Camillo Togni

Camillo Togni (18 October 1922 – 28 November 1993) was an Italian composer, teacher, and pianist. Coming from a family of independent means, he was able to pursue his art as he saw fit, regardless of changing fashions or economic pressure.

Togni was born in Gussago, near Brescia. He began studying piano at the age of 7, with Franco Margola in Brescia, then from 1939 to 1943 with Alfredo Casella in Rome and Siena, and Giovanni Anfossi in Milan. Later he studied with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, receiving his diploma from the Conservatory of Parma in 1946 (Anon. n.d.; Osmond-Smith 2001).

He studied Classics in Brescia, musical aesthetics at the University of Milan, and in 1948 graduated in philosophy from the University of Pavia with a dissertation titled “The Aesthetics of B. Croce and the Problem of Musical Interpretation”. Contemporaneously, he began to study composition in Brescia with Margola, subsequently in Rome and in Siena with Casella. He was active as a concert artist until 1953; subsequently, he performed only his own music in public.

Michelangeli introduced him in 1938 to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which affected him profoundly and caused him to develop a tremendous interest in the Second Viennese School. During the war, he gained access to Schoenberg’s scores through Luigi Rognoni (), with whom he was studying. By 1940, Schoenberg’s influence was clearly at work in Togni’s Prima serenata for piano, and his new-found technique came to full flower in the Variazioni for piano and orchestra (1945–46), with which he made his compositional debut at the 1946 Venice Festival of Contemporary Music (Osmond-Smith 2001). In 1949, together with Luigi Dallapiccola and Bruno Maderna, he addressed the First International Dodecaphonic Congress in Milan. From 1951 to 1957 he attended the Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, but he found the turn toward aleatoricism there, beginning in 1957, alien to his nature, and did not return until he was invited back in 1990.

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