to fade. Freccia was born in the same year as Willy Ferrero
so, if he ever saw Vittorio’s circus act, he was only five or six himself. His description of the details and
technicalities involved must have derived from some other written or oral account. This is not to suggest
that the act was not as Freccia described it, only to point out that, like so much of the story, it has reached
us at several removes.
Ferrero himself made much of his inherited musical gifts:
6 His full name according to Treccani. The Italian form of Guglielmo is occasionally seen. Professionally, his name was
always given as Willy. I have seen his full name stated as William Victor Louis Ferrero. Unfortunately, this was part of a
casual Google search made at a time when I was not seriously considering an article on Ferrero. More recent searches
have failed to rediscover this source. Victor was, of course, an English-language version of his father’s name Vittorio.
7
Ferrero told this story in Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
8 By using the plural, Treccani implies that his mother was also in the circus trade. According to Selvini (ibid.), she was
a good pianist.
9 Radio Corriere 1931 no. 5, p. 17
10 Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, L’Europeo, March 1954.
11 Massimo Freccia: The Sounds of Memory, University of California – M. Russell, 1991, pp. 42-3
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p4 April 2018
My family is entirely made up of musicians. Music is like a hereditary disease among us: our
grandparents handed it down to our parents; our parents handed it down to their children. Everybody
plays in my family. The only thing missing was a conductor. So I came along to fill the gap12
.
Maybe Willy was painting a rosy picture – in line with the family group below13. Or maybe he was being
disingenuous. Or maybe he was even planting false clues. For Vittorio Ferrero was not his biological father.
His biological father was one Arnaldo Guerra, with whom Signora Ferrero had a relation while they were
still in Turin. Much of the story is lost to us. Did Vittorio Ferrero take up an offer of work in America as a
means of removing his wife from the evil clutches of Arnaldo Guerra, only to find that she was pregnant by
him? Was she known to be pregnant when they left to take up work in America, thereby enabling her to
give birth to the child in an environment where nobody need gossip about who the father might be? Or,
just possibly, did Vittorio Ferrero never know that Willy was not his real son?
The answers to these questions cannot be known, but Arnaldo Guerra re-enters the story later on, at which
point it will be seen that the source for this information is an unimpeachable one, and that Willy himself
knew the facts not later than 1934. For the moment, let us resume the story of Ferrero’s childhood,
remembering only that his own references to his father may contain veiled hints as to a situation that he
never publicly revealed. Somewhat frustratingly, given that the question of inherited gifts is strongly
emphasized by Ferrero, we know little or nothing about Guerra’s own profession14. This is a little surprising,
considering that he later had a daughter who became at least as celebrated in her own field as Willy was in
his.
All this is fuel to the debate as to whether inheritance or environment plays the greater role in a child’s
upbringing. A musical environment was certainly not lacking:
… listening to music became part of [Willy Ferrero’s] daily life. At the age of two he began to show
signs of talent. Listening to a piece attentively, he used to beat time and to show annoyance if the
12 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
13 Photograph from Giberto Severi: Fortune di un ragazzo prodigio, Oggi, 31 August 1940, p.13. The caption merely
says “Willy Ferrero with his family”. The boy on the left is presumably his brother Teddy, of whom more later.
14 One French source describes him as a writer and journalist. In order to avoid a spoiler, I will save the reference for a
later footnote.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p5 April 2018
time was not what he considered right. If he liked a piece he could remember it all after hearing it
three or four times15
.
A photograph once existed of Ferrero, aged six months, brandishing, not a rattle but a baton16. Willy
himself recalled his earliest steps on more than one occasion.
I took hold of the spoon I should have been using to eat my soup and started to beat time precisely
whenever my father or my mother went to the piano. Mine was an instinctive sense of rhythm that
impelled me to watch continually the gestures of the orchestra conductor on my father’s tours. By the
time I was two, these tours had already visited 115 cities and I hadn’t missed a single performance. I
watched the gestures of that little coloured man who unleashed his arms before the thirty-or-so other
coloured men making up the orchestra. All his gestures remained impressed on my mind, all the
voices of the instruments were photographed in my brain17
. My sole amusement was conducting,
with a pencil or a spoon in my hand. I set out chairs and other objects in a semicircle and, imagining
they were players, gave them cues with great satisfaction18
.
In his mother’s words:
I realized that Willy was a musical sponge: he absorbed and prodigiously repeated every piece of
music he heard19
.
There seems to be a certain amount of competition between Ferrero-commentators to discover his earliest
approach to conducting. One has it that, at the age of two-and-a-half, he conducted French chansons at the
Palais de Cristal of Marseilles20. The following account allows him another eighteen months’ grace:
… [4-your-old Willy Ferrero] asked during a pause, apparently as a joke, to conduct a 25-instrument
wind band that was entertaining a local festivity. The musicians lent themselves happily to this
unscheduled performance, but when Willy climbed onto the rostrum, took the real conductor’s baton
and “gave the beat” to the musicians, things started to look serious. With the air of an expert
maestro, the child conducted impeccably the music the orchestra had played a moment before,
leaving everyone dumbfounded, parents and conductor included, above all by his capacity to give
cues to the various soloists and orchestral sections21
.
Three almost identical articles appearing in the USA in 1919 clear up at least some of the chronology:
The father told the Associated Press correspondent that Willy carried an American passport but that
his name thereon was William Ferrero, a name he had chosen for him while he had worked in Maine
when the child was born. The father said that at the age of two, the lad was brought to Italy whither
the parents were returning to take up their residence in their old home In Turin22
.
15 Indiana Weekly, 1914
16 Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, ibid. According to this article, the photograph was among the many effects lost by his
mother when her house in Viareggio was bombed during the war.
17 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
18 From an interview quoted in Selvini, ibid.
19 Quoted in Ferdinando Chiarelli: Bimbo prodigio, musicista autentico, Domenica del Corriere, April 1954.
20 Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, ibid.
21 Sergio De Benedetti: Willy, bambino prodigio delle note rovinato dagli studi all’Accademia, Libero, 29 May 2015
22 Virginia Chronicle, 19 July 1919, Brooklyn Eagle, 28 July 1919, Greencastle Herald, Indianapolis, 14 August 1919. The
article quoted is from the first of these.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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Willy was brought back to Turin at the age of two, then. Within
six months, though, the family was reportedly in Marseilles. At
the age of four23, hard on the heels of his alleged performance
in the town square, he conducted during a benefit concert at
the Trocadero of Paris, attended, as described above, by Jules
Massenet. The photograph on the left24 was taken in Paris in
1910. It seems fairly sure, therefore, that Turin was only a brief
stopping place on the way to France. This explains the fact that
Ferrero, when in London at the age of seven, could not speak
to the orchestra in English, but addressed them in perfect
French.
He conducted at least once more in Paris, in 1912, in a
programme ranging from Sousa marches to Ponchielli’s Dance
of the Hours and Suppé’s Poet and Peasant Overture25
.
Paris notwithstanding,
… his real debut was at the “Costanzi” of Rome in the
autumn of 191226. It was then that Sgambati said to
Mugnone, who had spoken enthusiastically of the boy, “I thought you were exaggerating. I have to
admit that this fanciullo [little lad] is even more wonderful than you said”
27
.
The Costanzi programme consisted of:
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell – Overture
Boccherini: Minuet
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Meyerbeer: Le Prophète – March
Grieg: Peer Gynt – Anitra’s Dance
Wagner: Tannhäuser – Overture
Verdi: La Traviata – Act III Prelude
It was not all plain sailing, Ferrero recalled:
When the orchestra saw this tiny figure in a velvet suit they refused to rehearse. One old player with a
big white beard was particularly obstinate: “We don’t lend ourselves to comedy acts like this”. Then
the orchestra gave way and agreed to rehearse for twenty minutes, at the end of which they would
leave the theatre. But … when the rehearsal ended, the players not only did not go, they wanted to
play the piece again. The bearded old player stood up with tears in his eyes and wanted to embrace
me. I couldn’t cry. I hadn’t yet had the time to learn how to cry28
.
Concerts followed in Naples, Perugia, Genoa, Turin, Milan and Terni. Some of Ferrero’s memories, it must
be said, have the air of good stories that have improved with the telling.
23 Three years and eight months according to Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, ibid.
24 From Severi, ibid.
25 Severi, ibid.
26 4 November 1912 – cf. Treccani.
27 Nino Alberti, Radio Corriere 1935 no. 4, p. 12
28 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
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MusicWeb International p7 April 2018
In Naples, one evening, a group of orchestral musicians wanted to put my musical sensibility to the
test and deliberately made a wrong entry in “The Mastersingers” Overture. I stopped the whole
orchestra with an energetic rap of the baton and called out indignantly: “Please! Don’t act like
children!” I was just seven at the time29
.
Sometimes, too, Willy allowed himself some disarming lapses into pure boyhood. At one of his 1912
concerts, he had just come on stage and was about to acknowledge the tumultuous applause when he
spied a cat entering warily by a side door. He was off in a moment, chasing it up and down the aisles and
along the rows of seats, brushing past gentlemen’s trousers and women’s long dresses. Only when the cat
had been caught and duly stroked did he return to the rostrum for the evening’s serious business.
On another occasion, at the Augusteo of Rome, early arrivals for a gala performance were disconcerted to
find every door handle bedaubed with a revolting, sticky black substance. Holding up their ruined gloves as
evidence, they demanded explanations of the ushers, who, in their turn, made feverish enquiries among
the musicians and other personnel. All to no avail until the true culprit owned up with a seraphic grin. It
was the evening’s conductor, Willy Ferrero himself, who had been experimenting with glue and black ink30
.
The Italians were naturally proud and enthusiastic. This had its downsides. In Italy, the cult of the bambino
[aka bimbo, fanciullo, pargoletto etc.) is a second religion and even today, mamme and especially nonne
[grandmothers], can be reduced to slobbering imbecility by the sheer sight of that most normal of human
products, a baby. The Italian novelist and critic Lucio D’Ambra takes up the tale.
The audience enjoyed the phenomenon and extended their arms to applaud that tiny conductor on
the rostrum who acknowledged them seriously and correctly, yet who was nevertheless a child whose
most fanatical admirers, and those seated most closely to the orchestra, held out their hands to
smother him, not so much in applause as in kisses. But Willy, child-man, slipped from their grasp.
Those exuberant spectators irritated him and he felt that, by caressing him like that in front of the
members of the orchestra, they lessened his authority. He preferred, rather, … the gelid protocol of
the European courts where he was often called to conduct31
.
Within a year, in fact, Ferrero was touring Russia. His visit coincided with prodigy appearances by the young
Jascha Heifetz. Heifetz was notoriously reticent about his early years, but recent research by Galyna
Kopytova32 has unearthed much information and, coincidentally, quite a bit about Ferrero’s Russian
appearances as well.
Ferrero’s scheduled concerts in 1913 were on November 3, 8, 19 and 24 in St. Petersburg, followed by two
concerts in Moscow and a second cycle of concerts in St. Petersburg, on December 6, 8, 12 and 15. They
were preceded by an “improvisational concert” at the Italian Embassy, a rehearsal with Count
Sheremetyev’s orchestra on October 31 and an open rehearsal on November 2. The programme for the
first concert included Beethoven’s First Symphony, Berlioz’s Hungarian March, Grieg’s Anitra’s Dance and
the overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.
The leading critic Vyacheslav Karatygin had to admit that
… this whole entire concert atmosphere, saturated with an unhealthy thirst for sensation, is so
unpleasant … my principal prejudices against wunderkind concerts reached their peak right before the
first wave of Ferrero’s baton.
29 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
30 These two stories are related in Chiarelli: ibid.
31 Lucio D’Ambra, Radio Corriere 1933 no. 10, p. 7
32 Galyna Kopytova (translated by D. Sarlo, A. Wiktovek): Jascha Heifetz: Early Years in Russia, Indiana University Press,
2013, pp. 231-234.
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MusicWeb International p8 April 2018
But then:
… after the first wave – what a miracle! All my musical and philanthropic foibles vanished … the living
imp … overturned all my preconceptions … by the remarkable expressiveness of all his gestures, by his
impeccability, the iron exactness of his rhythm … you see that this little artist truly leads the
orchestra.
Nevertheless:
The concert finished, I am already on the street and my former indignation toward the phenomenon
of “wunderkinder” captures me with new strength.
Still bemused, Karatygin posed a question:
Jascha Heifetz, like Willy Ferrero, is a wunderkind of wunderkinder. There are very few of them. But
overall the number of wunderkinder has greatly increased in recent years. What does the future hold?
… What are we facing – a game of nature or a new trend in which the future will fill concert stages
with children?33
Ferrero caught a cold after his first St. Petersburg concert and had to cancel his appearance scheduled for
November 8. Mature conductors sometimes catch colds too, but Ferrero’s provoked a storm. Alexander
Siloti led:
I must appeal to the public … Gentlemen! What are you doing? … I did not want to participate in
murder. I did not go and will not go to a single Ferrero concert, and Nikisch also34 did not go this
Sunday for the same reason35
.
33 Quoted in Kopytova, ibid.
34 According to another account, Nikisch considered Ferrero the eighth wonder of the world. Wonder at Boy Genius,
New York Times, 3 May 1914.
35 Open letter of November 7, quoted in Kopytova, ibid.
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MusicWeb International p9 April 2018
Siloti referred to the case where a tour of America by the 12-year-old Josef Hofmann had been stopped by
a court order. Nikolai Tcherepnin agreed with Siloti:
Ferrero’s public performances are criminal acts by his parents, supported and encouraged by the
crowd. He burns like a candle from both ends …36
The St, Petersburg division of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children convened to investigate
the case. Among those heard at the meeting were the musicians Siloti, Glazunov, Tcherepnin and Auer, as
well as psychiatrists, doctors, teachers and jurists. The proceedings were confidential and all we actually
know is that Ferrero’s concerts were resumed, with a further two added. The society did obtain, however,
that Ferrero's concerts should be given during the day, not in the evening.
Gifts included a canary in a cage, a train set from the conductor Khessin and a gold watch and chain
decorated with the state crest from the Empress Maria Fyodovna. It was noted that it “took some effort to
tear the musician away from his toys and convince him to go onstage again”
37
.
Some of the “toys” were real. When a Russian prince asked Willy what he would like to receive, the young
maestro replied without hesitation “A troika with three horses”. And sure enough, the next morning a
troika with three horses was awaiting his pleasure outside the Hotel Astoria38
.
Travelling in Russia could be a complicated business, even for those whose presence had been demanded
by the Tsar himself. Ferrero himself relates:
I was about to leave St. Petersburg when I was stopped by a letter from Baron Stakelberg to my
parents. The Emperor “wanted me” (this was the phrase) at his Palace. We left in the morning on a
special train the Tsar had put at our service. This was a train that travelled along a private line,
guarded to the hilt – there was a Cosack every ten metres. In those days, the life of the “little father”
was still precious for his children! And this was not all. When we reached Tsarkeje-Tselo, we had to
submit to a thorough inspection of our baggage.
“But our trunks contain nothing but music!” my impresario protested.
“It’s true”, came the answer. “But there might be bombs in there, too”.
It was evidently a custom in that country to carry bombs in your trunks and in your waistcoat
pockets!39
36 Quoted in Kopytova, ibid.
37 Kopytova, ibid.
38 Severi, Fortune di un ragazzo prodigio, ibid.
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MusicWeb International p10 April 2018
Long-distance sniping is easy game. One Canadian commentator would have no truck with the thing at all.
There ought surely to be a universal law to prevent the exploiting of musical prodigies. Here we have
a report from St. Petersburg of "a command performance given by the Italian child conductor, Willy
Ferrero …” A child of seven and a half years "conducting" a body of trained musicians! The thing is
preposterous — a positive insult to the orchestra. I read further that the Czar himself subsequently
asked to hear a piece which Ferrero had not yet rehearsed with the band, and a Boccherini minuet
was chosen. After the first few bars, the youthful conductor "stopped the orchestra and insisted on a
greater contrast between the forte and pianissimo passages. He even sang it as he desired it to be
played." Modesty is a merit, and a child of seven, who ought to be playing marbles, pretending to tell
the Imperial Orchestra of St. Petersburg how to play a Boccherini minuet is altogether too ridiculous40
.
Whatever we think of Ferrero’s parents’ exploitation of their child, there can be no doubt that their
ambitions reached an abominable climax when Willy attended a recital by Heifetz on November 22nd
.
Willy Ferrero entered the hall at the very moment when his contemporary had finished the second
movement of the Mendelssohn Concerto and should have begun the performance of the finale. The
public noticed the little conductor and started to applaud. It turned into something like a triumphal
procession throughout the entire hall. He sat together with his parents in the front row. In the light of
the fact that the violinist could not continue because of the applause, a smaller part of the audience
began to hiss at those applauding. Heifetz began to play, but the public still stared at Ferrero. Only
with his brilliant playing did the violinist finally manage to distract the attention of the hall from the
interesting guest41
.
From Russia to London. On a full page advertisement in the Daily Mail42, the “first appearance in England of
the Youngest Symphony Conductor in the World” was announced. Various enthusiastic press comments
were reproduced, together with encomiums from the Czar and the Empress Maria Federovna. More
significant, perhaps, were the quoted remarks of major musicians:
His way of conducting possesses the charm of genius. Why, he is performing miracles! I am, indeed,
amazed to the very depth of my soul. Willy Ferrero is a wonder! – Alexander Glazunov.
If you can explain the sun or the moon, then you may be able to
explain Willy Ferrero. He is as wonderful as he is inexplicable; he is a
genius – Leopold Auer.
A few days later, Ferrero was the subject of a lengthy and considered,
though unsigned, article in the Daily Telegraph43. As in Russia, the
excessive hype induced caution in more seasoned observers:
… Such was the reputation that he was given that the chief surprise
… was to find him living up to it.
The Daily Telegraph critic also addressed the question of the
proliferation of child prodigies but, at least as far as child conductors
was concerned, he reached somewhat different conclusions to
39 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
40 J.C. Hadden, Musical Canada, Toronto, May 1914
41 Petersburgskaya gazeta, quoted in Kopytova, ibid.
42 25 April 1914
43 A Boy Conductor – Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1914
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p11 April 2018
Karatygin:
It is rather curious, perhaps, that in these days of prodigies we should never before have seen the
spectacle of a child of very tender years directing the performances of a well-known orchestra. One
would have thought it would have been far easier to teach a child to wave a baton sufficiently well to
pilot experienced instrumentalists through music that they know almost by heart than to train his
youthful fingers to play the pianoforte or the violin. If memory serves, however, only one boy
conductor has appeared in London in recent years, and he was both older and less ambitious than the
new arrival44
.
On the whole, the critic was impressed:
… he is a boy who is obviously very sensitive to music, who has a strong sense of beauty and of
rhythm, and who has a real natural aptitude for the conductor’s art. As he stood there yesterday, a
tiny figure in a knickerbocker suit of plum-coloured velvet, with a shock of brown hair falling over a
very musical forehead, directing the New Symphony Orchestra whose members had, for this occasion,
their backs turned to the audience, so that their conductor might face it45, he made it abundantly
clear that he has great talent.
He then raised one of the most puzzling aspects of the whole episode:
There is no pretence whatever that the boy can read a score. On the contrary, it is admitted that a
page of printed music at present conveys nothing to him whatever. … He conducts purely from
memory, and he seemed to know every note of the First Symphony of Beethoven, of the
‘Meistersinger’ Overture, and of the Good Friday Music from ‘Parsifal’.
So far as is known, all the other prodigies listed at the beginning of this article could read music, since they
were studying instruments as well. In terms of reading an orchestral score, they were mostly limited to
following the principal melodic line. The critic’s surprise was compounded by the fact that conducting from
memory was generally unknown in 1914.
The Sydney Morning Herald extract below implies that the Daily Telegraph critic was commenting on a
private hearing for the benefit of journalists. This would explain some procedures that, in a concert, would
have been slightly odd:
Occasionally the players made mistakes; one could not but suspect that they did so on purpose, for
the New Symphony Orchestra is not as a rule prone to blunder in a Beethoven symphony. But these
mistakes did not remain uncorrected. A rap on the desk, a moment’s pause, a stern rebuke in fluent
French, and the players, one hopes duly chastened, repeated the passage correctly.
The critic wondered if a little gentle trickery was on display, but concluded that this was not so:
Of course, little effects like these might have been rehearsed, but it would seem that in his case such
subterfuges would be quite unnecessary, for it is obvious that he has all the details of the score very
clearly impressed upon his retentive memory. He would pick out the important leads of the different
groups of instruments, or indicate a sforzando or a sudden pianissimo, with the certainty and
assurance of an experienced conductor, with an open score before him. And there is in his gestures no
element of the automatic or the mechanical. They are free, lithe and expressive, and they indicate the
feeling of the music as the gestures of a good conductor should. They show that the music conveys a
44 I have not been able to identify this other prodigy.
45 It is reported that in Russia, too, Ferrero conducted facing the audience.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p12 April 2018
very definite meaning to him, and they show that he has the innate gift of conveying his own feelings
to others.
Still, critics are there to criticise, and the Daily Telegraph’s man had this to add:
He has, of course, decided limitations, and not the least of these would seem to be that his sense of
perspective is undeveloped, with the result that he gives all he has in him to each successive climax,
and has nothing bigger left in him when the great moment arrives.
As in Russia, there was some concern over the ethics of the situation. The Daily Mail’s medical
correspondent concluded that all was well:
There are none of the signs of neurotic precociousness or nervous instability about this prodigy.
During the impromptu football game I witnessed in the flat of his friends in Welbeck Street, the only
characteristic that marked him from the half-dozen children playing with him was his
superabundance of animal spirits. In all other respects than in his innate appreciation of music, Willy
Ferrero, as far as one can judge from a casual observation, is just pure boy46
.
While in London, Ferrero was taken to see Queen Alexandra.
When the Queen asked him how he liked conducting, he replied
that “he liked playing with toys just as well47”. The Queen also
gave him a letter of introduction to her cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of
Germany. With the outbreak of war, however, the letter was
never sent48
.
The question of whether Willy Ferrero might have been happier
playing with his toys, and also of the tendency for his concerts to
become open rehearsals, was also raised by Lucio D’Ambra:
But the morning after, in the hotel, beneath a portrait of that
little blond boy who was himself, he read in the various
European newspapers, “The Emperor of Germany receives Willy
Ferrero … the child prodigy at the court of the czar … ”. Then,
getting out of his little bed, Willy left the papers and went to his
toys. A child, just a child, and happy, till the time came for the
orchestral rehearsal. And so, with a heavy heart, he had to get
back to his enemies of the day, who were none other than his
collaborators of the wind and brass, those accursed orchestral
players with the scores in front of them and following the
pentagrams with one eye while the other, amid smirking and sniggering, followed him on the
rostrum, with an air of not taking him seriously. They seemed to be saying to each other, “Yes, my fine
little boy, my supposed phenomenon. You pretend to conduct. The people believe and applaud. But
we, the orchestra, our orchestra, are making the music by ourselves, it’s obvious …”
Obvious? Not so fast. The child Willy decided to prove to the musicians that the instruments were not
going under their own steam, according to the score, by any means, and that he, Willy, he the
conductor, was not just there for show. So when an irreverent oboe or a presumptuous trumpet came
in wrong, sure of getting away with it and raising a laugh from his colleagues, we saw a child’s hand
emerge from the frills to stop the great orchestra in full cry. We heard, in the amazed silence, a tiny
46 Quoted in this blog: l, but no date is given
47 Wonder at Boy Genius, New York Times, 3 May 1914.
48 Fortune di un ragazzo prodigio, ibid.
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irritated voice with the authority of a general say, having identified perfectly the single culprit from
among a hundred players: “Back to the beginning. And be more careful, please. You didn’t enter on
time49
.
