Goffredo Petrassi

Embodiment of the progress of 20th-century Italian music

Goffredo Petrassi was the patriarch of modern Italian music, a living embodiment of its progress in the 20th century, which is chronicled in his proud series of eight Concertos for Orchestra.

Petrassi was born into a family of modest means in Zagarolo, near Palestrina – a town that almost four centuries earlier had given its name to a distinguished predecessor – in Lazio, to the north of Rome. He taught himself music while still a boy, gaining practical experience by singing in a choir, and was only nine when admitted to the Schola Cantorum di San Salvatore in nearby Lauro.

At 15 he left, and got a job in a music shop, studying privately all the while: piano with Alessandro Bustini from 1920, and harmony with Vincenzo di Donata from 1925. In 1928 he was admitted to the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where Bustini now became his composition teacher; after a diploma in 1932 he turned his attention to the organ, studying with Fernando Germani, gaining that diploma in 1933, and then taking a conducting course with Bernardino Molinari between 1934 and 1936.

By the time his teaching career began – with courses in harmony, counterpoint and choral composition at the Santa Cecilia in 1934 – he was already an acclaimed composer: his Partita for orchestra had won first prize at both the Rassegna di Musica Contemporanea organised by the Sindacali Nazionali dei Musicisti in 1932 and the Fédération Internationale des Concerts in France. Premiered in Rome in April 1933, it was also Petrassi's first work to gain a hearing abroad: the composer Alfredo Casella took it under his wing, conducting it during the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Amsterdam in 1933 and taking it to Moscow and Leningrad two years later.

The extrovert, boisterous, jazz-tinged Partita set Petrassi firmly among the Italian neo-classicists, Casella and Malipiero chief among them, who were reacting against the tired clichés of verismo opera and the orchestral opulence of the Respighi generation with lean, acerbic neo-Baroque music that showed the influence of Hindemith and Stravinsky.

Hindemith provided another example to follow: he had written the first-ever Concerto for Orchestra in 1925, to be followed by Albert Roussel in 1927, Vagn Holmboe in 1929 and by Adolf Busch, whose Konzert für grosses Orchestra followed a year later (the best-known Concerto for Orchestra, Bartók's, didn't emerge until 1943). Petrassi was to make the genre his own. His eight exemplars – recently re-released on a three-CD set – chart his own evolution from Stravinskian neoclassicism, out of the confines of tonality towards a post-Webernian avant-garde reliant on timbre and gesture: the contrasts between the First (1931) and the Eighth (1970-72) could hardly be starker.

In his setting of the Ninth Psalm (1934-36), which immediately followed the Concerto for Orchestra No 1, Petrassi called on his experience as a choral conductor, initiating a series of large-scale choral works no less distinguished than the orchestral concertos. Perhaps prompted by the hieratic angularity of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Petrassi liked spare, muscular textures: Salmo IX is scored for chorus, brass, percussion, two pianos and strings. And the dark Coro di morti (1940-41), on texts by Leopardi, are sung by male-voice chorus, accompanied by brass, three pianos, percussion and double-basses. Petrassi's neoclassicism was expanding both to take in elements of the past and to look to the future – there is much modal writing for the chorus in Coro di morti, with densely chromatic, even atonal, material in the instrumental parts.

In the meantime, his career in music administration had been advancing – he had his parents to support. In 1935 Mario Labroca, head of the music division of the Ministry of Popular Culture, had appointed him to a minor bureaucratic post in the music section of the Ispettorale del Teatro, and in 1936 he became secretary of the union of music societies of the Centro Lirico Italiano. He then shot up the ladder in 1937, with an unexpected nomination as director of the newly re-opened Teatro La Fenice in Venice, and he boldly acquainted it with 20th- century music. Many of the opera houses in Fascist Italy were politicised institutions; interference at La Fenice was relatively minor, and Petrassi managed, as he put it, to

do some things that could have aroused some suspicion. I did Busoni's Arlecchino, which had never before been performed in Italy, Ravel's L'Heure espagnole, Stravinsky's Pulcinella and in 1938 – my first season – I did Strauss's Elektra, whose libretto had been written by Hoffmansthal, a Jew.

