Luigi Mancinelli

Luigi Mancinelli (Italian pronunciation: [luˈidʒi mantʃiˈnɛlli]; 5 February 1848, Orvieto – 2 February 1921, Rome) was a leading Italian orchestral conductor. He also composed music for the stage and concert hall and played the cello.

As a conductor he was active both at home (especially in the cities of Bologna and Rome) and abroad (in Madrid, London, New York, Buenos Aires and Lisbon). He was especially associated with the music of Richard Wagner as well as that of major Italian opera composers such as Verdi and Puccini.

He was succeeded as pianoforte professor at the Bologna Conservatory in 1886 by Giuseppe Martucci.

Mancinelli was on the conductors' roster of the New York Metropolitan Opera for 10 years, ending in 1903. In that capacity he conducted 531 performances of a variety of mainstream operas by Italian, French and German composers; but, in 1899, he led a performance of his own opera, Ero e Leandro, which had a libretto by Arrigo Boito. He wrote a number of other operas as well, and composed orchestral music and even some film music.

The main theater in his birthplace of Orvieto was renamed the Teatro Mancinelli in his honor.

Brief examples of his artistry as a conductor can be heard on the Mapleson Cylinders, which were recorded during actual Metropolitan Opera performances at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the clearest of these primitive-sounding cylinders consists of a brief extract from the "Torture Scene" in Tosca, recorded in 1903. On it, the Italian tenor Emilio De Marchi appears as Mario Cavaradossi, the role which he had created at the opera's world premiere in Rome three years earlier.

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