Riccardo Zandonai

Riccardo Zandonai (28 May 1883 – 5 June 1944) was an Italian composer.

Zandonai was born in Borgo Sacco, Rovereto, then part of Austria–Hungary. As a young man, he showed such an aptitude for music that he entered the Pesaro Conservatorio in 1899 and completed his studies in 1902; he completed the nine-year curriculum in only three years. Among his teachers was Pietro Mascagni, who regarded him highly.

During this period he composed the Inno degli studenti trentini, that is, the anthem of the organised irredentist youth of his native province. His essay for graduation was an opera named Il ritorno di Odisseo (The Return of Ulysses), based on a poem by Giovanni Pascoli, for singers, choir and orchestra. The same year 1902 he put to music another Pascoli poem, Il sogno di Rosetta. At a soirée in Milan in 1908, he was heard by Arrigo Boito, who introduced him to Giulio Ricordi, one of the dominating figures in Italian musical publishing at the time.

Zandonai's fame rests largely on his opera Francesca da Rimini, a free adaptation of a tragedy which Gabriele D'Annunzio had written expanding a passage from Dante's Inferno; it has never fallen entirely from the repertoire, and has been recorded several times. Some time after the premiere, he married soprano Tarquinia Tarquini, for whom he had created the role of Conchita in the eponymous opera (dealing with a topic that Puccini had first considered and then rejected).

Soon, however, war broke out; patriotic Zandonai in 1916 composed a song, Alla Patria ("For the Motherland"), dedicated to Italy, with the result that his home and belongings in Sacco (then still in Austro–Hungarian hands) were confiscated (they were returned to him after the war).

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