Where and when
Florence and Tuscany, the staging, the artistic organization
Conference organized by Mila De Santis – SAGAS Department, University of Florence “Pegaso” Interuniversity Doctorate in History of Arts and Entertainment
In collaboration with Museo Novecento, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino – Fondazione, mdi ensemble
Institutional greetings: Valentina Gensini, Stefano Zamponi, Andrea De Marchi
Speakers: Maria Ida Biggi, Moreno Bucci, Mila De Santis, Stefania Gitto, Renzo Guardenti, Jürgen Maehder, Michela Niccolai, Carlo Sisi, Ivanka Stoïanova, Daniela Tortora
The study day at the Museo Novecento concludes the cycle of events dedicated to the theatrical universe of Sylvano Bussotti, which began in Palermo in November 2015, with the revival of his debut work La passion selon Sade, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first performance absolute took place as part of the “New Music International Weeks” in Palermo on September 5, 1965.
The cycle continued with the conferences-concerts held in Rome (September-October 2016) and in Milan (May 2017), dedicated to the experience of the Bussottioperaballet and other significant junctions of his multifaceted, polymorphous story as a composer of musical theater.
The Florentine meeting, in which musicologists, theater historians and art historians of Italian and foreign institutions take part, intends to retrace some salient moments of Sylvano Bussotti’s presence in Florence and Tuscany, starting from the years of artistic and musical training: the network of friends and professional relationships, the performances of his works at the Municipal Theater, the teaching course of theatrical composition at the Music School of Fiesole, the experience of the mettle en scène at the Puccini Festival of Torre del Lago.
The investigation will therefore extend to other stages of his career as an opera director, as well as to the actor’s aspect, with the aim of contributing, also on the basis of unpublished documents, to the return of a complex theatrical practice, made up of the meeting of disciplines, different texts and languages and the cooperation of interpreters, musicians, artists, choreographers, dancers, mimes, actors and directors: a great patrimony to be drawn on even today both in a historical-critical context and in a productive perspective.
MARIA IDA BIGGI
She teaches History of Theater and Entertainment at the Cà Foscari University of Venice and is Director of the Institute for Theater and Opera at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. Her field of study is the history of theater in the declinations of direction and staging of melodrama, scenography, stage space and architecture. She also deals with the figure of the actor in Italian theater in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On these topics she has published numerous volumes and essays, as well as participating in international study conferences and curating prestigious exhibitions in Italy and abroad. The most recent publications include the catalog of the Eleonora Duse exhibition. Journey around the world (Turin, Skira, 2010) and the editing of the volume of studies in honor of Elena Povoledo Stage illusion and theatrical practice (Florence, Le Lettere, 2016).
MORENO BUCCI
Art historian, teacher, curator of the Historical Archive of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he has dealt, with publications and exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, on the relationship between painting and scene in the Italian twentieth century and in particular of GDe Chirico, Sensani, Sironi, Chini, Casorati. He has also written on historical Tuscan nineteenth-century painting and contemporary painting (Lorenzo Bonechi (1955-1994): painter of light, Florence, Aska, 2004). Among the many publications we mention the contributions to Visualità del ‘Maggio’. Sketches, sketches, shows 1933-1979, Rome, De Luca, 1979; the catalog of the exhibition Sylvano Bussotti’s work: music, sign, image, project, theater, sets, costumes, tools and whims from the 1940s at Bussottioperaballett, Milan, Electa, 1988; the inventory of the papers and drawings of the Archive of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (The papers of a theater. The Historical Archive of the Municipal Theater of Florence and of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino 1928-1952, Florence, Olschki, 2008; of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Inventario, Florence, Olschki, I-2010, II-2012, III-2014, IV-in press).
MILA DE SANTIS
Professor of Musicology and History of Music at the University of Florence, she is the author of numerous studies on the history of Italian music of the eighteenth, nineteenth and especially twentieth centuries: in particular on Casella, Dallapiccola, Savinio, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Malipiero, Petrassi, Berio. She has also dealt with poetry for music, including editing the poetic texts of the madrigals by Marc’Antonio Ingegneri (Lucca, LIM, 1999), and Andrea Gabrieli (Milan, Ricordi, 2001); of musical lexicology; history of music criticism (he recently coordinated the 2012 three-year National Interest Research Program “Musical articles in nineteenth-century Italian newspapers” – ARTMUS). Among the latest publications are the essays Beyond “Opera”, another kind of theater: on the dramaturgy of “A-Ronne” in Le théatre musical de Luciano Berio, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2016 and Alberto Savinio. Criticism as an invention, in the new edition of Box sound, Milan, the Saggiatore, 2017, as well as the edition of the critical writings of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, The lost pen, Rome, Aracne, 2017.
STEFANIA GITTO
Graduated in Musical Philology at the University of Siena and in Musicology in Pavia-Cremona, librarian and scholar of Tuscan musical collections with particular attention to those formed in the 18th century, she is currently in charge of the Library and Archives of the School of Music of Fiesole and of the Music Documentation Center of Tuscany for the Region.
Engaged in the direction of cataloging and enhancement projects of musical funds in major Tuscan institutions, she is responsible for the production secretariat of the Anima Mundi review of sacred music in Pisa, directed by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Since 2012 she has been part of the Austrian research center Studium Faesulanum and is a founding member of the cultural association Rinnovata Accademia dei Generosi.