The suspicion that the mistakes had been knowingly planted, probably by Ferrero’s father, and their
corrections discreetly rehearsed, remains. Massimo Freccia had no doubt about this:
His father, to glamourize further the miraculous gifts of his creation inserted false notes into the
orchestra parts in order that the boy, warned in advance, would correct the mistakes at rehearsal,
furthering the legend about his exceptional ear50
.
Oddly enough, another Italian writer, Alberto De Angelis, after complaining in 1915 that Ferrero’s work was
“generalized, monotone” in its colouring, concluded that
Ferrero is not a great conductor, but his mediocrity is the best proof that his conducting is genuine,
that there is no trick behind it51
.
The Ferrero phenomenon aroused curiosity as far afield as Australia.
The latest prodigy in the musical world (according to the London "Daily Telegraph") hails from Italy
and is a conductor. For these two reasons Willy Ferrero stands apart from most of his kind. To
Hungary and Russia we have come to look in recent years for a more or less regular supply of youthful
musical geniuses, and they are usually either pianists or fiddlers. Willy Ferrero provides the exception
in that he "wields the baton." This seven-year-old Italian boy has been giving a series of concerts in St.
Petersburg and astonishing the Russian public, accustomed though they must be by this time to feats
of the musical wunderkind. Little Ferrero was also commanded to direct a concert before the Tsar and
an audience of Royal personages. There was an orchestra of eighty-five, and the St. Petersburg
correspondent of "Le Temps" has furnished an interesting account of the proceedings. To his Imperial
Majesty was left the choice of the programme, and the first piece he selected was the "Tannhäuser"
overture. Afterwards came a Grieg dance, followed in turn by Boccherini's Minuet and a Farandole of
Bizet. Twice the very precocious conductor called a halt in order to explain to the instrumentalists – in
French – how he wished certain passages to be played. Little Ferrero, it is said, throws off all trace of
boyishness as soon as he sets to work with his miniature baton. His expression becomes serious –
even severe – and his eyes take on a strange look of concentration52
.
A New Zealand paper, quoting the Daily Mail of May 1st 1914 as its source, added the further detail that
Ferrero stood on a table to conduct. This article gives us a few closer glimpses of the mechanics of the
operation.
Willy Ferrero knows no music. Pieces are played to him on the piano, then he hears them played by an
orchestra, and then he conducts them. … there is no possibility of doubt that he does really conduct in
the very strictest and highest sense of the word. He has a firm and expressive beat, he knows all the
leads, and never fails to give them at the right time … If anything is not right, he stops the orchestra
and repeats a passage till it goes to his satisfaction. Nothing escapes him. It was said that in the
Beethoven Symphony one of the players made a mistake, just to see whether he was noticed, and he
was. … The sceptic will say this was all arranged beforehand, and he was following the band; but this
cannot be. … it is unthinkable that a body like the New Symphony orchestra should lend itself to
49 Lucio D’Ambra, Radio Corriere, 1933 no. 10, p. 7
50 Freccia, ibid., p. 43.
51 Il Tirso, Rome, January 1915, quoted in the booklet to the Musica Classica CDs.
52 The West Australian (Perth), 28 March 1914
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systematic trickery. … It is wonderful, but not without an element of pathos. What can the future
have in store for such a boy?53
It is to an Australian paper that we owe the suggestion that perhaps things did not go so fizzingly after all.
Willy Ferrero has come, but has not conquered. From the first I had my doubts, although I am bound
to say Willy came to us franked by the recommendation of his Imperial Majesty the Czar, and that of
famous Continental musicians. Also, and to my amazement, most of the London critics, having
enjoyed afternoon tea with Willy, and heard him conduct privately the New Symphony Orchestra,
paraded him to the London public as a heaven-born prodigy-genius, the like of which had never been
heard before, a great conductor aged 7 years, and without a scrap of musical knowledge. But the
public has been quite unresponsive, and Willy, his curly hair fluttering above the lighted platform on
to which they hoisted him at the Albert Hall, has wielded his baton to empty benches. The boy has
evidently some intuitive knowledge of rhythms and a feeling for music. But for my part I wonder how
the orchestra could sit so solemnly, responding to his "leads." I wonder more at the ready enthusiasm
of London's critics; but I would have wondered most of all if the affair had been the huge popular
success it was evidently designed to be. But, after all, these things do "come off" sometimes. This one
has failed to do so, and for little Willy's own sake I am glad of it54
.
Punch, too, in a column entitled “Gleanings from Grub Street, by Our Special Parasite”, allowed itself a
sarcastic aside. The ostensible occasion was a visit to London by a Finnish novelist called Hjalmar
Stormbarner. I suspect that no such an author really existed – doubtless the butt of Punch’s wit was some
Scandinavian figure who would have been readily recognized at the time.
Professor Stormbarner is of course best known in this country as the author of the famous romances,
Letters from Limbo, The Devil's Ducats, Narcotic Nelly and The Sarcophagus, but his versatility and
accomplishments in other departments of mental activity will come as a surprise to his English
admirers. He has penetrated the Arctic circle in a bath-chair drawn by reindeer; he plays with great
skill on the balalaika, and he has translated most of the works of Mr. Edmund Gosse into MæsoGothic. At the present moment he is undoubtedly the first favourite for the Nobel Prize, though Willie
[sic] Ferrero runs him close in virtue of the patronage of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and the DowagerEmpress of Russia55
.
According to one account, Ferrero’s child prodigy appearances continued until 191956. We know for certain
that he conducted five concerts with the Orchestra Massima dell’Augusteo in Rome, two of them with a
chorus as well, in April and May 1916. On 8 April 1917 he conducted part of a benefit concert at La Scala,
Milan, organized by the Associazione Lombarda dei Giornalisti in aid of “bread for prisoners and for the
children of soldiers”57. The three American articles referred to above58 tell us that in April 1915, Willy
received a gold medal from the Italian Minister of Education after conducting a chorus and orchestra
“aggregating 500 participants” in the Augusteo, and that he appeared before Pope Benedict XV in 1916.
Nevertheless, you cannot remain a child prodigy for ever. By 1919, the time had come to learn his trade
properly and, on the recommendation of Queen Margherita, assisted by some wealthy patrons and
accompanied by his father, Ferrero went to study in Vienna.
53 Grey River Argus, 26 June 1914
54 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June 1914
55 Punch, May 13, 1914
56 De Benedetti, ibid.
57 Selvini, ibid. The conducting was shared with Ettore Panizza.
58 See note 22
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In 1914, we are told, Ferrero, shown alongside at the age
of nine59, was unable to read music or play an
instrument. Well before he left for Vienna, he seems to
have become a fairly proficient pianist. The conductor
Fernando Previtali, his junior by one year, recalls that
during his early years in Turin he would go to Ferrero’s
house, where they played both games and music
together. For their music making, Ferrero played the
piano, while Previtali played the cello or joined Ferrero
in piano duets. Previtali does not date this episode, but
makes it clear that it was previous to Ferrero’s departure
for Vienna. Previtali was at this time studying at Turin
Conservatoire. There is no suggestion that Ferrero made
any formal studies before going to Vienna, but there
would have been no point in a budding conservatoire
student playing with him if he were not reasonably good.
Previtali does say that Ferrero’s mother would come in from time to time with advice, so we have to
assume that Ferrero learnt piano from her. Previtali also testified that Ferrero “had music and rhythm in his
blood”60
.
Before leaving Ferrero the child prodigy, perhaps we should try to assess what a child prodigy is, and what
it meant in Willy Ferrero’s case. This is a minefield in which doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and
philosophers have come to grief, and my intention is to pose questions more than to answer them.
In my mind, there is a distinction between the child prodigy, who is quite unbelievably doing something
that, by all logic, he or she could not do, and the highly precocious child, who is doing something at a much
earlier age than we would consider normal. In some ways, Willy Ferrero met the former criterion. At the
age of four he could neither read music nor play an instrument, yet he stood in front of an orchestra and,
we are assured, did not “conduct along” with them, which anyone can do if the orchestra will tolerate it,
but actually directed the performance, giving cues, indicating expression and even identifying mistakes.
However, to define a child prodigy this way is to introduce a mystical element. It almost suggests a parallel
with children who apparently remember detailed facts and episodes from a previous life61. This is a
phenomenon for which much documentation has been assembled, but without so far convincing the
scientific community that it is more than a pseudo-science. Not entirely surprisingly, the theosophist Annie
Besant wondered if Ferrero had not two souls – his own and that of some deceased musician62. Without
invoking reincarnation, the experienced conductor Landon Ronald nevertheless implied a mystical element.
I believe that Willy Ferrero possesses the most incomprehensible genius I have ever witnessed. He is
the greatest of all mysteries for me, because he has given proof that he knows, at his age, more than
men do who have spent their lives studying and conducting. I could understand it more easily if he
were able to read music. As it is, he is simply a born conductor63
.
59 Photo included in Chiarelli, ibid.
60 Fernando Previtali: Article written in 1954 and reproduced in the Musica Classica booklet.
61 This line of thought has been developed by Amadeus Voldben, who mentions the case of Ferrero in La
Reincarnazione – verità antica e moderna, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome, 1991, p. 144
62 Referred to in Guglielmo Bilancioni, essay published in 1921 and reproduced in the Musica Classica booklet.
63 De Benedetti, ibid. I have seen these words by Landon Ronald quoted in several places, but always in an Italian
translation. The above is therefore a back-translation, and may not reproduce Ronald’s words exactly.
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A more scientific investigation was attempted by Professor Agostini64. After making precise and
complicated measurements of the boy’s head, he pronounced him “a tipo di genialoide who, if not unwisely
exploited, might progress to become a real genius”. The Italian word genialoide describes a person with
fervid imagination but short on discipline.
Some would argue, though, that a child prodigy in the sense intended by Besant or Ronald does not really
exist. It all boils down to degrees of precociousness. What seems scarcely credible when a five-year-old
does it, is still highly remarkable when a ten-year-old is doing it. It is remarkable in a rather more normal
way when the prodigy is a fifteen-year-old. The same thing done by a twenty-year-old might even leave us
dissatisfied, if nothing more than good technique and a healthy musical instinct are involved.
So was what Ferrero did logically impossible? He had been surrounded by music from birth and had been
watching conductors ever since he could consciously watch anything. Previtali recalled another aspect:
… he also had exceptional capacity as a mimic. With a gesture of his hand, with a change of
physiognomy, as well as with words, he evoked and imitated people and things with the greatest of
ease.65”
Willy Ferrero therefore possessed a unique combination: a remarkable capacity to mimic a conductor’s
gestures, an innate feeling for music, and an exceptional ability to remember and absorb the music he
heard. The former on its own would have provided no more than an entertaining party piece, rather on the
lines of the unknown young conductor illustrated at the beginning of this article. The other two might have
reached concrete application only after years of training. In combination, they enabled him to conduct an
orchestra. So, amazing as young Willy’s conducting was, it was not actually a logical impossibility.
Lorin Maazel, who certainly knew what it was like to be a child prodigy, was at pains to emphasize the
natural, non-phenomenal aspects.
Anyone with a fine musical gift can demonstrate it precociously. You can do the same if you have, say,
a mathematical gift too, but with the musical one you get it exhibited. It’s certainly not necessary and
it can be detrimental66
.
Ferrero himself, in the 1930 article quoted several times above, seemed to wish to keep the boy and the
man well apart, concluding as follows:
And now? Now I won’t tell you anything more, because I have been asked for the memories of a child
prodigy, not the hopes of a man67
.
More unfathomable, really, is the question of why and how a person – at whatever age – has exceptional
gifts denied to others. In the end, is it more remarkable to conduct like Ferrero at the age of ten, or like
Giulini – a slow developer – at the age of thirty? Or, in Maazel’s own case, was he more remarkable when
he conducted at the age of eight, and just about managed it, or when, in the years of his finest maturity, he
conducted as few others could? So our next question must be, did the child prodigy become a remarkable
conductor in his maturity, or did he continue to conduct like a ten-year-old?
64 Quoted in Severi, ibid. Presumably, this was Cesare Agostini (1862-1942), Director of Perugia Psychiatric Hospital
from 1904 and author of a manual on psychiatry, for students and doctors, published in 1906.
65 Previtali, ibid.
66 Interview in Gramophone, March 1971, p. 1449.
67 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
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Studies in Vienna
Ferrero’s period of study at the Vienna Academy is normally dated 1921 to 192468. The teachers named are
Max Springer and Ferdinand Löwe69. Springer was a composer, particularly of church music, Löwe was a
conductor. The registers of the Vienna Academy, however, show that Ferrero was enrolled only for the
summer semester of 192270. He took four courses: Counterpoint I, with Max Springer, Piano I, with
Friedrich Wührer (entered 2 January), General Musical Theory with Georg Valker (entered 14 January) and
Civic Education. He was not graded in the latter because of “insufficient knowledge of German”. The
somewhat sketchy entry is shown below.
Nevertheless, he was certainly in Vienna by May 1921, and was still enough of a wunderkind to conduct a
couple of concerts in this guise with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The programmes were71:
31 May 1921, UhrGroßer Saal
Beethoven: Symphony No. 5
Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture
Martucci: Notturno
Scarlatti, D: Burlesca
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell – Overture
15 June 1921, UhrGroßer Saal
Beethoven: Egmont Overture
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique”
Wagner: Die Meistersinger – Overture
He matriculated, the Vienna registrar tells us, on 25 June 1924 as a private student, with good results. Most
sources presume this means a diploma in conducting, but in reality, conducting diplomas are a fairly recent
innovation. Just possibly, since he certainly took piano lessons with Friedrich Wührer during his “official”
semester, his diploma was in piano. More likely, though, it was in composition. This would have meant that,
as a private student matriculating externally, residence in Vienna was no longer essential, if this was
68 Cf. for example, Mario Zafred, Immatura morte di Willy Ferrero, L’Unità, 25 March 1954.
69 Cf, Treccani, Selvini, ibid.
70 A copy of the registry entry, with additional information from a present-day registrar of the Vienna Academy, has
been provided by Alexander Negrin.
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becoming burdensome. He could come and go, or even send his compositions by post from Italy. Certainly,
a career as a composer was seriously considered at one stage, as Lucio D’Ambra relates:
… In Vienna he began again to study music from the basics upwards … while the problem at the root
of the musical vocation began to pose itself. Composer or performer? Compose his own music or
continue to perform that of others? Uncertain for several years, Willy finally decided72
.
According to one account, Ferrero “showed, from his earliest years, a strong desire to compose”
73. It is not
clear when he made the decision to concentrate on conducting, though the few compositions listed in
Treccani would seem to have been written before his thirtieth year74. Previtali tells us that, on his return
from Vienna,
… he let me hear some of his compositions, which seemed to me further proof of his extraordinary
musicality75
.
Previtali, as we shall see later, was a master of the unspoken phrase. Technically fluent compositions may
indeed be the expression of “extraordinary musicality”, but a minimum of originality is needed as well, and
Previtali does not say Ferrero had this. Nor did he ever express any regret that Ferrero chose conducting
over composition.
Conducting, then, was Willy’s choice. At which point we can speculate that, while Löwe was not among his
teachers during the semester for which he was enrolled at the Academy, persistent mention of this name in
Ferrero biographies may not be entirely wrong. Löwe was, after all, a prominent senior conductor in Vienna
in those years, so why not seek a few lessons from him?
A young conductor in Italy
The die seems to have been cast in favour of conducting by 11 March 1923
when Ferrero, even before obtaining his diploma, directed a concert at the
Teatro Costanzi of Rome “in aid of war orphans”. Nevertheless, now that he
was a mature man, if still a very young one, engagements no longer fell at
his feet. The intervention of Margherita, the Queen Mother, was needed to
persuade the Augusteo to open its doors to him once more76. On 8 February
1925, he conducted the orchestra of Santa Cecilia for the first time – the
first of some eighty concerts he was to give with this orchestra during his
career77
.
The appeal to Queen Margherita was probably made by Willy’s mother, for
there had been changes in the Ferrero household. The exact date and
circumstances of Vittorio’s death have not yet come to light. Previtali,
remembering the days when he frequented the Ferrero home in Turin as a
teenager, before Willy went to Vienna, remarked that “his father was still alive at that time”78. Put that
way, it sounds as if he did not remain alive for very long afterwards. We know that Vittorio accompanied
Willy to Vienna and, since Willy was a minor, his enrolment documents for the 1922 semester name
Vittorio as his guardian. Beginning from 1925, Willy’s mother wrote a series of letters to highly-placed
72 Lucio D’Ambra, ibid
73 Radio Corriere 1931 no. 5. p. 17
74 Treccani quotes as the source for its information about Ferrero’s compositions an article by A. Aniante, published in
Quadrivio, 12 July 1936. With the sole exception of the fragmentary music for the film “La terra trema”, I have found
no mention of any further compositions, or of any attempt by Ferrero to press his claims as a composer.
75 Previtali, ibid.
76 Cf. Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, ibid.
77 See Appendix 4.
78 Previtali, ibid.
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people, politically and musically, asking them to help her son. Recipients, apart from the Queen Mother,
included Queen Elena, the art historian Paolo D’Ancona (1878-1964), the writer and journalist Luigi
Federzoni (1878-1967), who was also a Minister in Mussolini’s government from 1923 to 1928 and later
President of the Senate, Federzoni’s wife, and the Secretary of the Fascist Party. It may be supposed that
such letters, if necessary at all, would have been written by Vittorio had he been alive79
.
In 1929, the critic G.T. Barblan, hailing “one of the finest concerts we have heard at the Augusteo in recent
years”, referred to Ferrero’s ongoing difficulties in re-establishing himself, and also revealed another of
Willy’s generous supporters.
A concert that will, we hope, open the eyes of those who wish to keep them obstinately closed,
preventing this glorious affirmation of the genius of our [national] race from pursuing a splendid
career, officially recognized by all the magnates and monopolizers of the musical art. We give our
public thanks to Maestro Mario Rossi, the young, exuberant assistant conductor of the Augusteo,
who, with a gesture of laudable solidarity, did his utmost to enable [Ferrero] to ascend the rostrum of
the Augusteo80
.
Moral support, at least, also came from Mascagni who, then at the height of his fame, attended the third of
Ferrero’s 1929 concerts at the Augusteo and, at the end of the performance of the intermezzo from I
Rantzau, directed the applause away from himself and towards the young Maestro81
.
It has been suggested that the post-diploma Ferrero was a disappointment to his erstwhile admirers. No
doubt some were already primed to hear it this way. While young Willy was garnering praise and presents
at the end of a wunderkind appearance in Rome, Francesco Paolo Mulè heard a bird of ill omen at his
shoulder:
What a shame! These child prodigies always run out of steam sooner or later.
And those around agreed82. De Benedetti entitled his article “Willy, the musical prodigy ruined by study at
the Academy” and concluded
… during his years in Austria, something had changed. Rigour, precision and maximum respect for the
score had made Ferrero a real professional, but had robbed him of the free-flowing spontaneity that
had characterized him. He continued to conduct in the leading Italian theatres and frequently visited
the USSR after the war to propagate Italian music, but he lacked that touch of genius that had made
an extraordinary character of him83
.
Antonio Guarnieri, a great conductor little remembered because he left few recordings, sniped:
The child prodigy? Aha, the prodigy has gone, only the child remains84
.
Massimo Freccia turned the knife in the wound:
… when the legs became too hairy and the shadow of a beard too visible, he had to abandon his Lord
Fauntleroy suit and his fame receded85
.
79 Information from Alexander Negrin, who has examined these letters in the Santa Cecilia archives.
80 Impero, 7 June 1929.
81 Cf. Tribuna, 14 June 1929, Giornale d’Italia, 14 June 1929, Corriere d’Italia, 14 June 1929.
82 F.P.M. [Francesco Paolo Mulè], Radio Corriere 1934 no. 50, p. 12
83 De Benedetti, ibid.
84 Quoted in Selvini, ibid.
85 Freccia, ibid., p. 43.
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Francesco Paolo Mulè, writer, critic and librettist of an opera by his brother Giuseppe, did not agree with
the bird of ill omen.
But Willy Ferrero did not run out of steam. First he was guided by instinct. Later, when according to
the omens, he should have run out of steam, instinct was overtaken by reason, the reason that comes
from study. The child prodigy, advancing year by year, is today one of our finest conductors86
.
If we are to believe De Angelis’s estimate that Ferrero in 1915 was a real conductor, but a mediocre one,
the conclusion has to be that, from 1925 onwards, he was much better than that, otherwise, why should
the Santa Cecilia Orchestra invite him at all, let alone invite him back another 80-or-so times over the
following 29 years? At La Scala concert season, too, he appeared regularly. In particular, from 1929 to 1931
he conducted works there such as Stravinsky’s “Firebird” Suite, pieces from Prokofiev’s “For the Love of
three Oranges” and Honegger’s “Chant de Nigamon”. On 16 May 1942, again at La Scala, he accompanied
the young Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto, while on 24 November 1945
he gave the Milanese première of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony. This, though, was his last
appearance at La Scala. From the late 1920s until the war years, moreover, Ferrero’s career was intimately
bound up with the early history of broadcasting and recording in Italy. If nothing else, this is an easily
traceable part of his career, thanks to RAI’s splendid initiative in making available, in downloadable PDF
form, the entire series of Radio Corriere issues, from its inception in 1925 to its demise in 199487. Before
addressing this, however, we might seek a few glimpses of the man that was emerging.
If Ferrero found it hard to shake off his child prodigy past, this was at least partly due to the purely visual
effect that he remained a diminutive figure. Lucio D’Ambra tells us that the child
… has now become a man but without succeeding in becoming an imposing figure. His person is still
slender and tiny. Though a man, he seems to be a boy88
.
We shall see that, by the end of his life, Ferrero, always a bachelor, had
established a life-style that alternated hermit-like withdrawal with lively
gregariousness. Back in Rome in the late 1920s, he frequented a group,
referred to as the Cenacolo, which met for some six years in the salon of
Angiolo Giuseppe (“Beppe”) Rossellini89. Prominent attendees were
Beppe’s nephews Roberto and Renzo. The former, post-war, became one
of Italy’s most significant film directors. Renzo established himself as a
composer by the 1930s. Other musicians frequenting the circle were
Mascagni, Zandonai, Alfano and Titta Ruffo. They were joined by artists,
architects, entrepreneurs and politicians. A dominating figure was the
writer Massimo Bontempelli. Common to all was a vaguely left-wing
ideology that momentarily saw salvation in Mussolini. But, while
Bontempelli, as a leading voice of the Novecento movement, became an
outright exponent of Fascism until the racial laws brought him up against
reality, Willy Ferrero was looked on with suspicion by Mussolini’s secret
police as early as 192790
.
Another recipient of Willy’s mother’s appeals for help may have been Willy’s biological father, Arnaldo
Guerra. What is certain, is that in 1934, Ferrero stood godfather to Arnaldo’s daughter Anna Maria Isabella
86 Francesco Paolo Mulè, ibid.
87 h Lucio D’Ambra, ibid.
89 See Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini, Da Capo, New York, 1998.
90 See Mario José Cereghino, Giovanni Fasanella, Le carte segrete del Duce, Mondadori 2014.
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Francesca Guerra91. The normal assumption has been that the Ferreros were family friends of the Guerras.
In reality, Willy was Anna Maria’s half-brother. This would explain why he took a closer interest in Anna
Maria’s upbringing than might normally be expected of a godfather. Among other things, he also
encouraged her ambitions, opposed by her parents, to become an actor. In recognition of his help, she
adopted the stage name of Anna Maria Ferrero, becoming one of Italy’s leading actors in the post-war
years, as well as the partner of Vittorio Gassman. This claustrophobic relationship collapsed after seven
years and in 1962 she married the French actor Jean Sorel. She withdrew from acting shortly after her
marriage. Some years ago, she and Sorel spoke to Alexander Negrin at considerable length about Willy
Ferrero, confirming that he was in fact her half-brother. It was, they explained, a family secret, something
that everybody in the family knew, but nobody talked about. They raised no objections to the matter being
made public now. Indeed, Anna Maria’s parents acted extremely well by Willy, particularly her mother, who
showed a commendable broadmindedness. The above signed postcard shows Anna Maria Ferrero in 1952,
when she was at the height of her fame and while Willy was still alive.
Chronology and motivations, regarding a period before Anna Maria Ferrero was born, will remain in the
realm of hypothesis. We can only put together what we know. Arnaldo Guerra had married one Maria
Palmieri not later than about 1923. In 1923 or 1924 they had a son, Carlo. He became a doctor.
The alternative to an approach to the Guerras by Willy’s mother is that Ferrero himself, informed of the
facts, decided on his own initiative to seek his real father. So when did Willy become aware of the facts? It
is hardly the sort of thing you tell a little boy, even a little boy capable of conducting a symphony orchestra.
Conversely, when he stood godfather to Anna Maria, it must surely have been agreed on all sides that this
was a neat formula that would enable him to act as a family member without external gossips needing to
suppose that he actually was so. Anna Maria Ferrero told Alexander Negrin that Willy was always made
welcome in their home and treated as a member of the family. A welcome that does not seem to have
been compromised when he encouraged Anna Maria to flout her parents’ wishes, or by her decision to
work professionally under his name rather than theirs. Arnaldo Guerra continued to help Willy over the
years, acting as his agent in dealings with orchestral managements from the 1940s onwards. One remaining
query is whether Willy Ferrero, when he wrote the autobiographical article in 193092 stressing the fact that
music ran in both sides of his family, was deliberately stepping around a truth that was not to be revealed,
or whether he was informed of his true father some time between then and 1934.
This also seems the best place to relate what little is known of Willy Ferrero’s brother, the violinist Teddy
Ferrero. Presumably he was not a child prodigy. His name first appears in the Radio Corriere in 1930, when
Professor Teddy Ferrero contributed brief solos during programmes by an unidentified “small orchestra”.
With his brother conducting, he played the Bach E major Concerto (1935), the second part in the Bach
Double Concerto (1941, with Aldo Priano) and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino’s Allegro da Concerto (twice in
1941). He played the Lalo Symphonie espagnole with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra on 25 April 1945,
conducted by Roberto Caggiano. His last broadcast was in 1947, when he played the Franck Sonata and
Ravel’s Tzigane with Sandro Fuga. A correspondent tells me that Teddy was a homosexual93 who also
suffered from a nervous disorder which caused him to abandon his public career. Homosexuality should not
have been an issue in Italy. It is, of course, outlawed by the prevailing Roman Catholic religion, but as far as
civil laws are concerned, intercourse between consenting same-sex adults has been legal in Italy since 1887.
The Fascist regime made some attempt to criminalize it in the public mind. A nervous problem that affected
91 I have seen her full name only in this French-language biography: ndex.php.
This site also provides the information that Arnaldo Guerra was a writer and journalist and that Anna Maria had an
elder brother.
92 Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
93 There is a reference to Teddy in Elegia n.14 by the homosexual poet Giancarlo Albisola Albertalli. The poem is dated
1973 and Teddy would seem to have been still alive at the time, though the poetic language may bear other
interpretations. Cf. Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p22 April 2018
Teddy’s ability to give of his best in public, or to face the public at all, would obviously have been much
more serious. It is highly unlikely that recordings exist of the broadcasts mentioned.
Spare a thought for Teddy, though. We see him only in the family group reproduced on page 4. At the
centre, in his Lord Fauntleroy suit and bearing the confident grin of success, is Willy. Relegated to the left,
looking rather less self-confident, is “our other son” Teddy, groomed for a normality that would be
decorous in any other context but which, under these circumstances, must have seemed to him the most
abject failure.
Ferrero, the EIAR and the RAI
Broadcasting began in Italy when the URI – Unione Radiofonica Italiana – was set up in 1924. The following
year the Radio Corriere, to which we owe so much of the information in this article, made its appearance as
a weekly magazine. The URI need not detain us since, by the time Ferrero first appears in the Radio Corriere
pages, it had been replaced, in 1927, by the EIAR – Ente Italiano per Audizioni Radiofoniche. In 1931, the
EIAR acquired the Teatro di Torino for use as an Auditorium and the Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR concert
seasons began in that year.
Appendix 1 lists all Ferrero’s known broadcasts, from 1928 to the last year of his life. The first of them, on
10 December 1928, was broadcast from Rome and the orchestra was described as the “Grande Orchestra
Sinfonica”. For other broadcasts prior to the institution of the EIAR orchestra, the orchestra is not named at
all. Even after the formation of the Turin-based EIAR orchestra, many orchestral concerts were broadcast
from various Italian cities, usually Rome or Milan, but sometimes as far south as Palermo. The practice of
the Radio Corriere, when the orchestra was not that of EIAR, was generally not to name it at all. It will be
seen that, for many of the broadcasts listed in Appendix 1, the orchestra is not named.
Coincident with this observation, it will be seen that broadcasting in Italy had a regional basis. This possibly
reflected the difficulty of providing national coverage in a country that was narrow but very long. For
whatever reason, it remained the case even after the EIAR was replaced by the RAI – Radio Audizioni
Italiane – in 1944. Italy had three national programmes, along vaguely BBC lines, from 1951. So what were
the orchestras used for broadcasting outside the EIAR seasons? On the assumption that the EIAR orchestra
did not travel all round Italy, we must suppose that the unnamed orchestras were pick-up bands consisting
largely of members of the principal orchestra of the city in question: La Scala in Milan, Santa Cecilia in Rome
and so on. But this is only a guess.
We do not know, for example, what orchestra was used for an interesting and little remembered initiative
that just predated the formation of the EIAR orchestra. This was the concert seasons of Radiomarelli. If you
look for information about Radiomarelli, you will find that it was created in 1929 to produce and trade
radio equipment. It enjoyed a monopoly position during the Fascist years and survived the war, but faltered
and then disappeared in the 1970s due to an incapacity to adapt its products to new markets. What nobody
seems to remember is that it ran a series of broadcast concerts, fully documented in the Radio Corriere, at
the beginning of the 1930s. The venue was Milan Conservatoire and the artistic direction was undertaken
by the major figure of Ildebrando Pizzetti. Ferrero conducted two of these.
The pre-war Radio Corriere also included synthetic lists of broadcasts from foreign radio stations. These
show that Ferrero broadcast with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra on a yearly basis from 1934 to 1938
(see Appendix 2), and from Moscow in 1935 and 1936 (see Appendix 3). In this latter year, he also appeared
in Leningrad and Kiev
94. He seems also to have conducted in Spain95
.
94 Cf. ml
95 Cf. Mario Labroca, Muscisti Italiani all’Estero, Il Lavoro Fascista, 16 October 1935, referring to this forthcoming tour.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p23 April 2018
Some interesting details of Ferrero’s 1936 Russian tour are given in the article already quoted by Giberto
Severi96. Ferrero gave a total of forty concerts. The repertoire was mainly Italian, ranging from Vivaldi,
Scarlatti and Corelli to Respighi, Petrassi, Tocchi, Masetti, Zandonai, Pizzetti and Pick-Mangiagalli. It was
during this tour that he met Khrennikov, whose First Symphony he later performed several times in Italy.
One rather pleasing feature that emerges about Willy Ferrero is his loyalty to past friends. After his arrival
in the Soviet Union, one of his first acts was to ask after the impresario Riesnikov, the once-powerful figure
who had masterminded his pre-Revolution tours of the country.
At first, those questioned replied evasively, they did not wish to tell him where [Riesnikov] was or
what he was doing, let alone allow them to meet. After much insistence, they told him he was at the
Radio, a clerk in a small office. Willy’s heart missed a beat when he thought that Riesnikov had been
one of the most influential men in the Russian theatre and the Petronius of St. Petersburg society. It
missed a few more when Riesnikov appeared before him, accompanied by an agent of the GPU
[forerunner of the KGB], a sad, white-haired figure who leaped into his arms, weeping without saying
a word. Willy, distressed by the scene, asked Riesnikov if he could do anything for him. Riesnikov
asked him a single favour: to give a concert in his native town, Rostov Don.
Willy kept his promise.
This was not Ferrero’s only glimpse of Soviet democracy at work. According to a clause in his contract, the
Radio would see to all the necessary visas so he did not worry unduly when his visa expired about half way
through the tour, during a series of Beethoven concerts in Odessa. As soon as the concerts finished, he was
confronted by two GPU agents and ordered to leave the country within 24 hours. Willy insisted that he
could not do this because he still had about 20 concerts to conduct and his next stop was Kiev. Icily, the
agents repeated their order that he was to leave within 24 hours. Willy took the train for Kiev nevertheless,
but took the precaution of buying an extra rail ticket and giving it to a Russian friend, who was to keep a
discreet eye on him and inform the Italian consul in Kiev immediately if he disappeared en route.
Fortunately, nothing untoward happened and he was met in Kiev by the Italian consul who made due
representations to the authorities, with the result that the visa was renewed and the tour completed. One
might suppose that these incidents would have caused Ferrero to wonder whether Stalin’s workers’
paradise was any improvement on Mussolini’s police state but, as we shall see, his communist faith
survived the shock.
The 1940 article containing this information shows that the years were not treating Ferrero kindly – he was
only 34, after all. It also gives us a glimpse of the disorderly lifestyle at which many others have hinted:
[Willy] is there before us with his slender body wrapped in a dark crimson dressing-gown and his face
marked by several wrinkles. As he speaks, he runs his long, nervous hands through his uncombed hair
and paces up and down the hotel room where he has received us, carefully avoiding the many
obstacles strewn in his path; for Willy is considerably and candidly untidy97
.
Ferrero’s programme planning followed a pattern throughout his mature career that may seem unusual to
British listeners, but which, pre-war, was not confined either to him or to Italy. The “meat” came at the
beginning – a classical symphony, usually by Beethoven – I have traced performances of all but the second
and the ninth. Mozart was also fairly frequent, but limited to symphonies 34 and 35. Brahms was rare –
usually the First or Third Symphony before the war, while the Fourth became a regular item post-war.
Romantics such as Dvořák (the “New World”), Tchaikovsky (usually the Fourth, sometimes the
“Pathétique”) and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” appeared occasionally, and invariably opened the
programme. After the interval would come a work by a living Italian composer – Ferrero’s involvement with
96 Fortune di un ragazzo prodigio, ibid.
97 Fortune di un ragazzo prodigio, ibid.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p24 April 2018
a certain type of Italian contemporary music will be discussed shortly. Colourful showpieces, or noisy
Wagner extracts, or an even harder-hitting Richard Strauss tone poem, rounded off the evening.
Another curious feature is the sheer repetition of repertoire
involved. This, evidently, was not a problem for the pre-war EIAR
which, in the days before tape recording, did not usually – if ever –
preserve its broadcast concerts, so would have no preclusion
against broadcasting the same piece again, under the same
conductor.
Post-war, Ferrero’s name appears less often in the Radio Corriere.
He was still in demand in concert seasons elsewhere – in 1946 he
took the Santa Cecilia Orchestra on tour throughout northern and
central Italy, for example. There are several reasons why he may
have become less useful to RAI than he was to EIAR. One of these
regards his attachment to a type of Italian music which was
disappearing from their programmes as they sought to catch up
with Schoenberg, Bartók and the new Darmstadt School, and to
give free rein to a new generation of Italian dodecaphonic
composers. Ferrero’s last Santa Cecilia concert98 included one of
his pre-war favourites, Pizzini’s Strapaese. This implies that his
commitment to this repertoire remained, though the piece was
actually programmed at the request of the Santa Cecilia
authorities themselves99. Be that as it may, Pizzini’s Strapaese was
clearly no longer what a post-war radio station meant by modern
music.
Another reason for Ferrero’s diminished radio presence may have been his wish to repeat certain pieces
again and again. By now, RAI was regularly taping its concerts, which were not necessarily broadcast live.
Unlike, say, the BBC, it had full rights over its recordings so it could, and did, repeat them often. There was
no longer any reason, therefore, to pay Ferrero and one its orchestras to perform Boléro or Falla dances yet
again when it already had recordings of him doing them.
Ferrero, Homocord, Parlophone, Parlophon and Cetra
Records had been made in Italy since 1895, when a Neapolitan song was set down by International
Zonophone. Various Italian companies followed, notably FONIT (Fonodisco Italiano Trevisan Milano),
created in 1911. They dealt in popular repertoire, however. As far as more serious music was concerned,
the Gramophone Company, later His Master’s Voice, and Columbia were soon busy. A native Italian
company with a substantial production of classical music, orchestral and instrumental as well as operatic,
did not appear until the formation of CETRA in 1933. As a subsidiary of EIAR, it served as a shop window for
the newly formed EIAR Symphony Orchestra, and also provided EIAR with a repertoire of “own recordings”
useful for broadcasting purposes.
Cetra was nevertheless anticipated by a brief initiative based in Milan. Dischi Homocord were produced by
Fonocastiglia, a manufacturer of recording equipment. The name is first found in an advertisement placed
in the Radio Corriere by Fonocastiglia in 1929, but it was not until 1931 that a full-page impressive publicity
spread100 announced something like a real catalogue. Included in this first batch was a coupling of the
98 20 January 1954
99 Letter to Ferrero from Alessandro Bustini (1876-1970), President of Santa Cecilia from 1952 to 1964, dated 25
November 1953, conserved in the Santa Cecilia archives.
100 Radio Corriere 1931 no. 8, p. 6
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p25 April 2018
Intermezzo from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut with
the Overture to Mascagni’s I Rantzau (P 12016).
The orchestra, conducted by Willy Ferrero, was
described on this advertisement as “the 100
professors of La Scala comprising the Orchestra
Italiana Homocord”. Elsewhere it has been called
the Grande Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano. Later
that same year101, an article discussed the new
company, which had in the meantime issued,
much more ambitiously, Richard Strauss’s Till
Eulenspiegel, on four sides, with Ferrero again in
charge (F-12023/24). No further mention of
Homocord is to be found in the Radio Corriere
and Ferrero made no other recordings for it.
In the opening solo string section of the Puccini
Intermezzo, the “professors” of La Scala are
lavish with their portamento, but when the full
strings enter, Ferrero has them play pretty
cleanly. It is mostly very beautiful but, like many
other conductors, Ferrero gets hysterical
towards the climax, which is rushed to my ears.
Till Eulenspiegel is given a vividly characterized,
racy but not hectic account. Ferrero is fairly free
but never lets the individual moments pull the
music out of shape. There is some pretty good
playing, too. I have not heard the Mascagni
piece.
In 1933 Cetra advertised for the first time102
.
Cetra is the Italian name for the musical
instrument known in English as the cithara, but
it was also an acronym for Compagnia per
edizioni, teatro, registrazioni ed affini. In this
first advertisement it announced itself as
“dealer and manufacturer for Italy of Parlophon
Records” and presented “the new EIARRadiomarelli orchestral series”. Parlophon
remained autonomous in Italy even after the
company had been taken over by Columbia in
the UK and anglicized as Parlophone.
Parlophone and Parlophon remained related
and British Parlophone issued a substantial
group of EIAR Symphony Orchestra recordings
around 1938, six of them conducted by Ferrero.
101 Radio Corriere 1931 no. 36, p. 6
102 Radio Corriere 1933 no. 33, p. 8
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p26 April 2018
Recordings with the EIAR orchestra, attempted chronology
In the absence of exact recording dates – some but not all can be found in Gray’s catalogue103 – I have
attempted to reconstruct a chronology by collating the Radio Corriere advertisements with the Gray
entries. Recording dates are from Gray when given. Some recordings advertised are not listed in Gray, while
Gray lists others that do not appear in the advertisements. In addition, two short pieces issued by British
Parlophone around 1938 were not advertised by Cetra and are not listed in Gray. Where two numbers are
given, the first is from the Radio Corriere advertisement, the second is from Gray. I have added a few
remarks about the recordings I have been able to hear.
Advertised in Radio Corriere in 1933104
P 56543 RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: The Flight of the Bumble-bee (2.6.1931)
MUSSORGSKY: Khovanschina – Act IV Prelude (2.6.1931)
P 56544 MARTUCCI: Notturno (2-3.6.1931)
B x 27820 SIBELIUS: Valse triste
The Rimsky-Korsakov presents a brilliantly articulated, angry swarm of hornets, showing that the EIAR
orchestra was quite something in those days. The Mussorgsky is long-drawn, darkly passionate with the
underlying bass motif well present. Interestingly, there is less swooning portamento than in some later
versions. In the Martucci, Ferrero pulls out all the romantic stops in a performance more luscious and sultry
than any I know. The Sibelius is quite extraordinary in its alternation of extreme dolefulness with manic,
whirling intensity. Something of the kind – but not to such an extreme – was done by De Sabata in his 1946
LPO recording. Was De Sabata influenced by Ferrero? Or was Ferrero influenced by a younger De Sabata
who went to greater extremes than in later life? Interestingly, while Ferrero is sparing of portamento, he
uses one very evident portamento in exactly the same place as De Sabata.
Listed in Gray with dates, not advertised in Radio Corriere
T 17004 HANDEL: Solomon - Prelude in B flat (3.8.1938)
SCARLATTI, D: Burlesca (3.8.1938)105
BB 25046 RESPIGHI: Feste romane - L'Ottobrata (23.8.1938)
The Handel, known in English-speaking countries as the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, goes at an infectious
dance tempo with gorgeously clucking oboes and some steep dynamic shading. There is marvellous verve
here. The Musica Classica set included a performance of Respighi’s “Ottobrata” which is claimed to be a live
recording from 3 December 1937. While it is true that Ferrero conducted this piece in Turin on that date,
the recording shows no evidence of an audience present and I suspect it is really the Cetra recording. More
importantly, the first part of the piece is absolutely brilliant with almost Stravinskian rhythmic drive, while
the serenade is finely expressive though still maintaining a tight profile.
Issued by British Parlophone c.1938106
R 2689 SCHUBERT orch. ZANDONAI: Moment Musical op. 94/3
SCHUMANN orch. ZANDONAI: Träumerei op.15/7
E 11398 BACH orch. PICK-MANGIAGALLI: Prelude in d from BWV 539
BACH orch. PICK-MANGIAGALLI: Prelude in E from BWV 1006
103 Viewable at The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) l
104 See note 57
105 A note to a broadcast of this piece in Radio Corriere 1939 no. 47, p. 5 does not provide full identification, but tells
us that the title “Burlesca” derives from Hans von Bülow and that the transcription for strings and wind was by Camillo
De Nardis.
106 Parlophone also issued the Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumble-Bee and Mussorgsky Khovanschina Prelude from
1933. I have suggested a date of 1938 because the numbers are close to those of recordings by Eileen Joyce known to
have been made in 1938.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p27 April 2018
The Schubert has wonderful delicacy and grace. It is caressed without disturbing the gently lolloping
accompaniment. Not many performances on the piano are as good as this. I’m not sure if the Träumerei
arrangement is so successful, perhaps because the music itself is less amenable to transportation.
Schumann’s inwardness is nevertheless conveyed with tender phrasing and no lugubrious exaggeration.
String portamentos are incredibly few for the date. The first of the Bach transcriptions is gravely drawn, the
second sizzlingly vital with much dynamic shading. This latter was also used as a display piece by Boult and
the BBC SO as a filler to their 1933 version of Bach’s Third Suite. Boult is faster still, even pell-mell, and is
impatient with the rhetoric at the end. I find more real Bach in Ferrero.
Advertised in Radio Corriere in 1940107
CC 2191/BB 25043 FALLA: La Vida breve – Interlude and Dance
CC 2195-6/BB 25080-1 RESPIGHI: Gli uccelli
CC 2064/BB 25042 BACH arr. PICK-MANGIAGALLI: 2 Preludes (issued by Parlophone c.1938, see
above)
After a somewhat raucous beginning, the Falla Interlude turns into a very finely etched account, rich in
latent, brooding passion. The Musica Classica set has what is claimed as a live performance of the Dance
from 23 June 1952 by the Santa Cecilia Orchestra. It sounds like a pre-war studio recording on shellac to my
ears and I have had confirmation that it is actually the Cetra recording listed here. It has plenty of the right
verve.
Gli uccelli is quite wonderfully done. The opening strides in firmly without being pompous, the vivacious
sections are fleet and airborne, while the slower movements are expressive without sentimental lushness.
The EIAR orchestra proves once more that it was a very fine band in those days.
Advertised in Radio Corriere in 1941108
CC 2246/BB 25023 FALLA: El Sombrero – Miller’s Dance, Miller’s Wife’s Dance
CC 2247/BB 25024 TURINA: Oracion del Torero
CC 2248/BB 25085 MASETTI: Il gioco del cucù
PIZZINI: Impressioni del vero – Strapaese
CC 2217-8/BB 25047-8 VIVALDI109: Concerto in A RV 552 (transcribed by B. Molinari), with A.
Gramegna, E. Giaccone (violins) (25.5.1940)
VIVALDI: Concerto op. 8/4 “Winter” – 2nd movement), A. Gramegna (violin)
CC 2215/BB 25083 PIZZETTI: La Pisanella – Sul molo del porto di Famagosta, La danza sparviero
CC 2203 PANNAIN: Fontane d’oltre mare
FALLA: La Vida Breve - Dance
BB 25030 LIADOV: Kikimora (25.5.1940)
The Liadov is another Musica Classica mystery. Their version is claimed as a live performance from 27
December 1937 and Ferrero conducted the work in a concert on that date. My ears tell me the same story
as in the Respighi Ottobrata and the Falla Vida Breve dance, and I believe it is the Cetra recording. Ferrero
shows himself again a vivid colourist and story-teller. He distils a suitably sinister atmosphere at the
beginning and crackling – but still sinister – vitality from the final section. The Falla Sombrero pieces appear
on the Musica Classica set in performances stated to be from a live broadcast of 25 November 1953. This
time, their dating deserves the benefit of the doubt and I will discuss them under post-war recordings.
Unfortunately, I have not heard anything else from this batch, which includes some interesting repertoire.
107 Radio Corriere 1940 no. 27, p. 2 and no. 47, p. 17
108 Radio Corriere 1941, no. 43, p. 7 and no. 44, p. 6
109 Identification of the concerto, transcription and soloists from Gianluca Tarquinio, La diffusione dell’opera di Antonio
Vivaldi attraverso le fonti sonore: la discografia a 78 giri: zo_2010/26-Tarquinio.pdf. Tarquinio gives the date as 1942.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p28 April 2018
Advertised in Radio Corriere in 1942
CB 2008-9/BB 25019-20 RAVEL: Bolero
CB 20004/BB 25016 FALLA: El Amor Brujo – Pantomime, Ritual Fire Dance
CB 20002/ BB 25014 DEBUSSY: Nocturnes – Fêtes (11.2.1942)
CB 20003 STRAUSS, J: Waltzes (arr. Ferrero)
BB 25095 MARTUCCI: Novelletta, op. 82 (25 & 28.5.1942)110
As with the Sombrero excerpts, I will suppose the Musica Classica versions of the Falla to be from a 1954
broadcast, as claimed. Their Debussy, though, I think must be the Cetra recording, for all the same reasons
as before. It is very fast, a brilliant, euphoric performance with coursing vitality. The ending is properly
atmospheric.
Listed in Gray with dates, not advertised in Radio Corriere
BB 25137-41 RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Scheherazade (10, 11, 12 & 17.5.1943)
This Scheherazade was set down in three days shortly after a performance the orchestra gave at the Teatro
La Fenice of Venice. More than the postwar Brahms 4, it shows that Ferrero’s approach at its freest could
nevertheless keep in sight the overall shape of what is virtually a big romantic symphony. Some parts go
faster than I have ever heard, some slower, yet Ferrero switches from one to another with complete ease.
Only the love theme in the third movement is slow enough to risk stickiness, though the unanimously
executed rubato keeps it afloat. The finale is unusually slow, but very clear and vital. The orchestra plays
very well and the violin soloist, Armando Gramegna111, is a fine player.
So, 1943 recording quality apart, one of the best Scheherazades? Unfortunately, it can only be taken as
evidence that Ferrero could have given us one of the best Scheherazades. A timing of just over 38 minutes
will set various alarm bells ringing – 43-45 is more normal. The first two movements are complete, but a
substantial section is omitted from both the other two –
enough to have required another full 78 side in each case.
This is a work that properly required twelve sides but, as the
record numbers above show, it was allowed only ten. We will
charitably suppose that Ferrero did not chop the work down
in concert112 – evidently wartime conditions obliged Cetra to
impose a limit of five discs.
Ferrero and contemporary composers
Ferrero conducted a wide range of music by contemporary
composers – of a certain kind. From the broadcast concerts in
Appendix 1, and from the Santa Cecilia concerts listed in
Appendix 4, the names emerge in his pre-war concerts of
Enrico Cagna (?-?), Pietro Calabrini (1897-?), Ezio Carabelli
(1891-1964), Valentino Caracciolo (1908-1989), Riccardo
Castagnone (1906-1983), Pietro Ferro (1903-1960), Orazio
Fiume (1908-1976), Sandro Fuga (1906-1994), Alberto Gasco
(1879-1938), Stefano Gibilaro (?-?
113), Roberto Imperatori (?-
110 Gray lists another recording of this piece, also with the EIAR orchestra, on the Tono label, dated 10.12.1946 (X
25095). The EIAR had been transformed into the RAI in 1944, so the date or the orchestra must be mistaken.
Presumably this is a reissue of the 1942 recording.
111 Identified in Radio Corriere 1945 no.3 pp. 2 and 18
112 The listing for the live broadcast in the Radio Corriere (1943 no. 18) supports this. The concert began at 20.45. The
first part consisted of a Vivaldi concerto and Scheherazade, with the interval to take place at approximately 21.45. This
is compatible with an uncut Scheherazade.
113 Gibilaro was 23 when Ferrero performed his Largo, cf. Il Giornale d’Italia, 28 January 1930.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p29 April 2018
?
114), Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (1909-1987), Achille Longo (1900-1954), Luigi Malatesta (?-?), Enzo
Masetti (1893-1961), Giulio Pachetti (?-?), Mario Peragallo (1910-1996), Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2003),
Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968), Carlo Alberto Pizzini (1905-1981), Renzo Rossellini (1908-1982), Giuseppe
Savagnone (1902-1984), Giulio Cesare Sonzogno (1906-1976), Guido Spagnoli (1896-1963), Gianluca Tocchi
(1901-1992), Vincenzo Tommasini (1878-1950), Antonio Veretti (1900-1978) and Riccardo Zandonai (1883-
1944), After the war, he conducted a work by Casella and made a notable attempt to resuscitate the
reputation of the tragically short-lived Donato Di Veroli – his Moscow performance of the Tema e Variazioni
is discussed below. All these pre-war composers, with the obvious exceptions of Petrassi, Pizzetti and the
older figures of Tommasini and Zandonai, have fallen into a black hole so deep that it is difficult even to
know what sort of music they wrote. Comments scattered here and there in the Radio Corriere suggest
they were mostly of a romantic or impressionist cast. Many of them were pupils of either Alfano or
Respighi. Post-war, their music was held to be no longer relevant and only Pizzetti has remained with us, up
to a point. This obviously says nothing about whether their music was good or not, of its kind. As discussed
previously, Ferrero’s last Santa Cecilia programme115 included Pizzini’s Strapaese. The dedication above was
placed on the concert programme of 14 January 1940, at which Ferrero had conducted Pizzini’s Poema dei
Dolomiti.
As we have seen, Strapaese was given in response to a letter from Alessandro Bustini, President of Santa
Cecilia, but Pizzini himself may have been behind the request. He was, after all, a member of the Academy
and, pre-war, had been prominent in their concert programmes, yet nothing of his had been played there
since Jean Martinon conducted Al Piemonte in 1949. Pizzini could be forgiven if he felt a little peevish,
though worse was to come. His name did not appear in a Santa Cecilia season again until 1962, when
Massimo Freccia revived Strapaese – all five-and-three-quarter minutes of it. Pizzini maintained a tenous
presence over the following decade, but no work of his has been heard at a Santa Cecilia concert since
1972. As the dates above show, it was the fate of many of the modern Italian composers championed by
Ferrero in the Thirties and early Forties to survive into the post-war epoch, often by several decades, only
to see their work fall into total oblivion. The British are wont to lament the neglect of their native
composers, but in truth, British composers appear almost privileged compared with all but a handful of
Italian opera composers. There was no Italian equivalent to Richard Itter’s Lyrita Recorded Edition and
other initiatives in the LP era, nor has there been an Italian Music Society ready to proclaim the genius of
whoever possessed the virtue of being thoroughly forgotten, or never performed at all. In a few cases,
proud families may be clinging to their great-grandfathers’ manuscripts against better days, a few even
maintain websites116, but, for the most part, any conductor curious to investigate this music would quite
likely find neither scores nor parts.
Petrassi is obviously a different case, since he became a leading post-war modernist. Fuga and Peragallo
also embraced a more modern idiom later, but it is unlikely that the early pieces conducted by Ferrero
would have caused much offence to conservative ears. Gianluca Tocchi’s Record, though, was extreme
enough to divide the public between applauders and hissers117. Further evidence that Ferrero was willing to
embrace more extreme forms of contemporary music comes from his friendship, begun in the 1930s, with
Giacinto Scelsi, whose Rotativa he gave in Naples in 1937. Scelsi himself recalled the occasion:
Willy Ferrero performed my work in Naples … Things of every kind happened during the rehearsals,
and even during the performance! For example, the timpanist’s stick slipped from his hand, bounced
against the skin of the instrument, took splendid flight and ended up in the audience, amid great
laughter118
.
114 “A young Milanese composer who died just after the armistice from a cruel disease contracted in the trenches” –
S.M. in “Il Popolo di Roma”, 6 June 1929. “Il Messaggero” of the same date tells us that he died aged 20.
115 20 January 1954
116 In this, at least, Pizzini is fortunate: Alberto Savinio, review reproduced in the booklet to the Musica Classica issue.
118 See f
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Scelsi had a very high opinion of Ferrero as artist and conductor, as will be seen later.
Of the non-Italian composers, we should remember that Ravel was still a living composer in the first decade
of Ferrero’s mature career, Falla and Richard Strauss for a few years more, while Sibelius outlived him.
Selvini insists on Ferrero’s work for contemporary composers, citing Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Honegger.
These names do not appear on Ferrero’s broadcast programmes, and only sporadically in those of Santa
Cecilia. In any case, a conductor wishing to be seen as a contemporary music specialist in the early 1930s
would have needed to choose works by Stravinsky more recent, or more extreme, than the Firebird Suite or
the First Suite for Orchestra, and something more ambitious by Prokofiev than the two pieces from The
Love of Three Oranges. Rather, the picture emerges of a conductor who played Weiner but not Bartók or
even Kodály, who played Veprik, Khrennikov119, Khachaturian and the more conservative Shostakovich of
the Leningrad Symphony, but did not play any more extreme works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev or
Shostakovich, who once ventured into Roussel and Schmitt, but not Les Six, and who played Gershwin and
– at least once – Morton Gould, but did not play Ives or Copland. A possibly more audacious choice was the
Sinfonia Technica by the Hungarian Eugène Zador (1894-1977), of which he played a single movement with
the Santa Cecilia orchestra in 1938. One contemporary work he championed post-war was Jani Christou’s
Phoenix Music, which he gave at the Maggio Fiorentino in 1950 and repeated in Moscow120
.
It should be pointed out that Italian contemporaries of the kind favoured by Ferrero did not enjoy
automatic critical approval even in their day. Here is a fairly vicious piece, chosen more or less at random:
Guido Spagnoli’s Due Intermezzi say nothing beautiful and nothing new: clumsy of construction,
rhetorical in expression, the most typical bad bourgeois taste can be heard flowing through them. Nor
does the grey, apathetic instrumentation and the general flatness of the rhythms add any merit to the
composition121
.
Ferrero’s very timid attempts to investigate a little English music met with notable vituperation. Elgar’s
orchestration of Bach’s C minor Fantasia and Fugue perhaps hardly needed to cross the channel but, for the
very fact that the likes of Respighi and Pick-Mangiagalli were prone to similar operations at home, it
scarcely deserved this:
We trust that the passing of years will refine Ferrero’s artistic taste, enabling him to understand what
stupid barbarianisms have been perpetrated by Maestro Elgar to the detriment of Giovanni
Sebastiano [sic] Bach, barbarianisms, alas, which we would not wish to witness either today or
tomorrow122
.
A particularly trenchant arbiter of public taste was one S. M. He, too, thought little of Spagnoli’s I due
pastori, which did not “deserve the trouble Ferrero took to make them shine and achieve for them a tepid
and deferential success” and, along the way, he dismissed Sibelius’s Finlandia as a “fatuous expression of
puffed-up, vainglorious eloquence”123. Having duly castigated the “repellent sonorous excesses” of Elgar’s
Bach transcription, he spoke of three movements, Mars, Venus and Jupiter, from Holst’s Planets as if the
composer had done him a personal injury:
119 Apart from the performances in Turin and Rome listed in Appendixes 1 and 4, Ferrero also conducted Khrennikov’s
First Symphony in Florence, cf. Il Bargello, 21 January 1940.
120 Nicolas Slonimsky, New Music in Greece, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1. This work does not appear in the
Moscow concert list provided by Alexander Negrin, however – see Appendix 6.
121 Lavoro Fascista, 11 June 1929.
122 G. Rossi-Doria, L’Italia Letteraria, 9 February 1920.
123 S.M. Popoli di Roma, 9 June 1929
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Holst … is an impressionist in his own way. With a foot in every stirrup, he leaps onto the saddle of
one horse after another without concern for the age of the ride. He passes from the worst Strauss to
the worst Stravinsky and does not disdain, when necessary, even our own Puccini, foraging, naturally,
among the less worthy things of the lamented maestro from Lucca, such as Tosca. .. I do not know
and I cannot fathom why Ferrero chose to favour this pretentious, inconclusive music. He is one of the
few conductors able to understand and interpret with real genial versatility the works of our own
major composers of all times and of all schools and trends. He will do well to avoid certain sudden
infatuations that cannot add minimally to his fame124
.
S.M. was not alone in his distaste for Holst but, in fairness, it should be said that other reports were more
sympathetic125, one of them noting that the music sounded more attractive under Ferrero than on its sole
previous outing in Italy, when Albert Coates had conducted the same orchestra. Guido Spagnoli, too, could
take comfort in reading the other papers, several of which noted that his music was warmly applauded.
The three broadcast programmes Ferrero conducted in 1942-3 of concert extracts from film scores, and his
post-war interest in Gershwin, imply, not so much conservatism in the academic sense, as a musical
philosophy that saw salvation from the audience-unfriendliness and disintegration of most contemporary
schools in a fusion of “popular” and concert music that would recreate a public for contemporary
composers. Given his strong attraction towards communism and the Soviet Union, this philosophy would
be consistent with that of Khrennikov and those of his ilk. But, in the absence of specific pronouncements
by Ferrero himself, or any knowledge of his own few concert works, this must remain speculation.
Ferrero, film music and Luchino Visconti
The three film music programmes mentioned above predated the release of the first film in which,
according to standard sources of information, Ferrero had a hand. This was Harlem (1943), directed by
Carmen Gallone. The music was described as “coordinated and directed by Willy Ferrero, with the
collaboration of Enrico Cagna Cabiati”. It is not clear who composed the music, assuming that the
soundtrack contains original music at all. The fact that Ferrero had included in a concert programme a
Valzer umoresca by Enrico Cagna – whose name sometimes appears with Cabiati added, sometimes not –
reinforces the impression that Ferrero was attracted to the idea of a cross-fertilization between “popular”
and classical camps.
In reality, Ferrero may have been drawn into the world of film-making earlier than this. He conducted the
music for Mario Costa’s Fontane di Roma (1938), for example. This film, as I understand it, is a
straightforward visual interpretation of Respighi’s tone-poem and would therefore enable us to hear
Ferrero conducting a work that he regularly performed, but did not record. It is not unlikely that Ferrero
conducted quite a few more films, and even composed the music for them, for which the music is not
credited.
Why do this? Why forgo the honour? The answer to the first question is, quite simply, money. Ever since
Ferrero had returned from Vienna and set up as a professional conductor, money had been a pressing
matter, and from the 1940s, it became even more so. What did he do with all the money he got for
conducting leading orchestras, some people will be wondering? This brings us to a general misconception
that continues to this day. People who see concert artists in their evening dress – maybe their only one,
pressed and pressed again for as long as it will hold together – perceive a world of glamour. They assume a
“them and us” situation and, even on very provincial circuits, they vaguely suppose that the artists are
getting an almighty lot of money for what they are doing. This has been true in the past, as it is true in the
present, only for a very select few. If you study the biographies of the conductors prominent on the Italian
concert scene – with the EIAR, with the RAI, with the Santa Cecilia and so on – you will find that most of
them also taught in a conservatorio. This was probably not highly paid either, but it was a stable income
124 S.M. Il Popolo di Roma, 21 January 1931.
125 Cf. Meridiano, 20 January 1930, Il Tevere, 20 January 1930.
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they could supplement with their conducting engagements. Outside the RAI, there were not many posts as
permanent conductor of a symphony orchestra. Inside or outside the RAI, none came Ferrero’s way. Opera
houses would have had more stable jobs to offer. As far as is known, Ferrero never conducted opera in his
life126. I have found no reference to him teaching either. One supposes he decided he was not that kind of
person. The fact that he obtained his diploma in Vienna might, moreover, have been a prohibitive
bureaucratic stumbling-block. Only quite recently was Italy compelled, under EU regulations, to accept
other European degrees and diplomas as equivalent to its own. Ferrero would quite simply not have been
qualified to take a stable post in an Italian conservatorio.
Another source of income was films. A list of Italian conductors who directed the music for films, and in
some cases composed it, involves most of the prominent conducting names of the day. Ferrero’s teenage
friend Previtali has 45 credits as conductor and four as composer. How much honour they saw in it was
another matter. I once had a conversation with the son of Alberto Paoletti, a once esteemed but now
forgotten opera conductor who averaged a film a year over twenty years, and he assured me his father
regarded the activity as a pure money-spinner, attaching no artistic importance to it. This does not prove
that Ferrero saw it this way, but it provides a possible reason why the composer/conductor of a film score
might be more happy than not to pocket the money and remain anonymous.
Further opportunities for uncredited film work came when, after the fall of Fascism, the Italian film industry
got busy dubbing foreign films. I owe, again, to Paoletti’s son the information that foreign movies, at any
rate low budget ones, would arrive for dubbing with words and music on a single soundtrack, so once the
foreign words had been removed for dubbing by Italian actors, the music had gone too. Rather than record
the original score all over again, it was usually cheaper to get some low-paid local hack to provide a new
score, or else just use bits and pieces by classical composers. I have actually seen an Italian release of 49th
Parallel with a wretched score that was certainly not by Vaughan Williams, and another film – I forget
which – accompanied throughout by scraps of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, which had not yet been
written when the film was released in its original language. This does not prove that Ferrero conducted or
composed any of these rehashed film scores, but in most cases we do not know who did, and it meant
money for someone.
According to standard reference books, nonetheless, Ferrero has been credited with providing original
music for just one film. This is La terra trema, directed by Luchino Visconti and issued in 1948. The full
description at the beginning of the film is “Musical comment coordinated by L. Visconti and W. Ferrero,
conducted by Willy Ferrero, assistant Maestro Micucci”. The film itself is well known and has been widely
commented, so I will limit myself to the musical aspect.
The most striking thing, in truth, is the extent to which Visconti has the action underpinned by no music at
all. Various tolling church bells, snatches of presumably Sicilian popular song sung by the non-professional
actors, a wheezy clarinet attempting Bellini, again played by one of the actors, and a mouth organ during
the tavern scenes are presumably the parts coordinated by Visconti himself. After a brief opening
orchestral flourish, we are more than fifty minutes into the film before some actual composed music is
heard. It is a tiny fragment, over almost before it has begun. That is the pattern thereafter. There are long
sequences with no music – often with visuals that, by stock Hollywood or Pinewood standards seemingly
cry out for luscious musical accompaniment. Then another snippet, usually used to underpin the hero
126 All sources but one agree that Ferrero never conducted opera. However, the conductor and composer Pier Luigi
Urbini (1929-2003), speaking on the film Io ricordo Willy Ferrero by Paolo Isaia, recalls playing in an opera under
Ferrero, he thought it was La Traviata, at an open-air theatre in Cagliari – “with excellent singers and he was
bravissimo”. Urbini performed as a solo violinist from 1949 until he took up conducting so was presumably gaining
orchestra experience while still a student around 1946-9. The doubt remains that Urbini was confusing his memories
with another conductor, but it is just possible that Ferrero decided to give opera a try, choosing a location where he
would not be under close scrutiny. A snippet from Isaia’s film can be seen on YouTube.
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’Ntoni’s developing states of mind. Only one musical sequence extends to a minute or so. Placed end to
end, I doubt if there are five minutes of music in the entire film.
This, clearly, is how Visconti wanted it. For anyone hoping to get a glimpse of Ferrero as a composer, it is all
the more frustrating in that what we hear is actually rather interesting. Ferrero proves a master of
bittersweet, attenuated atmospheres, with sensitive use of solo instruments, attractive melodic lines
underpinned by piquant countermelodies and almost Mahlerian harmonies. It would have been nice to add
a section to this article on Ferrero the composer – his compositions include a symphonic poem Il mistero
dell’aurora, a double fugue for large orchestra and chamber music. Since his fragmentary contribution to
this film is all I have to go on, I can only say that the style sounds promising, but I have no idea of his ability
to extend and develop it beyond a single paragraph.
As fully documented conductor of other composers’ scores, Ferrero contributed to nine films from 1947 to
1951:
Natale al Campo 119 (1947), directed by Pietro Francisci, music by Angelo Francesco Lavignino
Miracolo a San Gennaro (1948), short documentary directed by Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras,
music by Roman Vlad
Romantici a Venezia (1948), short documentary directed by Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras, music
by Roman Vlad
Isole nella laguna (1948), short documentary directed by Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras, music by
Roman Vlad
Ladri di biciclette (1948), directed by Vittorio De Sica, music by Alessandro Cicognini
Fabiola (1949), directed by Alessandro Blasetti, music by Enzo Masetti
Il cielo è rosso (1950), directed by Claudio Gora, music by Valentino Bucchi
La strada buia (1950), directed by Marino Girolami (English language version Fugitive Lady directed
by Sydney Salkow), music by Victor Diamante
Othello (1951), directed by Orson Welles, music by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Alberto
Barberis127
I have not attempted to follow all these up. Ladri di biciclette is, of course, a classic of Italian post-war film.
Ferrero also had a few theatrical adventures with Luchino Visconti. In June 1949, he conducted the music
for a production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida in the Giardini di Boboli in Florence. One hopes it
was sufficiently successful to make amends for a debacle earlier that same year. On 9 April 1949, at the
Teatro Quirino of Rome, the doors had opened on Vittorio Alfieri’s L’Oreste, lavishly staged to celebrate the
bicentenary of the dramatist’s birth and also as a vehicle for Vittorio Gassman. It failed completely to
attract the public. To the daily cost – for fifteen days – of 150,000 liras due to the company were added a
further quarter of a million due to Willy Ferrero and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, called upon to fill the
“thousands of pauses” inserted in the play128, and over two million to transform the stage. Costumes for
the leading actors, replete with precious silks and gold, cost upwards of half a million each. By the second
evening, takings were below 300,000 liras. By the fifth, the paying public was down to double figures.
Visconti’s loss was reckoned above 15 million liras129, though it was partly offset by a state subvention of 12
million130
.
127 Some reference books credit the conducting to Franco Ferrara. The closing credits clearly name Willy Ferrero. This
film exists in two versions, however. The original, in which the music was conducted by Ferrero, was thought lost and
a new soundtrack was recorded. To the chagrin of Livigno’s widow, the music was reconstructed from a copy of the
first version instead of using Livigno’s own score, which she possessed and would have lent if she had been asked.
Later, the original version came to light and was re-released.
128 From another source we learn that the music was all adapted from Beethoven.
129 The zeros on the old Italian lira were confusing. After the Bretton Woods agreement of 21 September 1949, 1 US
dollar equalled 625 liras. So Visconti’s estimated loss amounted to 24,000 US dollars. At this same date – the pound
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The post-war years
The conductor Massimo Pradella believed that Ferrero’s conducting appearances had been interrupted
during the war. He attributed this to Ferrero’s double Italian-American citizenship131. Independently, Sorel
also stated to Negrin his belief that this was so. Appendixes 3 and 4 show that there were no Santa Cecilia
concerts in 1943 and no EIAR appearances in 1944, but hardly testify to a complete hiatus. It is not difficult
to imagine the authorities taking a dim view of the American
passport. In order to assess any impact it had on Ferrero’s wartime
career, though, it would be necessary to have more information on
his appearances, if any, with other Italian orchestras in these years.
It would also be necessary to measure his Santa Cecilia and EIAR
engagements against the level of activity these bodies were
maintaining during the difficult war years.
As has already been said, Ferrero’s broadcast appearances certainly
became less frequent after the war. His last appearance at La Scala
was in 1945. His tour of northern and central Italy with the Santa
Cecilia Orchestra in 1946 was described as “triumphal” by Augusto
Frattani, though according to Selvini the press comments were
disappointing. Nevertheless, he continued to conduct this orchestra
and further engagements were already on the concert calendar at
the time of his death on 23 March 1954.
While for Massimo Freccia, Ferrero’s post-war public was merely a
“nostalgic following”132, strong evidence that Ferrero was not a
spent force comes from a Gershwin concert he gave with the Santa
Cecilia Orchestra and the pianist Armando Trovajoli on 13 August
1953. This lucky survival, issued on CD in 2011 (RaiTrade RTP 0253),
offers fair sound for the date. Trovajoli (1917-2013) was a major
figure in Italian light music and a prolific composer of film scores.
His second wife was the actress Anna Maria Pierangeli – “Pier
Angeli” to English-speaking film goers and unforgettable in The
Angry Silence. They had a son but their marriage failed after only a
few years. Trovajoli proves to be a brilliant pianist, with a dry,
slightly brittle but not hard touch and fabulous fingerwork. There is
some notable trumpeting and the clarinet launches Rhapsody in Blue splendidly. The ease with which
Ferrero and the orchestra swing Gershwin becomes more understandable when we remember that Ferrero
conducted many film scores and the individual members of the orchestra doubtless frequently moonlighted
in the Rome film studios. The conductor Massimo Pradella recalled that, after leaving the Santa Cecilia
Orchestra, “I was part of an extraordinary orchestra made up entirely of soloists (some of them famous)
which did work for films and a few special events”133. Ferrero was among those who conducted this
orchestra and, as will be related below, it was through this ensemble that Pradella came to know Ferrero
and made his own first steps as a conductor.
The Piano Concerto has dash and passion without either overdoing it or trying to make it classical. The
finale is whisked off with an insouciance that matches Gershwin’s own truncated version – and is much
had been devalued on 19 September 1949 – this was equivalent to 8,571 pounds sterling. These figures would have
been different in April 1949, but I have not found data with which to make a proper calculation.
130 Reported in ht/
131 Letter from Massimo Pradella to Alexander Negrin.
132 Freccia, ibid.
133 Pradella, ibid. Pradella was a violinist in the Santa Cecilia Orchestra from 1945 to 1950.
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better pianistically. Funnily enough, the two best versions of this concerto might both be by Italian pianists
– the other being Sergio Fiorentino, backed by the London Philharmonic under one-time jazz violinist Hugo
Rignold. The slow movement opens with mournful passion under Ferrero. Under Rignold it swings more
poetically, but swing it does – Catfish Row basking under the noontide sun.
On their own, Ferrero and the orchestra turn in a gorgeous American in Paris – hear them zip into the
beginning. Yet there is something more Roman than Parisian about it, including the impatient taxi-horns. I
seemed immediately to see Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn scooting around the Coliseum in Roman
Holidays.
The Rhapsody is dashingly fast at times – Trovajoli’s and Ferrero’s burnups make even Gershwin himself
and Paul Whiteman sound like old fuddy-duddies. It left me a little breathless. Yet where else, except from
Gershwin and Whiteman, will you hear the “big tune” forging ahead without a trace of sticky
sentimentality? Taken as a whole, this is one of the great Gershwin records.
The Musica Classica CD set managed to include a few
items from Ferrero’s post-war work for the RAI, all
with the Turin orchestra. I am not convinced, though,
by their claims, doubtless made in good faith, that
these are live performances. One, Ravel’s Bolero, was
issued officially on an Extended Play Cetra disc (EPO
0304) as a tribute to Ferrero after his death. The date
given is 24 September 1953. Also from this same date,
and included in the Musica Classica CDs, is the Second
Suite from Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloë”. The Radio
Corriere shows that these two pieces – just these, not
a whole concert – were broadcast on 24 November
1953, with no pretence that they were live. There is, in
fact no hint of an audience present during any of
these performances and they all finish with natural
reverberation and no applause.
The clarity of the dawn rustlings at the beginning of
the Ravel Daphnis Suite is remarkable, as is also the sense of line, given the age of the recording and a less
than first rate orchestra. However, Ferrero does not seem at his most inspired here and the great
crescendo is a touch laboured in its build up. Nor does the Pantomime entirely take wing and the Danse
générale again favours clarity over euphoric splurge – the secret of this music should surely be to obtain
both.
These same characteristics are more suited to Boléro. At 16:03, this is virtually identical in pacing to Ravel’s
own controversially slow performance. Just occasionally, the orchestra tries to move him on – the harp
does so near the beginning and so, collectively, does the whole orchestra towards the end, but Ferrero
manages to hold steady to impressive effect.
Cetra issued one further tribute to Ferrero, this time an LP (LPU0035). It contained five Falla dances,
Liadov’s Kikimora, Debussy’s Fêtes and Respighi’s L’Ottobrata. All these are included on the Musica Classica
set. I have already noted that the Dance from Falla’s La Vida Breve is not, as they claim, a live performance
by the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, but the pre-war EIAR version. I have also queried their dating of the Liadov,
Debussy and Respighi pieces and have discussed the performances above. I wondered about their other
Falla offerings – the Miller’s Dance and the Miller’s Wife’s Dance from El sombrero de tres picos and the
Ritual Fire Dance and Pantomime from El amor brujo, since Ferrero recorded all of these extracts pre-war
with the EIAR orchestra. But I will give these the benefit of the doubt. The Radio Corriere certainly shows
that, on 12 January 1954, a Falla programme was broadcast, consisting of these pieces and “Nights in the
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Gardens of Spain”, in which the pianist was Ermelinda Magnetti. Musica Classica, however, give the date as
25 November 1953. The 1954 broadcast was given at 22.15, so it was clearly not live. It appears, then, RAI
had Ferrero set down some repertoire in the studio on various dates for future broadcasting. He proves an
ideal conductor of this repertoire, combining taut rhythm with pliant, flexible phrasing and a steep dynamic
range suggesting suppressed violence. The Ritual Fire Dance makes its point without undue haste.
Also studio-made is the recording of Beethoven’s First Symphony, dated 25 September 1953, the day after
the Ravel pieces. The Radio Corriere search function shows that no performance of this symphony
conducted by Ferrero was broadcast post-war at all. Evidently, RAI recorded it, archived the tapes and then
never got round to broadcasting it. It therefore remained unheard until issued in the Musica Classica CDs.
This is all the more odd when the performance is a very good one, steering an unerring path between
Haydnesque buoyancy, Mozartian grace and Beethovenian drive. The second movement is slowish but
poised, the last two fast but not excessively so. Repeats are given in the outer movements. On this
showing, Ferrero was a vital and perceptive interpreter of the classical repertoire. The general transparency
of the textures lays bare an occasional raggedness, especially in the first movement, though in general the
orchestra plays finely.
If Ferrero was struggling to keep his head above water in the complicated Italian post-war musical scene,
he had a renewed warm welcome in Poland and the Soviet Union.
His return to Poland was, in the first instance, an unscripted affair. The story is told by Giuliano Pajetta, a
leading member of the Italian Communist Party and a Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, during a
parliamentary session commemorating Ferrero on 25 March 1954.
I wish to recall a gesture made by Willy Ferrero on the eve of the World Peace Council Congress,
which was to have been held in England. He was doubtful and undecided as to whether to take part in
an event of this kind. However, when he heard that the British government had forbidden the
congress and that it would be held in Warsaw, he resolved to attend, thereby expressing his protest
as a free man134
.
Ferrero’s presence made it possible for him to renew acquaintance with the Warsaw Philharmonic
Orchestra, which he had conducted several times before the war, in a concert held on 23 November 1950.
Or maybe a Warsaw Philharmonic date was dangled before him as an incentive to attend the Congress –
who can say now? Either way, he was invited back for further concerts on 8, 9 and 10 June 1951.
A word should be said about the British government’s “ban” on the Congress of the World Peace Council,
an organization whose laudable aims failed, at least in those years, to distinguish between peace and Pax
Sovietica. The Congress was to have been held in Sheffield. Technically, it was not banned, but the British
government of the day considered the movement, in the words of the Prime Minister, a “bogus forum of
peace with the real aim of sabotaging national defence” and clipped their wings by imposing a “reasonable
limit” on foreign delegates. Those not granted visas to attend included the President of the WPC, Frédéric
Joliot-Curie and, among musicians, Dimitri Shostakovich. One wonders whether Ferrero would have been
allowed to attend, but probably his American passport would have eased his entry. In total, the
“reasonable limit” reduced prospective attendees from two thousand to a mere five hundred, about half of
whom were British subjects anyway. Hence the move to a terrain more congenial to peace as the WPC
conceived it.
It should be noted that the British Prime Minister in question was not the “warmonger” and rabid antiCommunist Churchill, but Clement Attlee. Attlee’s Labour government was by now teetering towards its
134 Italian Parliamentary proceedings, 25 March 1954.
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last gasp. It had just been re-elected with a wafer-thin majority that made new elections inevitable within
the following year, so perhaps felt there was electoral advantage to be gained from a hard line.
Ferrero’s Russian concerts, from which the photograph below derives, are listed in Appendixes 5 and 6.
They were recorded and Melodiya later issued two LPs dedicated to “Willy Ferrero in Moscow”:
D-010601
MUSSORGSKY: Khovanschina – Act IV Interlude (27 May 1951)
LIADOV: Kikimora (7 March 1952)
STRAUSS, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils (24 May 1951)
MOZART: Symphony no. 34 – 1
st movement (7 March 1952)
ROSSINI: Il signor Bruschino – Overture (24 May 1951)
STRAUSS, J: Valzer-Fantasia (24 May 1951)
D-031685
BEETHOVEN: Coriolan (5 February 1952)
SIBELIUS: Valse triste (27 May 1951)
VERDI: I Vespri Siciliani . Overture (24 April 1951)
DEBUSSY: Fêtes (19 April 1951)*
STRAUSS, R: Don Juan (24 April 1951)
As can be seen from the concert list in Appendix 6, orchestral honours were divided between the USSR
Symphony Orchestra and the Large Symphony orchestra of the All-Union Committee of Radioinformation.
The items contained on the second of these LPs can currently be heard on Emilio Pessina’s YouTube
channel. This channel, which also contains the entire content of the Musica Classica CDs, has made
available the following live items with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra:
MARTUCCI: Novelletta (12 February 1952)
MUSSORGSKY: Khovanschina – Act IV Interlude (15 February 1952)
RAVEL: Boléro (17 May 1951)
STRAUSS, R: Till Eulenspiegel (15 February 1952)
WAGNER: Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey (13 May 1951)
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Much more recently, in 2011, some further
Moscow material was issued on SMCCD
0107. This is still available. The items are:
BRAHMS: Symphony no. 4 (27 May 1951)
MARTUCCI: Notturno (29 April 1951)
DI VEROLI, Donato: Tema e variazioni (27
April 1951)
The CD states that the USSR State
Symphony Orchestra plays throughout, but
the Martucci is actually played by the Large
Symphony orchestra of the All-Union
Committee of Radioinformation.
As can be seen from Appendixes 5 and 6, there were nine concerts in Leningrad (four programmes with
replicas) and seven in Moscow (all different programmes). Even allowing for some repetition of repertoire,
it looks as if other significant material could emerge, such as the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony from the
programme above.
The first of the Melodiya discs opens with an intimate,
delicately shaded version of the Khovanschina Interlude.
There is a feeling of repressed tension, interrupted only
by the harshly jangling bells.
In Kikimora, perhaps the very ease with which acres of
Russian gloom could be extracted from the Moscow
orchestra led Ferrero to over-egg the pudding in the
first part. As the music gains momentum, he assays
some wayward characterization similar to that of his
Leningrad Till – see below. But Liadov hasn’t the same
weight and substance as Richard Strauss and the simple
but vivid story-telling of the pre-war EIAR version seems
preferable. If you want to hear the fairy tale with a
dimension of psychological depth, you should hear Jonel
Perlea’s Vox version. This is followed by a suitably lurid
Dance of the Seven Veils, culminating in violent passion.
What a pity the LP contained only the first movement of the Mozart symphony. Clear, transparent textures
and elegant phrasing suggest at the outset that this will be pretty well ideal Mozart. Maybe it is –
depending on what you expect or allow in Mozart. After the festively joyful opening, the tempo slackens
and the second group goes at a considerably slower tempo. In itself, the phrasing is beautifully poised.
Later, in minor key episodes, the tempo slows yet further. Anyone hearing these single moments in
isolation would surely find this beautifully expressed Mozart. Here we are in territory similar to that
occupied by the Tibor Paul performances I have discussed in this series. Each theme has its own tempo and
the structure is shaped dramatically rather than according to symphonic logic. As with the Paul
performances, here is a rare example of how such an approach can be completely convincing. You are left
wondering if our ideas about classical interpretation need overhauling.
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After an uncertain beginning, Il signor Bruschino is
turned with a Mozartian grace that does not
preclude the necessary Rossinian cheekiness. The
recording is good by the standards of these Russian
retrievals.
More than a “Fantasy”, the Johann Strauss is a
switch of favourite tunes. It is presumably the same
selection as that recorded by Ferrero pre-war for
Cetra and announced as the work of Ferrero himself.
It will be a headache for those who, like me,
remember the tunes and the titles but cannot
remember which goes with which. Apart, obviously,
from The Blue Danube, which begins and ends the
selection, and Die Fledermaus which bounces in near
the end. A sequence like this might have been an
opportunity to pop in a few good tunes from the
little-known waltzes, but I do not think there was
anything here I did not know. Ferrero often obtains a remarkable lilting grace from his Russian players, but
at other times he lays on the schmaltz and the gags with a trowel.
The second Melodiya LP opens with a tense
and dramatic Coriolan, played with real
conviction. The tempo is well judged to allow
both fire and breadth. Just a few points
suggest an interpreter who had learnt his
trade between the wars. The second theme is
introduced by a notable rallentando, though
the tempo picks up when the theme enters.
This second theme is, however, introduced at
a slower tempo in the coda, which is given the
character of an epilogue, further winding
down in the last few bars.
Anyone who thought the pre-war EIAR Valse
triste exaggerated might prepare themselves
for it by listening to this, after which the EIAR
version will sound quite reasonable. Extremes
of dolefulness and extremes of whirling
intensity have transformed into extremes of tragedy and hysteria that the music can barely support.
The Verdi overture gets a tense, brilliant, passionate and brassy performance – the latter being the only
negative aspect. It lacks, perhaps, the sense of generosity, of humanity, that can be released from Verdi’s
melodies with a less uptight approach.
At 6:22 compared with 5:51, the Moscow Fêtes has notably more space that the EIAR version. It has a
wonderful clarity as well as greater poetry and no lack of verve. The cutting edge of the Moscow trumpets
only adds to the excitement.
Ferrero plunges into Don Juan like a man possessed – and carries the orchestra with him. This is a pretty
free performance with wild extremes. The lovemaking is as erotic as you are likely to hear, while the Don is
painted as a swashbuckling figure, aflame with fire and passion.
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Turning to the Leningrad performances, in the Martucci Novelletta Ferrero again plumbs unusual emotional
depths in this composer. After a saturated, decadent opening, he sets an unusually slow tempo, avoiding –
deliberately I suppose – the easy lolloping grace of most other interpreters. His tempo creates some
coordination problems with the oboe, who tries to move on to a more natural tempo – and indeed, Ferrero
allows the tempo to increase a little. He nevertheless extracts a degree of Mahlerian anguish from the
music that it does not normally appear to have – and the climax is capped by a trumpet such as only
Leningrad or Moscow could have provided. The recording by Francesco Mander and the Milan Angelicum
Orchestra presents the music as a string of painful yet interior, almost Proustian memories. Ultimately, I
prefer this, but Ferrero gives an interesting demonstration of how much raw emotion can be drawn from
Martucci.
The Leningrad performance of the Khovanschina Interlude is by no means a rerun of the Moscow one – or
of the pre-war EIAR one for that matter. It is much more overtly passionate, with the Leningrad strings
digging in strongly. There is more emotion but less atmosphere. In part, this is also because the recording is
closer and the pitch is a little higher, but I think this only emphasizes something that is already there. My
favourite of the three is the Moscow version, but it is interesting to have a demonstration of how Ferrero’s
interpretations of pieces he played often could take spontaneous wing in different directions.
The timing of 16:04 for the Leningrad Boléro is virtually identical to the RAI version. Nobody in this
orchestra tries to run away with the tempo – they maintain an implacable tread as if this were the
advancing Nazi troops in the Leningrad Symphony. Some of the solo playing is surprisingly fallible – more so
than in Turin. As explained below, the piece had previously been banned by the Soviet authorities, so it was
a first time for the orchestra. There is a sheer blatancy about the later stages that rams home the message
with a shocking brutality. The final mocking guffaw is among the most effective I have heard. Marginally, I
prefer the Turin performance, but this has a bludgeoning, hypnotic effect all of its own.
If Ferrero’s Russian performances did not always improve on his pre-war versions of the same piece, his
Leningrad Till Eulenspiegel makes the earlier one sound like an embryo. This really is an extraordinary
example of spontaneous – or so it seems – interpretative freedom that works. This Till truly has everything,
from mercurial high spirits to deep tenderness and high drama when the miscreant is called to account.
There are occasional ragged moments, but this is scarcely avoidable given the twists and turns Ferrero
requires of the orchestra.
The first impression in the Wagner extracts is that I do not think I have ever heard such a barrage of
unchecked, explosive coughing as greets the dark music preceding Wagner’s Dawn. I am fairly tolerant of
audience noise on live recordings but the suspicion here is that elements of the Leningrad public were
deliberately sabotaging the performance. The second point is that, when the Dawn bursts out, the
recording buckles totally under the onslaught and they really might as well be playing anything. Luckily,
once Siegfried’s journey gets under way, much of the music is loud enough to cover the tuberculars while
not loud enough to defeat the engineers.
Having got all this out of the way, the performance is extraordinary. Not just for the tension it creates –
there were other conductors around in 1951 who could create similar tension in Wagner – but for the
freely changing tempi. Ferrero practically reinvents the music as we know it. How this would work over an
entire opera I do not know – it was never put to the test. Taken in isolation, it is a quite remarkable
example of re-creative interpretation. The orchestra is with him all the way.
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The most recent CD tribute provides our only
opportunity at present to hear Ferrero at work with a
large-scale symphonic structure. His performance of
the Brahms Fourth Symphony has many paragraphs of
ideally Brahmsian warmth as well as a viscerally
explosive scherzo. As with the Mozart movement, a
comparison with Tibor Paul is instructive, but in this
case it is not to Ferrero’s advantage. In the first
movement, Ferrero does not actually change his basic
tempo all that much, but he has a way of rounding of
paragraphs with a ritardando, suggesting that he sees
the music as a series of mood pictures rather than a
developing structure. Very oddly, the opening of the
second movement is quite swift, almost a call to arms,
after which the theme enters much more slowly. The
second theme is slower still and, taken on their own,
many entire passages are glorious. The third
movement almost hurtles out of control at times – insofar as we can judge from a recording that cracks
under the strain. In the finale, while Ferrero is not as monstrously invasive as Constantin Silvestri in his live
Japanese performance, neither does he convince this listener, as Paul did, that he is relating all the
episodes to the whole.
At first the Martucci Notturno seems to stagnate – it is slightly slower than the EIAR version. As the piece
proceeds, Ferrero manages to draw a rapt, almost Delian poetry from the orchestra which surpasses at
least sometimes the earlier performance.
The little-known, tragically short-lived Donato De Veroli (1921-1943) needs further investigation.
Apologists tell us that Mussolini’s racial laws were a fairly anaemic sop intended to assuage his friend Hitler
while remaining a dead letter on the domestic front. In obeisance to this comfortable view, little is said or
known about those that suffered, and often died, under them. My travels through little known Italian
musicians – so just in one limited field – have already come across two victims, the senior composer Leone
Sinigaglia and the younger Aldo Finzi. Technically, Donato de Veroli was not a “victim”, since he died by his
own hand at the age of 22, but the causes of his tragic gesture, insofar as we know them, are enough to
justify adding his name to the list.
De Veroli was born in Rome. A composition by the 8-year-old musician was praised by Mascagni and he
entered Santa Cecilia Conservatoire at the age of 13. In 1939 he was compelled to leave – Santa Cecilia was
off-limits for Jews – but was able to study at the Papal Institute for Sacred Music. He composed quite
prolifically from the age of sixteen but, in the prevailing climate, achieved no public success. Ferrero
befriended him, but was unable to perform anything till the political climate had changed. Too late for Di
Veroli, whose death by suicide in 1943 was partly caused by his forced isolation. But it was exacerbated, it
seems, by an impossible sentimental relation with the daughter of Giuseppe Mulè, head of the
Conservatoire and also a fascist bigwig.
After the war, some attempt was made to investigate Di Veroli’s work. Ferrero gave his piano concerto in
Rome in 1947, as well as performances of the Theme and Variations, including that in Moscow. His opera La
Madre was performed in Bergamo in 1951 and again by the RAI in 1960. So far, there has been little else.
I listened to the Tema e Variazioni for the first time with no knowledge of the above facts. It did not seem
the work of an immature composer. Rather, it revealed a master of the orchestra. The extremely doleful
character of the theme, emphasized by the typical Moscow woodwind, suggested to me a Russian
composer, someone like Miaskovsky perhaps. The generally pungent post-romantic tone of most of the
variations confirmed this impression – even the more Italianate penultimate variation is not allowed to
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luxuriate too much. The theme is, so far as I can tell without a score in front of me, a twelve-note row, but
the working out depends on shifting tonalities not on serial organization, giving an attractive modernist
tweak to a basically post-romantic idiom. All this, from a composer aged around twenty, reveals remarkable
confidence and mastery. It is a piece that should be regularly played in Italy, maybe elsewhere too. The
performance is far from immaculate but in terms of pacing and atmosphere it can stand as a model for
those that will hopefully come.
Ferrero was rapturously received by the Moscow and Leningrad audiences. Apart from his own qualities, he
provided them with a breath of fresh air in the form of music they did not normally hear. I understand that
he actually obtained special permission to perform Boléro and Dance of the Seven Veils, decadent offerings
that were at that time banned in the Soviet Union. Ferrero’s performances of Boléro resulted in a
permanent lifting of the ban and Mravinsky recorded it in 1952. To judge from an English-language version
of a Russian review135, the experts found much to praise but also had doubts over Ferrero’s handling of
larger forms. The review is interesting in that it discusses two symphony performances which, though
recordings may exist in the Russian archives, have so far not reached us. But first, the critic indulged in a
few gentle polemics:
The progressive representatives of culture in all countries are anxious to come to the capital of our
fatherland. The rulers of the capitalist countries fear to allow Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Fadeyev,
Ehrenburg, Neruda, Robeson136 and other masters of the arts and literature to come to Washington,
London, Paris or even little Brussels. But Moscow, which is dear to the hearts of workers from all over
the world, receives with a warm welcome workers, poets, musicians and scientists who are the friends
of peace and democracy.
Willy Ferrero’s own credentials, readers were reassured, were impeccable.
The famous Italian conductor Willy Ferrero … is an active participant in the Peace Partisans’
movement and a member of the World Peace Council.
Having done his duty by the Party, the critic then got onto the musical side.
Conductor Ferrero has faultless control of his baton. He conducted the most subtle nuances of musical
compositions with great artistry and skill and pleases by the temperament of his performances and
his ability to create colourful, vivid images.
The various shorter pieces were briefly praised without reservation. When it came to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
Symphony, the critic showed that he was not blindly antagonistic to “new” interpretations.
The scherzo was the most interesting in a unique treatment of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
Contrary to established tradition, the conductor, by slightly retarding the tempo and skilfully stressing
individual groups of stringed instruments, found many original and new moments.
The second and fourth movements were approved without detailed comment.
But the most controversial was the conductor’s interpretation of the first movement, which ran
counter to the composer’s plan. Instead of emphasizing the great human tragedy, the groping of the
human soul, Ferrero arbitrarily stressed the motifs of impotence and doom and brought out only the
intimate and lyrical elements. Tchaikovsky’s profoundly philosophical symphony, full of fierce
135 Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. III, no. 15, p. 31, translating a review by Conductor Niazi, Stalin Prize
Winner, Pravda, May 6, p.3.
136 At least three of those named had been banned by the Attlee government from the proposed World Peace Council
Congress in Sheffield.
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struggle, dreams and joys, sounded sentimental in Ferrero’s interpretation and was changed from a
tremendous social canvas into a petty personal drama.
In Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, too, the critic found the scherzo “particularly successful” and generally
praised the second and fourth movements. However:
The tendency to be carried away by individual, even though well executed episodes of the first
movement, and the absence in the conductor’s interpretation of a single, well-conceived line
prevented Ferrero from conveying the composer’s intentions.
Alberto Savinio had expressed, if less trenchantly, similar doubts about Ferrero’s Eroica in the 1930s137. We
can only hope that recordings of these Moscow performances come to light. Whatever they reveal, the
critic’s final summing-up seems a little gratuitous:
All this is eloquent proof that our Western colleagues often get lost in musical details and are not
always capable of revealing profoundly the idea of the work they are performing.
It is not entirely a coincidence, then, if Ferrero’s post-war engagements outside Italy took him to the Soviet
bloc rather than, say, France or Great Britain. He had already been sufficiently left-wing in the 1920s to
arouse Fascist suspicions. After the war, like many western intellectuals, he embraced communism
wholeheartedly. Following his attendance at the WPC Congress in Warsaw, in August 1951 he attended a
communist rally in East Berlin, together with party representatives Enrico Berlinguer for Italy and Walter
Ulbricht for East Germany, and such artists and intellectuals as Pablo Neruda and Raymond Diem.
Overlooked on all sides by portraits of Stalin, as well as puppet images of Churchill, Eisenhower and
Marshall, they spent a happy time chanting “Ami-go-home”138. Originally, Ferrero had been expected to
conduct a concert for the occasion, the orchestra being the virtuoso band described above by Massimo
Pradella. Pradella himself tells the tale:
In 1951, the Youth Festival was held in East Berlin, an extraordinary event organized by the
Communist Parties and extended to many protagonists of culture. The Maestro had received the high
award of “Partisan of Peace” from the World Peace Organization and was engaged to organize the
musical part of the Italian participation in the Festival. Those were the years of the cold war and
McCarthyism … The Maestro was to conduct a concert with us for the National Academy of Dance.
One morning the Maestro’s wife [sic139] phoned me and implored me to conduct that day’s long
rehearsal because the Maestro was indisposed. It was a way to get the great instrumentalists of the
ensemble to say what they thought of my qualities. So I went to Berlin to conduct my first concert,
and when I came back they took away my passport for two years140
.
Communists, Italian and Soviet, were still rankling from the fact that a group of Soviet musicians, called
“Florentine Music”, had recently had a concert tour of Italy curtailed when the Italian authorities had
rescinded their staying permits. This induced Ferrero to issue a statement.
I wish the Soviet people and Soviet musicians, whose love of Italy and whose appreciation of our
culture I well know, to be informed through the columns of this newspaper that this scandalous veto
is in complete contrast with the true feelings of respect and friendship that the Italians have for the
Soviet peoples141
.
137 Savinio, ibid, in Musica Classica booklet.
138 See Giuseppe Fiori, Vita di Enrico Berlinguer, Laterza 2004.
139 Ferrero never married. Pradella is referring to the companion of his last years, Lucia Lategola. See below.
140 Pradella, ibid.
141 Berliner Zeitung, 14 July 1951
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Ferrero’s one unsuccessful attempt to stand as councillor in municipal Roman elections, in 1952, was not in
the ranks of the Partito Comunista Italiano, however, but in an independent left-wing list called Faro142
.
In terms of personal life-style, Augusto Frattani draws a picture of Ferrero in his last years that suggests an
eccentric but amiable – or simpatico as the Italians would say – bachelor existence.
Anyone who followed from close up the serene passage of his days at Ostia, where he created a safe
haven for himself some years ago, would certainly agree that Willy Ferrero’s life had its bizarre
aspects. True; but bizarrerie is often congenial to the artist.
There, in fact, he was able to establish a particular rhythm of life where the impulses of his soul were
not excessively tied to the common rules of living, in which spontaneity and independence were not
unduly hamstrung by the confines of conventions. Whenever he could, he avoided going to Rome,
remaining for long periods closed within his house, immersed in study and reading, until thrust out
into the open by some basic and overpowering stimulus. He then went out alone, equipped for fishing
and, looking out to the sea and sky he was able to enjoy to the full his daily need for nature, from
which he drew new freshness and vitality. He was bound to no timetable: he often remained there for
hours, forgetful of mealtimes, sitting on the sea wall with his legs hanging over the water, deep in
thought. On other occasions, he held long conversations with other anglers.
He was able to converse with the Ostia fishermen in their local dialect143. Other pastimes were cultivating
flowers and breeding pigeons144
.
In the evening, jolly and welcoming, he entertained friends from Rome in his study. And inevitably, in
the midst of conversations about art, he revived memories of his past years: recollections, anecdotes
and episodes from his childhood humorously punctuated his conversation. And he relived, as he
evoked it, the face of Massenet when the little Ferrero, aged scarcely more than four, gave his first
concert at the “Trocadero” of Paris, along with the story of his concerts at the “Costanzi” and that
solemn moment when Czar Nicholas, in St. Petersburg, conferred on the young conductor the
decoration of Knight of the Order of St. Stanislav, adorned with enamel and gold. And then, all his
memories of his travels around the world, observed with the immediacy of childlike sensibility and
conserved with meticulous devotion in the heart, first of the adolescent, then of the man145
.
Previtali, though, found him increasingly “restless and tired” as the years passed.
He was sad, though he tried to hide his worries behind an ironic mask and could even reproduce that
same smile with which, as a boy, he persuaded me to swap stamps from our collections, usually to my
disadvantage146
.
Trovajoli added that
Willy had an extrovert character … he always had a reserve of melancholy because he was in
economic difficulty and never got any help from the Italian concert-giving world. He was serene only
because he found warmth and success in Russia [Trovajoli’s underlinings]147
142 Selvini, ibid. Faro means “beacon”. History has little to tell us about this independent group. It appears to have
stood only in Rome and only in that year, and failed to win a single councillor. See Wikipedia articles on administrative
elections in Italy.
143 Information from Alexander Negrin.
144 Cf. Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, L’Europeo, March 1954
145 Augusto Frattani: Radio Corriere 1954, no. 13 pp. 12-13.
146 Previtali, ibid.
147 Alexander Negrin visited Trovajoli, who later sent a letter, quoted here, in which he clarified certain points
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Scelsi gave a still darker account:
Little by little, though, his extremely unruly lifestyle unfortunately took its toll on his performances as
well as on his physique, which deteriorated continually, resulting in his untimely end148
.
The letter sent to Ferrero by Alessandro Bustini, President of Santa Cecilia Academy, in relation to what was
to be the conductor’s last concert, opens up vistas on Willy’s final months that others have only hinted at.
Dear Willy,
I do not know if you are still ill and what stage your severe illness has reached. Assuming it allows you
to think, see if, when you build your second programme, you could include one of the compositions by
our member and friend Pizzini. I know that you were the first acclaimed interpreter of one of his bestknown symphonic poems, “In Piedmont” or “Poem of the Dolomites”. Returning to one of these
pieces, you will take a step back in time and feel a few years younger, which can do no harm149
.
Most commentators have remarked upon Ferrero’s increasing melancholy in his last years, and also his
physical frailty. Nobody has suggested publicly that, already several months before his death, he might
have been in such severe pain as to restrict his capacity to think clearly. Previtali, indeed, noted that it was
“difficult to forget” Ferrero’s last concert150. Previtali, we noted above, was a master of the unspoken
phrase. Coming at the climax of a paragraph in which encomiums were heaped upon Ferrero’s
performances of a range of works, Previtali certainly succeeded in giving the impression that Willy went out
with a bang not a whimper. But there can be other reasons for not forgetting something. Armando
Trovajoli, speaking privately to Alexander Negrin, also said he would never forget that last concert, for Willy
was a mere shadow of himself, unable to do more than just go through the motions, something that he had
never done in all his career. Signally, newspaper commentators limited themselves to generalized
observations, plus a pat on the back for Pizzini’s piece151
.
148 Scelsi, ibid.
149 Letter from Bustini to Ferrero, 25 November 1953, ibid.
150 Previtali, ibid
151 Cf. Il Messaggero, 21 January 1954, Il Giornale d’italia, 22 January 1954, Paese Sera, 22 January 1954.
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Ever the generous friend, Previtali felt Ferrero might have been on the point of pulling through.
He was an artist whose career was on the upturn and his strenuous life, too, was gradually settling
down, helped by the loving devotion of those close to him152
.
“Those close to him” would have included his mother, who survived him by six or seven years and was
eventually buried alongside him, and his half-sister Anna Maria. It would also have included a lady called
Lucia Lategola, for this was not quite the bachelor establishment Frattani diplomatically depicted. In the
early 1950s, live-in partners were not the uncontroversial norm they have since become, but there was no
great secret of their liaison – Lucia is seen accompanying Ferrero to Moscow in the photo on the previous
page153. Her signature also appears on a postcard sent by Willy from Moscow to their friends back in Ostia
(see above).
It is believed that the cottage actually belonged to Lucia, who willingly shared it with Willy and her cats.
These latter doubtless took a close personal interest in Willy’s pigeon-breeding. The cottage has long since
vanished from the townscape of Ostia, the seaside resort serving Rome and its environs. A search for its
former whereabouts may start from the aerial view below, showing Ostia in the early post-war years.
152 Previtali, ibid.
153 From L’Unità, 9 January 1952. Lucia is decribed as his consorte.
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The article in L’Unità from which the photo of Willy and Lucia is taken describes the cottage as situated
opposite the Kursaal. The address, however, was Viale Desiderata Pietri no. 13. This is not the road along
the sea front but the parallel road further back, skirted by dunes and scrub to the landward side. If I have
got my bearings correctly, Lucia’s cottage would have been just beyond the top right of this photograph. If
you go there today, you will find some sort of establishment at no. 11, the fence and number of which can
be seen to the left of the street view below. There is no building at no. 13 and clearly has not been for
many years. The line of trees, nevertheless, hardly seems of recent date. Probably, then, Lucia had some
sort of former farmer’s dwelling further back from the road.
Lucia remained unmarried for two decades after Willy’s death but on 6 September 1975, in another seaside
town further north, Monterosso al Mare in Liguria, she
married a certain Angelo Alfieri Currarini154
.
A park near the seafront – “Parco Willy Ferrero” – recalls
Ferrero’s presence in the town. As an unwitting –
presumably – tribute to Ferrero’s American birth, its
facilities include a baseball pitch. After long neglect,
attempts have been made to restore the park in recent
years – a voluntary operator can be seen at work in the
photograph to the right. By a strange turn of events,
given Ferrero’s well-known political views, the voluntary
work is being carried out by members of the neo-Fascist
activist group CasaPound155. Such are the contradictions
of modern Italy.
An unsigned article gives an account of Ferrero’s last
days156:
Willy Ferrero’s death-agonies lasted twenty hours.
Stricken by a violent haemoptysis at the beginning of
last week, he was taken to a clinic in Ostia near his
154 Information about Lucia Lategola provided by Alexander Negrin.
155 Named after the American poet and Fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound, whose later years were spent in Italy.
156 Willy Ferrero se ne è andato, L’Europeo, March 1954
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cottage. With the worsening of his condition, and at the instance of Mr. Togliatti157, he was moved to
the Clinica Latina of Rome … The diagnosis was immediately alarming: cirrhosis of the liver. Ferrero
was optimistic nonetheless. He did not believe in this illness and joked with the nurses. On Sunday
Mariella, a young guitarist, visited him and played him a few pieces. On Tuesday he was examined by
Professor Frugoni who dismissed the idea of an operation in extremis. From that moment, Willy
Ferrero’s fate appeared to be sealed. Don Attilio, parish priest of the Chiesa della Natività, entered
the room, pronouncing absolution to the dying man, anointing him with oil and imparting to him the
Pope’s blessing.
These last rites might seem surprising for an inveterate Communist, but Italian Communists had a way of
being Roman Catholics on the side, as a sort of insurance policy. In spite of such precautions, and a death
worthy of Lord Marchmain, Willy Ferrero very nearly failed to get through the heavenly gates.
Later, however, when the time came to organize the funeral, Don Attilio announced that the
ecclesiastical authorities had prohibited admission into the church of the maestro’s body. It is thought
that this ban arose from the political ideas of which Ferrero had never made a secret. Visits and
phone calls went back and forth for two days in an attempt to have this order reversed. Only at
midnight on Thursday, following a personal intervention by Monsignor Montini158 before the Pope,
was permission granted for religious rites. After the funeral ceremony, the body was carried to the
Basilica di Massenzio, where the public had so many times applauded the maestro. The coffin was
placed on the rostrum, while the Academy of Santa Cecilia played Handel’s Prelude, of which the
maestro had made one of his finest recordings, before a public of three hundred people.
A brief video-clip of Ferrero’s funeral cortège reaching the Basilica di Massenzio can be found on YouTube.
Anna Maria Ferrero is clearly present. The commentator also refers to “family members”, while the camera
picks out an elderly woman, sitting in passive dignity, and a younger woman weeping. Probably these were
his mother and Lucia. Diplomatic representatives attended from the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland. The
conductors Fernando Previtali and Vincenzo Bellezza were joined, from the wider arts world, by the film
director Alessandro Blasetti and the painter Renato Guttuso. A telegram of sympathy arrived from the
Soviet Composers’ Union159. Ferrero was buried in the cemetery of Ostia. The epitaph reads “A prodigy to
the experts, a fanciullo to his friends”.
A few final thoughts
Whatever the fascination attached to Ferrero’s child prodigy career, the fact remains that we cannot
actually hear any performance conducted by him before the early-mature age of about 25 – approximately
the age when most conductors begin to get going. This is in line with the general pattern whereby child
prodigy escapades tend to be early parentheses. Once they have run their course, there is usually a pause,
after which the artist’s (or mathematician’s or whatever) career develops – if it does – on “normal” lines. It
is therefore Willy Ferrero the “normal” conductor, whose career began in his early twenties, that concerns
us now. I hope my discussion of the available recordings has made it clear that his work is of real interest,
well worth seeking out. He became a highly individual artist with touches of greatness.
Yet it was not a “normal” career. For one thing, as a mature artist he seems to have been well aware of his
limitations. As we have seen, he almost certainly never conducted an opera – and this in Italy! And, while
there are stories of him conducting a 500-strong chorus in his prodigy years – including the Inno al sole
from Mascagni’s Iris at La Scala on 8 April 1917 – the only choral work he ever broadcast was Debussy’s
157 Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964), Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Secretary of the Italian Communist
Party.
158 Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI, shortly to be canonized.
159 Cf. L’Unità, 27 March 1954.
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Sirènes. Indeed, the only other vocal works that show up are a Handel cantata for soprano and strings and
three spirituals arranged for baritone and orchestra160
.
His repertoire was, moreover, remarkably narrow. Just two Mozart symphonies and none from the last
three. No Schubert Unfinished. No Mendelssohn Italian. You might expect him to revel in Berlioz, but not
even a Roman Carnival. Even within his favourites, he was picky. He repeated the Ottobrata movement
from Respighi’s Feste Romane again and again, but seems never to have conducted the complete work. He
relentlessly plugged two dances from each of the Falla ballets but never conducted the complete scores, or
even the full suites161. The suspicion is that, for all the ease with which the child had “learnt” scores just by
listening to them a few times, the mature artist was a slow, laborious learner who tried to fill at least half of
each concert with tried and trusted favourites. Moreover, he always conducted from memory. This was
related to Alexander Negrin by Armando Trovajoli and is in any case borne out all photographs of Ferrero
conducting in concert. We may wonder, though, if “always” really extended to concertos and isolated
performances of pieces he did not expect to conduct again – in general, conductors who invariably perform
their core repertoire from memory have the score in front of them in these cases. But in truth, we just do
not know. As far as concertos are concerned, by his own preference he conducted precious few anyway162
.
The “no soloists” rule seems to have been broken mainly for his brother and for names that would have
brought lustre to his own image, such as Backhaus, Vidusso, Michelangeli, Agosti, Rubinstein and De Vito.
A narrow, rigorously memorized repertoire had its plus-side where contemporary works were concerned.
Modern composers, apart from a chosen few, generally have to be content to hear each new work decently
sight-read once only by a radio orchestra and then shunted aside, maybe for ever. If Willy Ferrero took on a
new work, he would cart it all over Italy and maybe take it to Poland or Russia as well.
Running counter to this interpretation, however, is the presence in his broadcast concerts of a number of
one-offs that must have required considerable study on his part and some careful rehearsing: Roussel’s
Third Symphony and Le festin de l'araignée extracts, Schmitt’s La Tragédie de Salomé and Scriabin’s Poem
of Ecstasy catch the eye. Perhaps, if we had a list of non-broadcast concerts, in addition to those with the
Santa Cecilia Orchestra, we would find that he did indeed get some further mileage out of these works.
All this explains why, though he enjoyed a regular relationship with the EIAR orchestra, he could never have
been considered a candidate for principal conductor. If we look at the programmes conducted in Turin by
Armando La Rosa Parodi before the war and by Mario Rossi after it, these are the typical programmes of a
radio conductor who is expected to make a decent job of practically anything. The fact that Ferrero could
fire up an orchestra and bring an audience to its feet in Boléro or Falla dances in a way Parodi or Rossi could
not, would not cut much ice with a broadcasting organization.
Perhaps Ferrero’s big chance would have come somewhere in Europe if he had lived at least another two
decades. Just possibly, too, he considered seeking it in the country of his birth. In an interview in a Portland
newspaper during the 1930s he stated his intention to visit America, partly to see his birthplace and learn
160 There is also some choral work in the soundtrack to Othello. The Santa Cecilia programme for 28 July 1944 lists a
chorus, but the only work in which it could have sung is the second Daphnis suite, which is specifically stated as being
for orchestra (and was so conducted by Ferrero on numerous occasions). Probably the choral listing is mistaken. In
addition, Tima Club issued a private off-air recording, dated 25 January 1943, of Beethoven’s Ah, perfido, in which Ines
Alfani-Tellini was accompanied by the EIAR SO under Ferrero. The Radio Corriere for that date does not list such a
broadcast, nor does a general search show any broadcast of Ah, perfido by Alfani-Tellini at all. There must be some
doubt as to what this recording is and where it comes from.
161 Duty obliges me to report that the Santa Cecilia programme for 9 April 1941 lists a suite from El Sombrero, and that
of 10 November 1948 lists a selection from the same work. On the grounds that the exception proves the rule, and in
the absence of a programme leaflet stating exactly what was to be played, I suspect that he really conducted the usual
two dances.
162 Alexander Negrin has had sight of a letter about forthcoming concerts from Ferrero to the Santa Cecilia.authorities
in which he stated that he would prefer not to have soloists.
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the language, but also to hear live the great orchestras which he knew only through records. Surely the
thought could not have been far from his head that the visit might produce engagements, even a
permanent conductorship? However, given the political climate of the 1930s, it is likely that the visit never
came off163. He nevertheless retained American connections post-war, or at any rate traded on his
American passport164
.
It is possible to imagine Ferrero at the head of a non-broadcasting symphony orchestra, building up with
them a tailor-made repertoire and holding in thrall an admiring public ready to hear Ottobrata or Falla
dances as often as he wished to play them. It is not so easy to imagine where, in opera-dominated Italy,
such an orchestra might have existed. Or perhaps it is, for the Principal Conductor of the Santa Cecilia
Orchestra, Franco Ferrara, had been dogged since 1940 by fainting fits on the rostrum, the exact cause of
which has never been entirely explained. He withdrew definitively from public conducting in 1948 and his
successor, Fernando Previtali, was appointed only in 1953. So why not Willy Ferrero, who had been
conducting them regularly for so long? Might the 1946 tour of central and northern Italy have been
intended as a testing bed for him?
At this point, it is no longer possible to evade an issue that readers will already have inferred from the
manner and cause of Ferrero’s death. By the end, and probably for many years before, his daily existence
was governed by alcohol. Nereo Zampieri – see below – mentions that he would congregate with the
musicians, drinking Campari. Trovajoli added:
He drank a lot. Campari in particular, whisky in the evening. Never drunk (Trovajoli’s underlinings)165
.
Of the various recollections of Ferrero, in fact, written or oral, nobody has reported actual drunken
behaviour. Unfortunately, as any doctor reading this will surely confirm, the sheer fact that so much heavy
drinking did not induce drunken behaviour is the measure of his addiction. He needed his daily dose to
function. This runs counter to the public image of the drunkard as someone who sings in the street, cannot
get his key in the door and has to be picked out of the gutter several times a week. Drunkards in this sense
are not necessarily alcoholics – yet – and alcoholics are not necessarily drunkards according to the popular
image – as Ferrero was not. This does not mean, though, that the havoc wrought on their bodily system is
any less. As we saw above, Previtali and others hoped he would pull through, but any plans for
rehabilitation came too late – his liver had had enough. Be all this as it may, his alcoholism was clearly
something that the orchestral management would not have ignored.
It can be pointed out that other conductors, from Leipzig to Glasgow and beyond, have lived under the
thrall of alcohol, yet fulfilled principal conductorships and even run opera houses. These conductors
evidently had orchestral building and opera house management in their blood streams. Instinctive
spontaneity was Ferrero’s winning card, and also his undoing. We can sympathize with the Santa Cecilia
management if they felt he was best kept for guest appearances. Previtali, once appointed, made it clear
that such invitations would not be lacking.
Ferrero’s conducting technique has aroused some comment. The famed Soviet conducting teacher Ilya
Musin recounted having seen the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony being done in the most
outlandish ways.
163 I read this article on the internet some time ago and did not conserve it, since I was not then considering an article
on Ferrero. Unfortunately more recent attempts to trace it have drawn a blank. Ferrero also spoke, a little regretfully,
of an American impresario who, in his child prodigy years, had proposed a contract for an American tour, with a fee of
two thousand dollars per concert. All this came to nothing with the outbreak of the war. Cf. Willy Ferrero ricorda, ibid.
164 Alexander Negrin has had sight of a letter from Santa Cecilia to Ferrero, thanking him for his intervention with the
American authorities over the use of a concert hall. This would presumably have been in late 1944 or 1945 when,
following the fall of Fascism, Rome was occupied by the allies.
165 Trovajoli, letter to Alexander Negrin.
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The most ingenuous, in his view, was that of the child prodigy conductor, Willy Ferrero, who got on
the podium of the Leningrad Philharmonic, simply lowered his arm and the orchestra after a long
moment of perplexity, noted that they didn’t have to wait any longer and after looking at the leader,
played in time and impeccably together166
.
Just possibly, Musin had been misled by a carefully prepared gag, on the lines of “I give you the tempo, you
count four and start”167. We have other evidence that Ferrero was not averse to the occasional gag.
Mariss Jansons recalls the Italian Willy Ferrero conducting Ravel’s Boléro, starting with the baton
tucked up his sleeve and slowly letting it emerge as the music got louder168
.
Rather more detailed and informative comment comes from Ferrero’s colleague Previtali, who must have
seen him conduct on many occasions. Previtali began by noting that, unlike most young Italians at that
time, Ferrero did not model his technique on that of Toscanini.
He had a personal beat. Elegant, clear, without emphasis or exaggeration, without fashionable
effect-making … Ferrero had a highly sensitive ear and an innate sense of orchestral balance; his
rhythm was strong without harshness. His performances were full of vivacity, yet at the same time
had a gentleness169
.
Massimo Pradella’s meeting with Ferrero in Berlin has already been discussed. On the technical-human
side, Pradella had this to say:
In those days in Berlin I got to know the Maestro well, his generosity and his gentleness. I had already
learnt a lot from him during his rehearsals, but in Berlin, towards midnight, when he was more lucid,
he gave me precious advice about how to approach music, my gestures and the orchestra. He gave
me one of his batons, which I conserve jealously. He was able, with a light gesture, to make the
orchestra play with a freedom and ductility that are rare today even in a string quartet.
Pradella showed this baton to Alexander Negrin170, pointing out that it was an ultra-light model, which
Ferrero had specially made for him. Pradella’s testimony is precious for another reason. It suggests that, if
anyone had had the imagination to appoint Ferrero to teach conducting classes in a Conservatoire, he
might have been a more helpful teacher than many, albeit an unorthodox and unsystematic one.
Scelsi had this to add:
As you must know, Willy Ferrero had been a child prodigy … And he remained a prodigy all his life. He
was instinctive. Under his baton, the orchestra came to life and he obtained astounding results. His
166 Retrieved from phony/.
Though Musin refers to Ferrero as a “child prodigy conductor”, he would have been only ten himself when Ferrero the
prodigy conducted in Russia. Probably he witnessed this on one of Ferrero’s later visits in the 1930s or 1950s.
167 I believe I witnessed something of the kind when Hugo Rignold, after the fanfare introducing the final galop in the
Guglielmo Tell overture, put down his baton and left the orchestra to start the galop perfectly without a sign from
him. If the orchestra had known already he was going to do this, it was easy enough for them to count out the rests
and start. If they had not known, they would have expected a gesture from the conductor and, not getting one,
anything might have happened.
168 Retrieved from or. In the years of Ferrero’s visits to
Leningrad, Mariss Jansons was a child and living in Latvia. He must have had the story from his father Arvid, who was a
violinist in the Leningrad Philharmonic. Perhaps the interviewer, unversed in the Ferrero story, had not appreciated
that this was not a first-hand account.
169 Previtali, ibid.
170 Pradella, ibid.
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performances were always – we might say – fiery, but they were fairly precise too, however much his
magnetism and enthusiasm might sometimes prevail over rigour and depth171
.
So far as is known, not a scrap of film footage
exists of Willy Ferrero’s conducting. The image
opposite was taken during a rehearsal at the
Augusteo in 1936172. Blotchy as it is, it hints at
a dynamic presence. It also seems to show
that flared trousers were not an invention of
the 1970s. As with many of the finest
conductors, however, this dynamic presence
was perceived more by the orchestra than the
public. A British observer in 1945 described
him as “undramatic and always superbly in
control”173
.
Another precious testimony comes from
Nereo Zampieri, an orchestral violinist who, at the beginning of his career, played in two of Ferrero’s Santa
Cecilia concerts, including the Gershwin programme, which left an indelible impression on him. When I
spoke to him174, he immediately declared that Ferrero was “a great and lovable conductor”. How did he
work at rehearsals? I asked. Was he very demanding?
The demands came from his gestures. He had a great technique without knowing it, because it was all
natural. He did everything with a smile, not like certain beasts that massacre the orchestra [here
followed a diatribe about a recently deceased French conductor].
Did Zampieri know him off the podium? I wondered.
Yes, he would go to the bar with the musicians. He always drank Campari, he said it soothed his
stomach burns.
Instinctive … fiery … lovable … above all natural. We are in the realm of the sort of interpreter who
improvises his performances on the spot, who fires up the orchestra to order. The absolute opposite to the
sort of conductor who arrives with a ready thought-out interpretation, prepares it painstakingly during
rehearsals and, on the night, steers the orchestra through charted waters. This instinctive sort of
interpreter runs risks, and sometimes comes to grief in larger structures. We have seen that Alberto
Savinio, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the 1930s, noted that Ferrero had a
tendency to slow down in places, whereas “Beethoven never stops”175. Post-war, it was not only the
Russians who raised doubts over Ferrero in the classical repertoire. Italo De Feo, shortly after Ferrero’s
death, commented:
We remember him in Rome, this summer, conducting a concert at the Basilica di Massenzio: he
wanted to interpret classical music according to highly modern criteria, as if to graft the broken
171 Scelsi, ibid.
172 Radio Corriere 1976, no. 43, p. 131.
173 Howard Clewes, Italy and the Arts, The Spectator, 24 May 1945.
174 Telephone conversation with the author, 9 February 2018. Zampieri was instrumental in establishing the “Stagione
Concertistica Willy Ferrero” of Ostia, now in its ninth season, as a means of remembering the maestro.
175 Alberto Savinio, article reprinted in the Musica Classica booklet.
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rhythms of jazz upon the melodic rhythm. The audience protested, little by little leaving the theatre.
But in silence176
.
De Feo, though an acute observer of his times, was not a musical critic. Massimo Mila, a major Italian critic
and musicologist, was more understanding.
Even if his Beethoven interpretations were not orthodox, the attack of the finale of the Seventh
Symphony, as Ferrero did it, would have shaken even an iceman177
.
Without hearing Ferrero’s performances of some of the larger Beethoven symphonies – it would seem that
the archives of RAI and the Russian radio stations may contain some – it is difficult to know what to make of
this. Just as, for many years, anybody who sang Violetta in Italy had to run the gauntlet of the “widows of
Callas”, so were Beethoven performances judged according to whether or not they deviated from the
Toscaninian norm. Those who walked out of the Basilica di Massenzio may have included the gentleman
who cried “buffoon” at Stokowski when he conducted Beethoven’s Fifth in Turin two years later. Somewhat
burdened by years, he and his likeminded friends may have turned up again in Turin to hiss Vladimir
Delman’s performance of this symphony in 1978. Such people would surely have had little time for the
“historically informed” performances of the 1980s onwards. But, as of now, we cannot say whether Ferrero
was anticipating later trends or simply providing an odd personal gloss on the music. As stated above, I
found that Ferrero’s tempo freedom worked admirably in Scheherazade but was more questionable in
Brahms. It is worth quoting the words of Armando Trovajoli, master of Gershwin but an unprejudiced
observer of all things musical:
I had the opportunity to hear and appreciate the interpretations of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky [and]
Mozart that we had prepared for the future tour in Russia. His musical details were an unforgettable
lesson for me178
.
What should give us pause for thought is
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s statement that the
three conductors who most influenced him were
Otto Klemperer, Nathan Rachlin and Willy
Ferrero. Another Russian impressed by Ferrero
was Vakhtang Jordania, who resolved to be a
conductor at the age of nine after attending one
of Ferrero’s concerts in 1951179. Ferrero live must
have been quite something. As it is, the few
documents we have are enough to show that his
instinctive engagement with the music, his
capacity to unfold a piece as though improvising
it, and his ability to fire up an orchestra at a
moment’s notice, are qualities to which any
young conductor might aspire.
A select number of Italian conductors have
become legendary more on account of
contemporary reports than through the very few
176 Italo De Feo, obituary of Ferrero in Resto del Carlino, 1954, quoted in Selvini, ibid. De Feo (1912-1985) was a writer,
journalist and literary critic. From the concerts listed in Appendix 4, it would seem that the incident occurred at that
on 26 August 1953, at which Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was played.
177 Massimo Mila (1910-1988), obituary of Ferrero, quoted in Selvini, ibid.
178 Trovajoli, letter to Alexander Negrin, ibid.
179 Obituary of Jordania by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, 6 October 2005.
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recordings we have of their work: Bernardino Molinari, Antonio Guarnieri and, for slightly different reasons,
Franco Ferrara. Willy Ferrero can certainly take an honourable place in their company. Or, taking into
account his lifestyle, we might remember him as a sort of Dylan Thomas among conductors – an
irrepressible personality, a faithful friend and a brilliant, natural and often inspired artist.
Christopher Howell © 2018
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Appendix 1: Concerts by Willy Ferrero listed at the OSN site180 and in Radio Corriere181
10.12.1928, broadcast from Rome, Grande Orchestra Sinfonica
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Spagnoli, G: 2 Intermezzi from the Poema Lirico “I due Pastori” (first performance in Rome)
Sibelius: Finlandia
Gasco: Buffalmacco, Preludio giocoso
Debussy: Petite Suite – En bateau, Danse
Wagner: Götterdammerung: Siegfried’s Funeral March
Mascagni: Le Maschere - Overture
Plus piano solos by Elisa Scardoni and spoken word
14.03.1929, broadcast from Rome
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Sibelius: Valse triste
Mendelssohn: Scherzo
Mancinelli: Scene veneziane – La fuga degli amanti a Chioggia
Puccini: Manon Lescaut – Intermezzo
Wagner: Die Meistersinger – Overture
Plus violin solos by Maria D’Alba and spoken word
01.08.1929, broadcast from Rome
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Respighi: Antiche arie e danze italiane – 3 pieces
Mascagni: I Rantzau – Prelude
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina – Act IV Prelude
Wagner: Parsifal – Good Friday Music
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
Plus cello solos by W. Sommer and spoken word
02.02.1931, Conservatorio di Milano 10th Concert offered by Radiomarelli, Milan, Turin, Genoa
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Masetti: Ora di Vespero (first performance)
Mascagni: Le Maschere – Overture
09.02.1931, Conservatorio di Milano 11th Concert offered by Radiomarelli, Milan, Turin, Genoa
Beethoven: Egmont – [Overture]
Martucci: Notturno
Rossellini: Suite in 3 tempi
Debussy: Petite Suite – En bateau, ballet182
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina – Interlude
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
10.03.1933, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR183
Beethoven: Symphony 7
Rossellini, Renzo: 2 preludi (first performance)
180 The site of the Archivio Storico of the orchestra Nazionale della RAI - htspx - is
an enormously useful resource which will one day list all concerts given by all RAI orchestras, with as much detail as is
known and the programme leaflets as downloadable PDFs where an exemplar survives. At present, however, it is
“work in progress”, limited to an incomplete list of concerts given in Turin.
181 As already described, the complete series of Radio Corriere issues from 1925 to 1994 are downloadable in PDF
form at htt.aspx. The site also has a search function based on text
recognition. This is enormously helpful but, in view of the blotchy print of many of the earlier issues, it is not infallible.
182 So announced. According to the review on p.13 of Radio Corriere 1931 no. 7, these two pieces were replaced by
Debussy’s “Fêtes”.
183 The OSN site names the orchestra throughout as the “Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI”. Since the RAI was
created on 26.10.1944 to replace the EIAR, so all performances by the Turin-based orchestra prior to that date should
be described as by the “Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR”.
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Debussy: Nocturnes - Fêtes
Ravel: Boléro (first performance in Turin)
Wagner: Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries
24.03.1934, Conservatorio di Napoli
Vivaldi-Siloti: Concerto in D minor
Mozart: Symphony no. 34
Wagner: Siegfried’s Rhine journey
05.04.1934, Rome, Naples, Bari
Vivaldi-Molinari: Concerto in A minor
Mozart: Symphony no. 35 “Haffner”
Veretti: I galanti tiratori
Petrassi: Partita – Giga
Sonzogno, Giulio Cesare: Dai nevai dell’Ortler
18.07.1934, Basilica di Massenzio, Rome
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Dukas: L’apprenti sorcer
Strauss, R: Tod und Verklarung
13.12.1934, Rome, Naples, Bari
Roussel: Symphony no, 3
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2
Schmitt: La Tragédie de Salomé
Dukas: L’Apprenti sorcier
25.01.1935, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Beethoven: Symphony 6 "Pastoral"
Tocchi, Gianluca: Record, impressioni sinfoniche dedicate al primato di Agnello (first performance in
Turin)
Albéniz: Iberia - Triana
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Strauss, R: Don Juan
26.03.1935, Torino
Beethoven: Symphony no. 8
Veretti: Sinfonia italiana (Il popolo e il profeta)
Masetti: Ora di Vespro, impression
Martucci: Novelletta
Rossini: La Scala di Seta - Overture
12.04.1935, Studio dell’EIAR
Veretti; Sinfonia italiana
Falla: Ritual Fire Dance
Pick-Mangiagalli: Notturno e Rondò fantastico
08.07.1935, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Bach, J.S: Violin Concerto in E, BWV 1042 (soloist: Teddy Ferrero)
Mozart: Symphony 34
14.02.1936, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Mozart: Symphony 34
Handel: Solomon – “Piccola Ouverture” for 2 oboes and strings (first performance in Turin)184
Bach, J.S – arr. Pick-Mangiagalli, Riccardo: 2 Preludes
Ferro, Pietro: Premetamorfosi, Suite I from the ballet "Persefone" (first performance)
Wagner: Parsifal – Good Friday Music
Debussy, orch. Ravel: Danse (first performance in Turin)
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
184 Probably “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba”, which Ferrero and the EIAR orchestra also recorded for Cetra.
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23.02.1936, Augusteo, Rome
Rossini: La Scala di Seta – Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 “Pastoral”
Ferro, Pietro: Premetamorfosi, from the ballet “Persefone”
Tocchi: Record (first performance)
Debussy, orch. Ravel: Danse
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2
01.11.1936, Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Bach-Sonzogno: Adagio and Fugue from Toccata in C
Veprik, Alexander: Little Suite on Jewish Themes185
Ravel: Rhapsodie espagnole
Wagner: Die Meistersinger - Overture
30.12.1936, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Beethoven: Piano Concerto 4 (soloist: Franz Osborn)
Beethoven: Rondò capriccioso, op. 129 "Rage over a lost penny"
Beethoven: Andante favori, WoO 57
Beethoven: Ecossaise in D, WoO 22
(Piano solos by Franz Osborn)
Rossellini, Renzo: Canti di marzo (first performance in Turin)
Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole
Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival186
15.01.1937, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Beethoven: Symphony 3 “Eroica”
Martucci: Notturno, op. 70 no. 1187
Veretti, Antonio: Suite in C (from a fairy-tale by Andersen) (first performance in Turin)
Ravel: Boléro
13.05.1937, Gruppo Roma
Vivaldi-Molinari: Concerto in A
Beethoven: Symphony 4
Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain (soloist unnamed)
31.07.1937, Gruppo Roma
Mozart: Symphony no. 35 “Haffner”
Falla: El Sombrero – The Miller’s Dance, The Miller’s Wife’s Dance
Respighi: Feste Romane – Ottobrata
Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival
29.08.1937, Politeama Garibaldi, Palermo
Vivaldi: Concerto grosso in D minor
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Respighi: Feste Romane: Ottobrata
Falla: El Amor brujo: Pantomime
Zandonai: Giulietta e Romeo: Cavalcata
03.12.1937, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR, Coro di Torino della Radio Italiana (chorus
master: Achille Consoli)
Brahms: Symphony 3
Debussy: Nocturnes - Sirènes (first performance in Turin)
Respighi: Feste romane - Ottobrata
Strauss, R: Tod und Verklärung
185 Described in Radio Corriere 1936 no. 45 p.11 as Five Little Pieces, “without either title or literary references”.
Possibly the Jewish aspect had to be hastily concealed, or else the “Jewish” piece was replaced by one less likely to
offend Fascist susceptibilities.
186 According to the OSN site. According to the Radio Corriere, the concert ended with Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier.
187 According to the OSN site. According to the Radio Corriere, the Martucci Notturno was not on the programme.
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27.12.1937, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Liszt: Piano Concerto no. 1 (soloist: Carlo Vidusso)
Masetti: Ora di Vespro
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Liadov: Kikimora
Wagner: Götterdämmerung: Funeral March
20.05.1938, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Dvořák: Symphony 9 “From the New World”
Sibelius: The Swan of Tuonela
Zandonai: Giulietta e Romeo - Scena del torchio e cavalcata
09.10.1939, Milan – Turin – Genoa
Handel: Agrippina – Overture
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Debussy: Saxophone Rhapsody (soloist: Sergio Quercioli)
Falla: La Vida Breve: Introduction and Dance
Wagner: Die Meistersinger - Overture
28.10.1939
Savagnone, Giuseppe; Augusto, poema sinfonico
Veretti: Sinfonia italiana (Il popolo e il profeta)
Tocchi: Record: Impressioni sinfoniche
Respighi: Pini di Roma
(Concert in celebration of the March on Rome, 28.10.1922, “consisting entirely of music celebrating the
highest ideals of Fascism and of Romanità”).
22.11.1939, Stagione Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Vivaldi: Concerto in A minor
Scarlatti, D (transcribed by C. De Nardis): Burlesca
Martucci: Noveletta op. 82
Pizzetti: La Pisanella – Danza dello sparviero, Sul molo di Famagosta
Petrassi: Partita – Gagliarda, Giga
Zandonai: Giulietta e Romeo – Danza del torchio, Cavalcata
14.01.1940, Comunale di Firenze
Handel: Agrippina – Overture
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Khrennikov: Symphony no. 1
Pizzini: Il Poema delle Dolomiti
Turina: L’Oracion del Torero
Falla: La Vida breve – Interlude and dance
Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries
19.01.1940, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Peragallo, Mario: Concerto per orchestra (first performance)
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, suite no. 2
09.09.1940, Sibelius 75th birthday concert
Sibelius: Symphony no. 2
The Swan of Tuonela
Valse triste
Finlandia
04.11.1940
Vivaldi (transcribed by Pilati): L’estro armonico – Concerto no. 11 in D minor
Martucci: Giga op.61 no. 3, Noveletta, op.76 no. 2188
Peragallo: Notturno
188 See note 189. If op. 76 is correct, it would in any case be no. 1
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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Masetti: Ditirambo
Respighi: Feste Romane . Ottobrata
Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani: Prelude
06.01.1941, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Vivaldi: L'estro armonico op.3 – Concerto no.11
Khrennikov, Tikhon: Symphony no. 1
Pizzini, Carlo Alberto: Strapaese, impressioni dal vero
Turina: L’Oracion del Torero
Martucci: Novelletta, op. 76 no. 1189
Wagner: Die Meistersinger: Overture
09.04.1941, Orchestra Stabile della R. Accademia di Santa Cecilia
Bach, arr. Pick-Mangiagalli: 2 Preludes190
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
13.04.1941, Orchestra Stabile della R. Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano, Rome
Handel: Solomon – Overture
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto (soloist: Edoardo de Zathureczky)
Strauss, R: Also sprach Zarathustra
Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani - Overture
25.06.1941
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Bach: 2-Violin Concerto in D minor (soloists: Aldo Priano, Teddy Ferrero)
Peragallo: Lo Stendardo di San Giorgio - Intermezzo
Cagna, Enrico: Valzer umoresca
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina: Avt IV Prelude
Granados: Goyescas – Intermezzo
Rimsky-Korsakov: Rhapsodie espagnole – Movements 3-5
20.10.1941
Wolf-Ferrari: Il Segreto di Susanna – Overture
Mozart: Symphony no. 35 “Haffner”
Lavagnino, Angelo Francesco: Allegro da Concerto (soloist: Teddy Lavagnino) (first broadcast
performance)
Albeniz: Triana
05.11.1941
Beethoven: Violin Concerto (soloist: Carlo Felice Cillario)
Wagner: Die Meistersinger - Oveerture
20.11.1941, Stagione Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Lavagnino: Allegro da Concerto (soloist: Teddy Ferrero)
Falla: La Vida Breve – Intermezzo, Dance
Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries
25.11.1941, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Strauss, R: Also sprach Zarathustra
Fuga, Sandro: Preghiere
Mussorgsky: Khovanchina: Prelude to Act IV
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, suite no. 2
26.02.1942, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
189 This op. no. is possible, insofar as Martucci’s op.76 no.1 is a Novelletta for piano (Radio Corriere gives op.76 no. 2,
as in note 8), but an orchestration of it is not known. It seems more likely that the Novelletta played was op.82 no. 2,
of which Martucci made an orchestral version and which Ferrero conducted on several other occasions, as well as
making a recording of it with the EIAR orchestra.
190 According to Radio Corriere, these are two preludes from the “48”, so not the two Preludes arr. Pick-Mangiagalli
that Ferrero recorded with the EIAR orchestra and frequently performed.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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Beethoven: Egmont, overture
Beethoven: Piano Concerto 4 (soloist: Wilhelm Backhaus)
Pachetti, Giulio: Concerto in tre tempi
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod
29.05.1942, Teatro di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Vivaldi: L'estro armonico op.3 – Concerto no.11 (transcribed by Aleksandr Ziloti)
Pachetti, Giulio: Concerto in tre tempi - Canzone
Martucci: Novelletta, op. 82 no. 2
Ravel - Boléro
28.10.1942
Corelli: Suite from op. 5 (Sarabande, Giga, Badinerie)
Tommasini-Paganini: Il diavolo si diverte
Martucci: Notturne
Respighi: Pini di Roma
Verdi: La Forza del Destino – Overture
14.12.1942: Commenti Sinfonici da Film
Pizzetti: Scipione l’Africano (2 pieces)
Pick-Mangiagalli: Scandalo per bene (2 symphonic miniatures)
Masetti: Gelosia (symphonic synthesis)
28.12.1942: Commenti Sinfonici da Film
Rossellini: L’Uomo della croce (3 pieces)
Fusco: Il cine delle meraviglie (Canzone del venditore di uccelli)
Malipiero: Acciaio (sottosinfonia delle machine)
Carabella: Pastor Angelicus (2 pieces)
11.01.1943, Commenti Sinfonici da Film, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Masetti: Nozze di Sangue (Preludio, danza e finale)
Carabella: Vele ammainate (symphonic impressions)
Cicognini: Una romantica avventura (Danza al castello)
Veretti: Bengasi (symphonic synthesis)
This and the preceding two concert were organized for CINES and ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industria
Cinematographiche)
21.04.1943
Vivaldi: L’estro armonico – Concerto in D minor
Martucci: Notturno
Respighi: Pini di Roma
Verdi: I Vespri siciliani - Overture
07.05.1943, Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Orchestra Sinfonica dell’EIAR
Vivaldi: Concerto in G minor RV 531 (transcribed by Molinari)
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the 7 Veils
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
30.11.1945, Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Rossellini, Renzo: Canzone del ritorno
Shostakovich: Symphony 7 “Leningrad” (first performance in Turin)
27.05.1949, Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Tchaikovsky: Symphony 4
Donato Di Veroli: Tema e variazioni (first performance in Turin)
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
American traditional: G'wine to Hebb'n (orch. Richard Wolfe), Sometimes I feel like a motherless
child (orch. Angelo Francesco Lavagnino and Leonardo Savina), The glory road (orch. Richard Wolfe)
(Soloist: Michael Tor, baritone)
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06.10.1950, Teatro Nuovo, Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Strauss, R: Tod und Verklärung
27.10.1950, Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Casella: La giara, suite
Roussel: Le festin de l'araignée, symphonic fragments
Ravel: La valse
06.11.1950, Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Smetana: Ma Vlast – Vltava, Vysehrad, Tabor
29.12.1950, Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi" di Torino, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Beethoven: Coriolan
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto (soloist: Gioconda De Vito)
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Debussy: Nocturnes - Fêtes
Rimsky-Korsakov: Spanish Caprice
07.08.1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Weiner: Divertimento on Old Hungarian Dances, op. 20
Khachaturian: Piano Concerto (soloist: Sergio Perticaroli)
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
24.11.1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Ravel: Bolero
Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2
12.01.1954, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain (soloist: Ermelinda Magnetti)
El Sombrero: The Miller’s Dance, The Miller’s Wife’s Dance
El Amor Brujo: Pantomime, Ritual Fire Dance191
Appendix 2: Broadcasts from Poland192
02.02.1934, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra
Bach-Mangiagalli: 2 Preludes
Vivaldi-Siloti: Concerto grosso
Handel: Motet – Silete, venti (soloist: Guglielmetti)
Petrassi: Partita
Zandonai: Episodio sinfonico
Ravel: Bolero
26.04.1935, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra
Vivaldi: Concerto grosso in D minor
Scarlatti, D: Burlesca
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Rossini: La Scala di Seta – Overture
Masetti: Nenet e Rintin
Rossellini: Danza delle torcie
Petrassi: Toccata e giga
Zandonai: Romeo e Giulietta – Episodio sinfonico
04.12.1936, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Brahms: Piano Concerto no. 1 (soloist: Rubinstein)
191 This concert, broadcast at 22.15, was obviously not live.
192 Source: Radio Corriere: px
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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Strauss, R: Don Juan
Respighi: Pini di Roma
30.04.1937, Warsaw Philharmonic orchestra
Programme to be defined
29.04.1938
Soloist: R. Casadesus, no other information
Appendix 3: Broadcasts from Moscow193
24.10.1935
No information
20.05.1936
Rossini: Overture (not specified)
Beethoven: Symphony no, 7
Debussy: 3 Nocturnes
Falla: Ritual Fire Dance
Wagner: Die Meistersinger - Overture
21.05.1936
No information
23.05.1936
No information
Appendix 4: Concerts with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra194
08.02.1925, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Mascagni: Le maschere – Overture
Martucci: Giga, op. 61/ n. 3, trascrizione per orchestra
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Scherzo
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - Overture
11.02.1925, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Mascagni: Le maschere - Overture
Martucci: Notturno op. 70/1
Scarlatti, D: Sonata in g minor K.450, transcribed for orchestra
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
05.06.1929, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Martucci: Novelletta op. 82/
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Funeral March
Imperatori: La tomba nel Busento, poema sinfonico
Sibelius: Valse triste op. 44/1
Masetti: Contrasti, per orchestra – no.2, Nenette e Rintintin
Strauss: Don Juan
08.06.1929, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique”
Sibelius: Finlandia
Spagnoli: Due intermezzi, per orchestra
Debussy: Petite suite
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - Overture
193 Source: Radio Corriere: htpx
194 Source: s.find
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12.06.1929, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Weber: Der Freischütz - Overture
Martucci: Notturno op. 70/1
Gasco, Alberto: Buffalmacco, Preludio giocoso per orchestra
Mascagni: I Rantzau – Preludio
Sibelius: Finlandia
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina: Prelude Act IV
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
19.01.1930, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Coriolan
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11, transcription for strings and organ
Bach, orch. Elgar: Fantasia and Fugue in c minore BWV 537
Holst: The Planets – Mars, Venus, Jupiter
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel
22.01.1930, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Coriolan
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11, transcription for strings and organ
Bach, orch. Elgar: Fantasia and Fugue in c minore BWV 537
Wagner: Parsifal – Good Friday Music
Sibelius: Valse triste
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel
26.01.1930, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Wolf-Ferrari: Il segreto di Susanna - Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Gibilaro: Largo, per orchestra
Debussy: Fêtes
Strauss: Tod und Verklärung
04.01.1931, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Spagnoli: Ouverture romantica
Debussy: Rapsodie for saxophone and orchestra
Rossellini: Suite in 3 tempi
Stravinsky: Feu d'artifice op. 4
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
07.01.1931, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Mascagni: Le maschere – Overture
Martucci: Novelletta op. 82/2
Puccini: Manon Lescaut – Intermezzo
Mancinelli: Cleopatra, incidental music – Overture
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
11.01.1931, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Beethoven: Symphony no. 7
Ravel: Alborada del gracioso
Prokofiev: The Love of Three Oranges – March and Scherzo
Masetti: Il gioco del cucù, for piano and strings
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
15.01.1933, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Brahms: Symphony no. 1
Honegger: Le chant de Nigamon
Rossellini: Hoggar, suite for orchestra
Liadov Kikimora
Ravel: Boléro
18.01.1933, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
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Bach: Brandenburg Concerto no. 3
Weinberger: Passacaglia, for organ and orchestra
Alfano: Due intermezzi, for strings
Ljadov: 8 Popular Songs
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Flight of the Bumble-Bee
Ravel: Boléro
14.07.1934, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
Albeniz: Iberia – Triana
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Overture
18.07.1934, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Egmont – Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade
Dukas: L'apprenti sorcier
Strauss, R: Tod und Verklärung
13.07.1935, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Brahms: Symphony no. 1
Catalani: A sera, for strings
Mancinelli: Scene veneziane – Fuga degli amanti a Chioggia
Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival
Ravel: Boléro
23.02.1936, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo
Rossini: La scala di seta – Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 “Pastoral”
Ferro: Prometamorfosi
Tocchi: Record
Debussy orch. Ravel: Danse
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, suite no. 2
26.02.1936, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Augusteo195
Bach orch. Pick-Mangiagalli: 2 Preludes
Handel: Samson – Introduction Part III.
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, suite no. 2
Calabrini: Suite agreste
Masetti: Sagra, poema sinfonico
Debussy orch. Ravel: Danse
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
24.06.1936, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
Pick-Mangiagalli: Notturno e rondò fantastico
Sibelius: Valse triste
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture
27.06.1936, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 7
Masetti: Sagra, poema sinfonico
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell - Overture
26.06.1937, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Brahms: Symphony no. 3
195 The Augusteo, much admired for its acoustics, was closed and demolished during 1937 as part of Mussolini’s
“urban improvement” plan.
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Stravinsky: The Firebird – Suite no. 2
Puccini: Manon Lescaut - Intermezzo
Wagner: Tannhäuser - Overture
16.01.1938, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano196
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Lavagnino: Tempo alto
Ravel: La valse
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
19.01.1938, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Mozart: Symphony no. 35 “Haffner”
Ravel: La valse
Zador: Sinfonia Technica - La turbina
Castagnone: Preludio giocoso
Prokofiev: The Love of Three Oranges – March and Scherzo
Dukas: L'apprenti sorcier
04.12.1938, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Dvořák: Symphony no. 9 “New World”
Beethoven: Coriolan
Malatesta: Scherzo-Danza
Ravel: Rhapsodie espagnole
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Funeral March
10.07.1939, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique”
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Ravel: La valse
14.07.1939, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 7
Respighi: Feste romane – Ottobrata
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Flight of the Bumble-Bee
Falla: La vida breve – Dance
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
24.03.1940, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Brahms: Symphony no. 4
Peragallo: Concerto per orchestra
Turina: Oración del torero
Ravel: Boléro
27.03.1940, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Vivaldi: Concerto in a minor RV 522, op. 3/8
Khrennikov: Symphony no. 1
Pizzini: Strapaese, impressioni dal vero
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel
Ravel: Boléro
12.07.1940, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Tocchi: Record
Strauss, R: Tod und Verklärung
15.07.1940, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Pizzini: Strapaese, impressioni dal vero
Sibelius: Valse triste
196 The Teatro Adriano was adapted for use as a concert hall and hosted the Santa Cecilia Orchestra from 1936 to
1946. It is now a cinema.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
09.04.1941, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Bach, orch. Pick-Mangiagalli: 2 Preludes
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1
Masetti: Idillio e Ditirambo
Falla: El sombrero de tres picos - Suite
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
13.04.1941, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Handel: Samson – Introduction Part III
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto (soloist: Ede Zathureczky)
Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra
Verdi: I vespri siciliani - Overture
04.07.1941, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Brahms: Symphony no. 4
Sibelius: Valse triste
Wolf-Ferrari: I quattro rusteghi – Intermezzo
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio spagnolo
08.07.1941, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Sibelius: Symphony no. 2
Peragallo: Lo stendardo di S. Giorgio – Prelude Act III
Granados: Goyescas – Intermezzo
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
18.01.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 “Pastoral”
Fiume: Introduzione ad una tragicommedia
Debussy: Fêtes
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2
21.01.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11
Scarlatti, D orch. De Nardis: Burlesca
Bach: 2-Violin Concerto in d minor BWV 1043 (soloist: Aldo Priano, Teddy Ferrero)
Cagna Cabiati: Valzer-umoresca
Ravel: La valse
Strauss, J [arr. Ferrero?]: Waltz Suite
30.06.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Weber: Der Freischütz - Overture
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Funeral March
Strauss, J [arr. Ferrero?]: Waltz Suite
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Flight of the Bumble-Bee
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
03.07.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Paganini: Moto perpetuo
Albéniz: Iberia – Triana
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
22.11.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Pachetti: Concerto per orchestra
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune
Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival
25.11.1942, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p67 April 2018
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique”
Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, per orchestra
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Verdi: La forza del destino – Overture
02.01.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Sibelius: Symphony no. 2
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio spagnolo
09.01.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 7
Ravel: Alborada del gracioso
Catalani: A sera, for strings
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina: Prelude Act IV
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - Overture
05.03.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Brahms: Symphony no. 1
Brahms: Violin Concerto (soloist: Gioconda De Vito)
04.06.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11 transcribed for wind and strings
Debussy: Fêtes
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
18.06.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 6 “Eroica”
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Scherzo
Debussy: Fêtes
Verdi: I vespri siciliani – Overture
20.06.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
Martucci: Novelletta, op. 82/2
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina – Prelude Act IV
Falla: La vida breve – Intermezzo and Dance
Ravel: Boléro
28.07.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Coro della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia
(Chorus master: Bonaventura Somma), Teatro Adriano
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 4
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2 for orchestra
Sibelius: Valse triste
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
30.07.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 4
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G (soloist: Guido Agosti)
Martucci: Notturno op. 70/1
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
17.12.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Shostakovich: Symphony no. 7 “Leningrad”
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture
20.12.1944, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Shostakovich: Symphony no. 7 “Leningrad”
Ljadov: Kikimora
Verdi: I vespri siciliani – Overture
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p68 April 2018
10.01.1945, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Vivaldi: Concerto in d minor RV 565, op. 3/11, transcribed for strings and organ
Ravel: Boléro
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture
Wagner: Parsifal – Good Friday Music
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Funeral March
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Valkyries
17.01.1945, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Coriolan
Beethoven: Triple Concerto (soloists: Guido Agosti, Gioconda De Vito, Enrico Mainardi)
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
31.01.1945, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
14.03.1945, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Beethoven: Coriolan
Beethoven: Violin Concerto (soloist: Gioconda De Vito)
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
19.03.1945, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Adriano
Vivaldi: Concerto in a minor RV 522, op. 3/8
Walton: Viola Concerto (soloist: Renzo Sabatini)
Wagner: Götterdämmerung – Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Pelude and Liebestod
Wagner: Tannhäuser – Overture
26.07.1946, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 4
Peragallo: Lo stendardo di S. Giorgio – Prelude Act III.
Pachetti: Concerto per orchestra – Canzone
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
29.07.1946, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
Respighi: Feste romane – Ottobrata
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Wagner: Die Walküre – Ride of the Vakyries
12.08.1946, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Catalani: A sera, for strings
Sibelius: Valse triste
Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Scherzo
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
30.10.1946, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Comunale Morlacchi, Perugia
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Debussy: Fêtes
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture
04.11.1946, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Regio, Parma
Beethoven. Symphony no. 5
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Debussy: Fêtes
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Verdi: I vespri siciliani – Overture
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p69 April 2018
05.11.1946, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Comunale, Modena
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Debussy: Fêtes
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture
07.11.1946, Orchestra della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Comunale, L’Aquila
Rossini: La scala di seta - Overture
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no. 5 “Emperer” (soloist: Ornella Puliti Santoliquido)
Respighi: Gli uccelli
Debussy: Fêtes
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture.
22.12.1946, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina197
Vivaldi: Concerto in a minor RV 522, op. 3/8
Mozart: Symphony no. 34
Alfano: 2 intermezzi for strings
Debussy: Fêtes
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
02.01.1947, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Rossini: La scala di seta – Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
Veretti: Il galante tiratore, suite from the ballet
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (soloist: Mario Carta)
01.06.1947, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Beethoven. Coriolan
Sibelius: Symphony no. 2
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Respighi: Pini di Roma
04.06.1947, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Beethoven. Coriolan
Sibelius: Symphony no. 2
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
10.09.1947, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Corelli/Pinelli: Suite dall'op. 5, transcribed for strings
Brahms: Hungarian Dances
Saint-Saëns: Danse macabre
Borodin: Prince Igor – Polovtsian Dances
Sibelius: Valse triste
Sonzogno: Tango
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
Ravel: Boléro
26.11.1947, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Di Veroli: Piano Concerto in a minor (soloist: Adriana Brugnolini)
Prokofiev: The Love of Three Oranges – March and Scherzo
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
14.03.1948, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
197 The Teatro Argentina was intended as a temporary home while a new auditorium was constructed. This story
stretches several decades beyond the scope of the present article.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p70 April 2018
Gershwin: Piano Concerto (soloist: Adriana Brugnolini)
Spirituals: G'wine to Hebb'n (arr. Wolfe), Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, De Glory Road
(arr. Wolfe) (soloist: Michael Tor)
Gould: Latin-American Symphonette
07.11.1948, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Brahms: Symphony no. 4
Longo: Canto funebre e tema ostinato
Debussy: Saxophone Rapsodie
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
10.11.1948, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Vivaldi: Concerto in A RV 552
Mozart: Symphony no. 34
Caracciolo: Allegro
Falla: El sombrero de tres picos – selection
Dukas: L'apprenti sorcier
26.08.1951, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 2 in D op. 36198
Carabella: Variazioni sinfoniche
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde – Prelude and Liebestod
29.08.1951, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Dvořák: Symphony no. 9 “From the New World”
Gershwin: Cuban Overture
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina – Prelude Act IV
Ravel: Boléro
22.06.1952, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Falla: La vida breve – Dance
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell – Overture
25.06.1952, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 6 “Pathétique”
Respighi: Feste romane – Ottobrata
Rimsky-Korsakov: The Flight of the Bumble-Bee
Albeniz: Iberia – Triana
Gershwin: Cuban Overture
26.08.1953, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
Ravel: Boléro
28.08.1953, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Fonte Anticolana, Fiuggi
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Martucci: Notturno op. 70/1
Falla: El amor brujo – Ritual Fire Dance
Zandonai: Danza del torchio e Cavalcata
30.08.1953, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Basilica di Massenzio
Gershwin: Piano Concerto (soloist: Armando Trovajoli)
Gershwin: An American in Paris
198 Sic. Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony is in C minor op. 17. His Fourth Symphony, which Ferrero conducted often, is
op. 36, though in F minor. An intriguing possibility is that this was Beethoven’s Symphony no. 2 in D op. 36. Intriguing
because Ferrero did not conduct this symphony on any other occasion, at least with the Santa Cecilia or EIAR
orchestras. This would make a very short programme, though (unless the Carabella is very long). Probably he
conducted Tchaikovsky’s Fourth.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p71 April 2018
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (soloist: Armando Trovajoli)
31.08.1953, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Fonte Anticolana, Fiuggi
Respighi: Fontane di Roma
Gershwin: An american in Paris
Catalani: A sera, for strings
Sibelius: Valse triste
Ravel: Boléro
13.12.1953, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Wolf-Ferrari: Il segreto di Susanna - Overture
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
Weiner: Divertimento for strings on four old Hungarian dances
Gershwin: Porgy and Bess – Symphonic Suite
20.01.1954, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro Argentina
Brahms: Symphony no. 4
Pizzini: Strapaese, impressioni dal vero
Debussy orch. Ravel: Danse
Mussorgsky: Khovanschina – Prelude Act IV
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg – Overture
Appendix 5: Post-war concerts in Leningrad199
13*-14 May 1951
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4
Wagner: Siegfried’s Rhine journey
Martucci: Notturno
Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani – Overture
16-17* May 1951
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Debussy: Fêtes
Sibelius: Valse triste
Ravel: Bolero
9-10-12* February 1952
Vivaldi: Concerto Grosso in a minor
Mozart: Symphony no. 34
Martucci: Novelletta
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
14-15* February 1952
Dvořák: Symphony no. 9 “From the New World”
Respighi: Feste romane – Ottobrata
Mussorgsky: Khovanchina – Prelude Act IV
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
The concerts marked with an asterisk were recorded and the items available via Emilio Pessina’s YouTube
channel have been discussed above.
Appendix 6: Post-war concerts in Moscow200
27 April 1951, USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Great Hall of the Conservatoire
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no. 4
Strauss, R: Don Juan
Di Veroli: Theme and variations
Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani – Overture
199 Information provided by Alexander Negrin
200 Information provided by Alexander Negrin
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
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29 April 1951, Large Symphony orchestra of the All-Union Committee of Radioinformation, Great Hall of
Moscow Conservatoire
Beethoven: Symphony no. 3 “Eroica”
Debussy: Fëtes
Martucci: Notturno
Wagner: The Ride of the Valkyries
24 May 1951, USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Great Hall of Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5
Rossini: Il Signor Bruschino . Overture
Strauss, J: Waltz Potpourri
Strauss, R: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils
27 May 1951, USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Great Hall of the Conservatoire
Brahms: Symphony no. 4
Mussorgsky: Khovanchina – Prelude Act IV
Ravel: Bolero
Sibelius: "Valse Triste"
5 February 1952, USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Great Hall of Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire
Beethoven: Coriolan
Beethoven: Violin Concerto (soloist: Galina Barinova)
Beethoven: Symphony no. 4
21 February 1952, Large Symphony orchestra of the All-Union Committee of Radioinformation, Tchaikovsky
Concert Hall
Dvořák: Symphony no. 9 “From the New World”
Martucci: Noveletta
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2
7 March 1952, USSR State Symphony Orchestra, Great Hall of Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire
Mozart: Symphony no. 34
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell - Overture
Liadov: Kikimora
Strauss, R: Till Eulenspiegel
Soviet orchestras did not normally invite foreign guest conductors on an annual basis, but a further tour
had been planned for 1954201
.
Appendix 7: Ferrero recordings preserved by RAI
8 August 1950, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, studio
Smetana: Vltava, broadcast 6 November 1950
The OSN site (see Appendix 1) lists a (rather short) concert on 6 November 1950 at which
Ferrero conducted three pieces from Ma Vlast: Vysehrad, Vltava and Blanik.
The Radio Corriere for 6 November 1950 lists a broadcast by the Turin orchestra at 22.30,
so clearly not live, with two pieces from Ma Vlast: Vltava conducted by Ferrero and Tabor
conducted by Mario Fighera.
27 June 1952, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, live
Beethoven: Symphony no. 5, not broadcast
Strauss, R. Don Juan, not broadcast
Falla: La Vida Breve – Dance, not broadcast
Rossini: Guglielmo Tell – Overture, broadcast 27 June 1952
The Santa Cecilia site gives 22 June 1952 as the date for this concert
The Radio Corriere for 27 June 1952 does not list the Rossini broadcast
11 June 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, live?
Weiner: Divertimento, broadcast 7 August 1953
201 Related to Alexander Negrin by Armando Trovajoli.
Forgotten Artists – 26. Willy Ferrero
MusicWeb International p73 April 2018
Khachaturian: Piano Concerto (soloist: Sergio Perticaroli), 7 August 1953
The Radio Corriere for 7 August 1953 lists this as a live concert, including interval talk. By
this date RAI was habitually recording their orchestral concerts and broadcasting them
later.
The concert concluded with Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, which was re-broadcast four
times during the 1960s but is now missing.
14 June 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, studio
Vivaldi-Siloti: Concerto in d minor op.3/11, broadcast 16 July 1953
Martucci: Notturno, broadcast 16 July 1953
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, broadcast 16 July 1953
Verdi: I Vespri Siciliani – Overture, broadcast 16 July 1953
Albeniz: Triana, not broadcast
The Radio Corriere for 16 July 1953 lists the four items as above.
Second versions, recorded on the same date and not broadcast, exist of the Debussy and
Verdi items.
30 August 1953, Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, live
Gershwin: Piano Concerto (pianist: Armando Trovajoli), not broadcast
Gershwin: An American in Paris, broadcast 10 September 1953
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (pianist: Armando Trovajoli), broadcast 10 September 1953
The Radio Corriere for 10 September 1953 lists the two items as above.
The entire concert is available on CD and is discussed above.
5 September 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, studio
Respighi: Gli uccelli, broadcast 25 October 1953
Pick-Mangiagalli: Notturno e Rondò fantastic, broadcast 25 October 1953
The Radio Corriere for 25 October 1953 lists the two items as above.
In addition, the programme concluded with the Danza del Torchio e Cavalcata from
Zandonai’s Giulietta e Romeo. This recording is evidently missing.
24 September 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI, studio
Ravel: Boléro, broadcast 24 November 1953
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloë – Suite no. 2, broadcast 24 November 1953
Ravel: Alborada del Gracioso, broadcast 25 March 1954
The Radio Corriere issues for 24 November and 25 March 1954 list the broadcasts as above.
Incidentally, Alborada was preceded by a performance of Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque in
which the RAI Rome Orchestra was conducted by Jascha Horenstein, of all people.
The 24 September sessions included two further Ravel items which seem not to have been
broadcast and are missing: Pavane pour une infant défunte and his orchestration of
Debussy’s Danse.
Boléro and Daphnis were included on the Musica Classica issue.
25 September 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Beethoven: Symphony no. 1, not broadcast
Included in the Musica Classica issue.
25 November 1953, Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della RAI
Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain (soloist: Ermelinda Magnetti), not broadcast
Falla: El sombrero des tres picos: Miller’s Dance and Miller’s Wife’s Dance, not broadcast
Falla: El Amor brujo: Pantomima and Ritual Fire Dance, not broadcast
According to the Radio Corriere for 12 January 1954, the entire programme was broadcast
on that date.
The dances are included in the Musica Classica issue.