Of course, apparently apolitical art could take on unexpected resonance:

I did a Carmen – and although there was nothing courageous in that, we felt a quiver when Carmen sang her hymn to "la liberté".

He also took some decisions which could have earned him political disfavour: "I invited [Vittorio] Gui to conduct, although he was known to be an anti-Fascist, and he came for two years in a row" – fortunately, Mussolini's cultural policy was far less rigorously organised than Hitler's. Indeed, Petrassi was astonished to find that his music, along with that of Dallapiccola, his exact contemporary, and Malipiero, was banned in Germany – it was too radical.

In 1939 Petrassi was appointed Professor of Composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia and so returned to Rome a year later; he retained the position until 1959. He was composing assiduously all the while. In his two ballets La follia di Orlando and Ritratto di Don Chisciotte (1942-43 and 1947) the struggle between neo-classical instincts and chromatic harmony had not been resolved; his two operas, Il cordovano, after Cervantes (1944-48), and Morte dell'aria (1949-50) likewise hover between the old and the new.

Petrassi's breakthrough into modernism came in 1950-51, with the work generally held to be his masterpiece, the cantata Noche oscura, setting words by St John of the Cross, and premiered, prestigiously, at the 1951 Salzburg Festival, where the conductor was Mario Rossi; Petrassi also held a composition course at the Salzburg Mozarteum that summer. In Noche oscura his style was almost entirely chromatic, and instrumental colour, a secondary consideration in his early days of contrapuntal vigour, was now very much a primary one. He did, though, continue to use tonal elements in other works.

In 1952 a commission from Paul Sacher, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Basle Chamber Orchestra, resulted in the Second Concerto for Orchestra, and an invitation from the BBC brought him to London to conduct his own music. A similar request a year later took him to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 1954, the year of his 50th birthday, he was elected president of the ISCM, remaining in the post until 1956.

Petrassi's first journey to North America came in 1955, when Charles Münch commissioned the Fifth Concerto for Orchestra for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Within a year he was back, giving a composition course at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston orchestra.

Formally, from 1959 until 1974, Petrassi was the director of the advanced composition course at the Santa Cecilia (and in 1966-68 he taught composition at a summer course for the Accademia Chigiana in Siena). His reputation as a teacher was international: Kenneth Leighton and Peter Maxwell Davies came from Britain to study with him. But increasing international recognition kept interrupting to take him abroad. The austere Sixth Concerto, bearing the title Invenzione Concertata, was ordered by the BBC and given its first performance in the Albert Hall in 1957.

In 1959 his Serenata for flute, harpsichord, percussion, viola and double-bass was premiered in Tel Aviv, and he toured Japan as composer and conductor. North German Radio commissioned a flute concerto in 1961, and in 1962 the Berlin Philharmonic asked him to come and conduct his Magnificat for soprano, chorus and orchestra, written in 1939-40. The commissions and travelling continued: Berlin again, Chicago (for the Eighth Concerto for Orchestra), Budapest, New York, London once more – the approach of old age only made him busier, although he did eventually give up composing in his early eighties, as his eyesight began to fail. For the last 10 years of his life he was effectively blind.

The music of Petrassi's last period was almost entirely serial. It had become athematic, surviving almost entirely on colour and timbre, the long lines shaped by his sure hand with counterpoint. It could also be violent, abrupt, aggressive, sharply contrasted. The musicologist Massimo Mila wrote of its "themeless structuralism", the American composer Elliott Carter, a friend, spoke of its "dreamy atmosphere", and Petrassi himself explained, "I seek to create new sonorities based on pure instrumental sounds."

Petrassi the man had become a national monument: his 70th birthday was marked by a torchlit parade in Zagarolo, his home town, and his 80th and 90th with concerts and celebrations the length of Italy. He died just a year and a bit too soon for the party of a very long lifetime.

Martin Anderson

Goffredo Petrassi, composer, conductor and teacher: born Zagarolo, Italy 16 July 1904; married 1961 Rosetta Acerbi (one daughter); died Rome 2 March 2003.