Roberto De Simone

Roberto De Simone (; 25 August 1933 – 6 April 2025) was an Italian stage director, academic teacher, playwright, composer and ethnomusicologist. Beginning as a harpsichordist, he turned to research of early Italian music and co-founded the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare to perform it. The musical La Gatta Cenerentola, which he authored, composed and directed, was first performed at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto in 1976 and received international recognition. He directed the San Carlo Theatre from 1981 to 1987, and was stage director of operas at La Scala in Milan from 1986. He was director of the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella from 1995 to 2000. Life and career Born in Naples on 25 August 1933, At the same time he started being active as an ethnomusical researcher and essayist, mainly focused on the southern Italy folk music of oral tradition, with specific interest in tarantism and funeral laments. In the second half of the 1960s he met some musicians who shared with him an interest in traditional music, and this encounter led to the foundation of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, with whom De Simone collaborated for a decade. He approached the in 1972 as a pos