Stanislao Gastaldon

Gastaldon was born in Turin on 8 April 1861 to Luigi Gastaldon and Luigia Grazioli. His father was an engineer from Lerino, a village near Torri di Quartesolo in the Veneto region of Italy. His mother was a Roman noblewoman who had married a wealthy landowner, Count Bernardo Genardini, at the age of 16. She met Luigi Gastaldon in 1854 when she was 23 and shortly thereafter abandoned her husband and four children to live with him. The family moved from one Italian city to another during Gastaldon's childhood and early youth while his father worked on a series of engineering projects. Part of his childhood was spent in San Vito Chietino in the Abruzzo region, where a street is now named for him and where his younger brother Guglielmo was born in 1864. Gastaldon studied music with the Turinese composer Antonio Creonti and with Torquato Meliani, an organist at the Florence Cathedral, as well as studying literature at the University of Florence. He began composing songs at the age of 17, sometimes writing the lyrics himself under the pseudonym of "Flick-Flock". Although it is not known for sure why Gastaldon chose "Flick-Flock", Italian musicologist Maria Scaccetti suggests that it probably derived from the popular ballet, Flick und Flock by Peter Ludwig Hertel, which had been performed at La Scala in 1861. Music from the ballet arranged as a military march became the official fanfare of the 12th Regiment of the Bersaglieri corps, which had been based in Turin. Gastaldon was only 20 when the Florentine firm Venturini published his song "Musica proibita", which made his name as a composer and achieved an enduring popularity. Its success would also provide an entry to the most important salons in Italy, where many of his early songs were first performed. His musical fame preceded him when Gastaldon did his obligatory year of military service in 1883. He was assigned to be one of the "professors" of the 24th Infantry Regiment band. '', 1890 When his military service ended, Gastaldon returned to Rome, where his parents were living at the time. Over the next four years, he continued composing songs and short pieces of instrumental music and started work on his first opera, Fatma. However, in 1888, when the music publisher Sonzogno announced a competition for one-act operas, Gastaldon decided to enter with Mala Pasqua!, a setting of Giovanni Verga's popular short story (and later play), Cavalleria rusticana. Another young composer, Pietro Mascagni, entered the same contest with his opera Cavalleria rusticana, also based on Verga's story. Gastaldon withdrew his work early in the competition when he received an offer from Sonzogno's rival, Ricordi, to publish it and arrange a premiere at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. He expanded the opera to three acts, and Mala Pasqua! premiered on 9 April 1890 to modest success. After the premiere of Mala Pasqua! in 1890, Gastaldon lived in Orvieto for a time and then settled in Florence, where he was to spend the rest of his life. There, in addition to composing, he taught singing and worked as a music critic for the Florentine paper Nuovo Giornale, as well as writing a column "Scattola Armonica" ("Music Box") for the children's periodical Il giornalino della Domenica. His associates in Florence were a circle of free-thinking artists and literary figures who gathered at the Gambrinus Halle café in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele (now called the Piazza della Repubblica). Gastaldon and his friends were out of sympathy with the rise of Italian Fascism in the 1920s, and he became increasingly marginalised. Finding it difficult to make a living solely from his music, in the final years of his life he also worked as an art dealer, buying and selling paintings by his friends in the Gambrinus Halle. He never married and lived alone in his house on Via Montanara. On 6 March 1939, Gastaldon suffered a heart attack while walking across the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele and died the same day at the age of 77. He is buried in the Misericordia di Antella Cemetery near Florence. ==Works==