Manuscripts and Documents from the Giorgio Cini Foundation Music Archives

Giovanni Morelli in Memoriam

The Giorgio Cini Foundation Institute of Music works to safeguard and make the best possible use of its 20th- and 21st-century archives with a special focus on those created by leading figures from the worlds of music, dance and audiovisual production. The documents on show come from eight archives, which are separate but interrelated in documentary and historical terms. Arranged according to the order of events, six showcases document stays in Venice or visits to the international Venetian scene by Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Aurel Milloss, Luigi Cortese, Gino Gorini, Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, Camillo Togni and Nino Rota. They thus range from Arnold Schönberg’s Venetian stage on his celebrated Italian tour with Pierrot Lunaire and Casella’s Concerto for String Quartet to the world première of Camillo Togni’s Gesang zur Nacht, but also include Malipiero composing for film and writing on Stravinsky. The overall effect is a polyphonic chorus of music history, albeit with some irreconcilable or not yet reconciled features between works such as Gorini’s Sonata for Piano and Cello and Cortese’s Cinque momenti musicali, or, surprisingly, Bruni Tedeschi’s Diagramma circolare and Mario Monicelli’s The Great War. The last showcase is devoted to Rota’s music for The Godfather.

Picture: Alfredo Casella, Concerto per quartetto d’archi, draft (1923-1924). Giorgio Cini Foundation onlus, Archivio Alfredo Casella, Quaderno 8 (MUS 46), detail of f. 6v.