Vittorio Gnecchi

Vittorio Gnecchi (17 July 1876 – 5 February 1954) was an Italian composer. Life Vittorio Gnecchi Ruscone was the son of a wealthy industrialist. Thanks to his solid financial position, he was able to take private lessons, and had among his teachers Michele Saladino (who was also the teacher of Pietro Mascagni and Victor de Sabata), Tullio Serafin, Gaetano Coronaro and Carlo Gatti. As soon as he was nineteen years old, he achieved success with the pastoral action Virtù d’amore, which allowed him to publish his work with the prestigious publisher Ricordi. The next work was the opera Cassandra, whose libretto, taken from Oresteia by Aeschylus, was first set by Gnecchi himself, then entrusted to the librettist Luigi Illica. Cassandra was completed in 1903 and premiered on 5 December 1905 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna under the direction of Arturo Toscanini with Solomiya Krushelnytska and Giuseppe Borgatti. Shortly after the first performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss (25 January 1909), an article appeared in Italy by musicologist Giovanni Tebaldini, entitled “Telepatia Musicale”. In this article, Cassandra and Elektra were compared, and the author concluded that Strauss must ha