RENZO GUARDENTI
He is professor of Performing Arts at the University of Florence and has taught as a visiting professor at the Institut d’Études Théâtrale de l’Université de Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and the Université de Caen-Basse Normandie. Specialist of the Commedia dell’Arte in France and of the Théâtre de la Foire, he is also scientific director of the digital archive of Dionysos theatrical iconography. His publications include Gli italiani a Parigi. The Comédie Italienne (1660-1697). History, stage practice, iconography, Rome, Bulzoni, 1990 (2 vols.), The theater fairs. Paths of the forain theater of the early eighteenth century. With a choice of plays performed at the Foires Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent (1711-1715), Rome, Bulzoni, 1995, Actors of paper. Iconographic motifs from antiquity to the nineteenth century, Rome, Bulzoni, 2005, Sguardi sul teatro. Essays on theatrical iconography, Rome, Bulzoni, 2008.
JUERGEN MAEHDER
She studied musicology (Thrasybulos Georgiades, Stefan Kunze), composition (Günter Bialas), philosophy (Arnold Metzger), theater history (Klaus Lazarowicz), opera direction (August Everding) and German literature (Walther Killy) in Munich and Bern . After obtaining a doctorate in musicology at the University of Bern, she was a researcher at the German Historical Institute in Rome; in the 1980s she taught musicology and history of theater at the University of Bern. Professor of musicology at the University of North Texas in 1988, she was called in 1989 to the chair of musicology at the Freie Universität in Berlin, where he founded the Puccini Research Center. Professor emeritus in 2014, she currently divides his time between teaching musicology at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano / Ticino), her collaboration with the Salzburg Festival and musicological research in the Republic of China / Taiwan. She has to his credit numerous publications, participations in conventions and conferences in Europe, the United States, Asia and the Pacific area, concerning the history of opera in Italy, France and Germany; Italian and European librettology; the history of orchestration; the music of the twentieth century (especially the history of avant-garde musical theater); the history of opera direction; the philosophy of music.
MICHELA NICCOLAI
Docteur en musique et musicologie, Michela Niccolai est actuellement collaboratrice scientifique à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles et est en train de réaliser le catalogue du Fonds Bornemann (cabarets, café-concert, music-hall) pour le Palazzetto Bru Zane.
Auteur de trois monographies (La Dramaturgie de Gustave Charpentier, 2011, et les deux éditions critiques de mises en scène historiques : Madame Butterfly à Paris, 2012, et Pelléas et Mélisande : the Staging of Albert Carré, 2017), elle a produit de nombreux articles sur l’opéra, la mise en scène et la musique des cabarets en France et en Italie entre XIXe et XXe siècles.
Elle vient de terminer le catalogue électronique du fonds de mises en scène lyriques conservées dans la Bibliothèque de la Régie théâtrale (Paris, ART, BHVP, parution décembre 2017) et prépare, avec Charlotte Ginot, un ouvrage sur Musique et Fascisme pour la maison d’édition Fayard.
CARLO SISI
He was director, until 2006, of the Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti in Florence and of the Costume Gallery and, until 2016, president of the Marino Marini Museum in Florence. He is currently a member of the Scientific Council of the MART of Rovereto; director of the Bardini and Peyron Foundation; president of the Technical Art Commission of the CR Firenze Foundation; scientific curator of the Primo Conti Museum in Fiesole; curator of the Ivan Bruschi Foundation of Arezzo. He oversaw the preparation of the modern art gallery in Palermo and the new path of the Chigi Saracini Collection in Siena.
He especially studies Italian and European art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among other things, he edited the series L’Ottocento in Italia. The sister arts (3 vols., Turin, Electa, 2006). Among the recently curated exhibitions, with its catalog: Americans in Florence. Sargent and the Impressionists of the New World (2012, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi); Les Macchiaioli. Des impressionistes italiens? (2013, Paris, Orangerie); Corcos. The dreams of the belle époque (2014, Padua, Palazzo Zabarella); Divine Beauty (2015, Florence, Palazzo Strozzi); 1927, the return to Italy (2016, Florence, Salvatore Ferragamo Museum).
IVANKA STOÏANOVA
Musicologist, professor emeritus of the Department of Music of the Université de Paris 8, honorary doctor of the Sofia Academy of Music in 2015. Member of the first team of IRCAM, Center G. Pompidou, under the direction of Pierre Boulez from 1975 to 1981; artistic director of the Ricordi Editions in Paris from 1989 to 1999.
She is the author of Geste-texte-musique, 1O / 18, U.G.E., 1978; Luciano Berio / Chemins en musique, “La Revue musica”, Paris 1985 (Prix de l ‘Académie Charles Cros pour le meilleur livre sur la musique en langue française de l’année 1985); Manuel d’analyse musica I, Les formes classiques simples et complexes, Paris 1996; Manuel d’analyse musica II, Variations, sonatas, formes cycliques, Paris, Minerve, 2000; Entre détermination et aventure. Essais sur la musique de la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004; Karlheinz Stockhausen / «Je suis les sons…», Paris, Beauchesne, 2014 (Prix de la Fondation Singer – Polignac 2015), and about 200 essays in magazines and musicological works.
DANIELA TORTORA
She holds the chair of History and Aesthetics of Music at the S. Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples. She has to her credit studies and research on the work of the early nineteenth century (Dramaturgy of Rossini serio, Rome, Torre d’Orfeo, 1996; Bianca and Falliero or Il Consiglio dei Tre, Pesaro, Fondazione Rossini, 2005), on musical dramaturgy of the twentieth century and on the Italian neo-avant-gardes of the second post-war period (Nuova Consonanza. Thirty years of contemporary music in Italy, Lucca, LIM, 1990), on the artistic partnerships of the 1960s (Collage 1961. An action of the art of Achille Perilli and Aldo Clementi, Rome, Gangemi, 2005) and Quaranta (Dance painting music. Around the artistic associations of the 1940s. Dallapiccola Milloss Petrassi, Rome, National Academy of Santa Cecilia, 2009). He directs the series of musicological studies “I discorsi della musica” for the Aracne publishing house in Rome; he is responsible for the Editions of the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples.