Riccardo Riccardi
*8 February 1954
Works by Riccardo Riccardi
Biography
Biography
Riccardo Riccardi is a composer and playwright, as well as a painter and architect. Some people surely consider him a Renaissance man. Less generous people think that he does too many things to do all of them well. To them he smiles and says, "I'm a Jack of all trades...but I usually do just one thing at a time”.
Education:
Riccardo Riccardi was born in 1954 in Rimini. He studied piano there at the Liceo musicale Lettimi, with Guido Zangheri. At the same time he attended High School at the Liceo classico Giulio Cesare. At seventeen, he was chosen as soloist for Pietro Montani's, Concertino in E, performing with the Lettimi's string orchestra. That started him looking at music with a different eye. His true artistic passion, before that, had been painting.
In 1972 he moved to Florence to study architecture. He also studied piano concurrently with Franco Scala, graduating in 1976. Out of curiosity, he had begun studying composition at the Cherubini Conservatory. His composition teachers were, first, Pier Luigi Zangelmi and then Carlo Prosperi. It was from Prosperi, above all, that he learned the craft of composition. From 1977 to 1980 he made long visits to Germany, and, in 1980, worked as a music coach at the Youth Festival Meeting in Bayreuth. In 1981 he earned his degree in Architecture with his dissertation, "Theories of Harmonic Proportions in the Architectural Treatises of the Renaissance". In July, 1982 he earned a degree in composition and moved to California that August.
Artistic activity:
From the first work in his catalog in 1973 until the early 1990's, Riccardo Riccardi almost exclusively composed instrumental music in a late expressionistic style, the style in which he was educated. In the early 1980's, with Ad libitum for piano, he turned toward the style he would increasingly develop in the following years: an emancipation of rhythm against a strongly melodic design. Ad libitum was the inspiration for a series of piano pieces revised in 1988 for an event dedicated solely to Riccardi's piano music at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Riccardi’s first approach to musical theater came in 1991 with a work that is half ballet, half opera, The Ugly Duckling. Since then, the sung word has become central to his creative activity. In that same year he began his song cycle, Canti da Pessoa, for voices and instruments---a project that involved him for more than a decade. These songs, with text fragments drawn from the great Portuguese poet, are newly envisioned in Italian and represent the most rarefied stage of Riccardi's output.
In 1996 for Arcosanti, an utopian city built in the Arizona desert, Riccardi wrote L'avvenimento for piano and narrator, on fragments taken from Rainer Maria Rilke and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1997 he expanded this pianistic poem into his chamber opera, L'avvenimento, a work in which he created his own libretto.
From the early nineties he began combining his musical and painting activities. His paintings, influenced by the post-expressionists, undulate between the figurative and the abstract. He has had solo shows in Italy, France and the U. S. These have been among his most recent exhibits: Each of us is more than one at the Galleria dell’Immagine in Rimini (2002) and The Mirror at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome (2004), and Snippets at the Corin Gallery, in Towson, Maryland (2004). After this, Riccardi's painting activities were temporarily suspended due to his greatly increased focus on musical theater.
In 2004, for the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Riccardi composed The Man Who Loved Islands for narrators and piano, that evolved in 2006 into a work for an actor, soprano and orchestra. For both versions he wrote the libretti, based on a story by D. H. Lawrence.
In 2009, under a commission from Opera Bazar, Riccardi wrote, Talk Show. The libretto was inspired by two of Rainer Maria Rilke's Totentänze, adapted to the present-day. In 2010 Riccardi wrote two more operas: the first, F.S.S.P.A., based on his own libretto, is set in a modern train station. The second, Una questione d'onore, based on Leutnant Gustl by Arthur Schnitzler, is set in Baroque Venice.
In 2011 he worked on a cycle of 22 songs entitled, Não sou nada. Again the material is taken from Fernando Pessoa but this time retains the original text and the Portuguese language.
In 2012 he created a libretto from the novel Caprice, by Ronald Firbank. The result was a satyrical opera, Shakespeare & Gossip. Then in 2013 he wrote from scratch Il testamento (The Will), a theatrical play with musical arias that had its premier at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.
In 2016 Riccardi received a request from the Italian Embassy in Washington D. C. to compose a chamber theater work for the celebration of the Italian "Festa della musica" at the Embassy. Moving-out resulted, a play with arias and duets whose action takes place inside a New York apartment. In the same year he revised and completed the instrumentation of his opera Shakespeare & Gossip for the Museo di Roma, in the Palazzo Braschi, Rome.
Between 2016 and 2017 he wrote the libretto and music for L'ascensore, an opera conceived as closing his cycle, Il trittico della banalità whose first two dramas are Talk Show, set in a TV studio and F.S.S.P.A., set in a train station. L'ascensore was presented in May of 2018 in the Sala Accademica del Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome.
In 2018 he finished the composition of Il direttore, a through-composed work, first sketched in 2012. For the libretto of Il director, Riccardi used a scene and two characters from Der Kammersänger by Franz Wedekind. He developed a new story by inventing three more characters from scratch. The opera was staged at the Teatro di Villa Torlonia, in Rome in May 2019. Also in 2018 he wrote Duello, a work that draws inspiration from harassments in the entertainment world: it is a play within a play and includes arias and concertos from operas of the classical era. The authors cited are: Gazzaniga, Salieri, Cimarosa, Mozart, and Rossini.
In 2019 he wrote a new Italian version of his two English-language plays, Il testamento (The Will), and Moving Out which he had written for Dublin and Washington, respectively. The new versions are not limited to a translation: both works, thanks to the addition of a mezzo-soprano in the first, and a tenor in the second, are expanded with new dialogues, arias and concertos and with new instrumentation. Both productions were staged in October 2021 at the Theater of Villa Torlonia, with direction, sets, costumes and lighting design by the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
The end of 2019 he turned to the creation of a satirical text of social criticism: Questionario, a theatrical play with arias and a prologue in one act. The play features a singer/actress alone on stage, dialoguing with the reverberating voices of two offstage actors. It had its premiere at the Teatro Nacional de Panamá, Panama City, September 2021.
In 2020, he wrote the libretto and music of La via del mare, which features a prologue, three days and an epilogue, and takes place in 1985 at an unspecified place on the Italian coast. Central to the unfolding of the story is the issue of building abuses, dealt with in a light and amusing way.
In 2021, on a libretto developed from a 2009 sketch, he began work on the two-act opera entitled, La disfatta, which explores the psychological relationship between a writer and his ex-wife.
In 2021, he returned to writing instrumental works and wrote his first string quartet. This is the first of four quartets he wrote over the next two years. It's also the year he composed Tra mare e mare a Concerto for percussion and orchestra.
In 2023, and in the wake of his return to writing instrumental pieces, is Come era bello quando sognavo, a large piece for string orchestra. That same year he also wrote Della natura del mondo, an Archaic Oratorio for Mixed Chorus and an instrumental Ensemble, based on a late Renaissance Italian translation of texts drawn from Plato's Timaeus.
In 2024, besides revising his previous compositions, Riccardi wrote a new Concerto for trumpet and orchestra.
Activity as a teacher:
Riccardo Riccardi held the Chair of Composition at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory of Music in Florence from 1988 to 2012 and at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory of Music in Rome from 2012 to 2021. He has also served as Professor of Composition in the Florence Program of New York University from 2008 to 2012, as Professor of Music Appreciation at Saint Mary's College (Notre Dame, Indiana) in their Rome Program from 1998 to 2013.
From 1988 to 1991 he produced educational programs for the Radio Nacional de España and for Radio 3, Italian National Radio. Since 1994 he has been a visiting professor in colleges in California, Arizona, Indiana, New York and Maryland. He has taught master classes in Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Poland and Panama.
Fellowships and awards:
1980 He was one of the circle of the winners of the Rassegna Internazionale della Filarmonica Umbra, with his Quartetto per sette strumenti a fiato.
1983 He received the Composer's Award at the 21st Southwestern Youth Music Festival with his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.
1987 He was awarded "honorable mention" at the Premio Città di Castelfidardo with his Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra.
1995 He was chosen by the California State University as Italian liaison for the project: Exploration of Musical Traditions – A Program of Cultural Cooperation between the United States and Italy.
2009 He received a Grant from the Center for Academic Innovation – Indiana for his opera, Talk Show.
2014 He was the Nancy Unobskey Visiting Artist in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Goucher College, Towson, Maryland.
From 2022 to 2024 he was Director of International Projects at the International Centre for Contemporary Music, London.
Since the summer of 2024 he has devoted himself solely to his creative work.
About the music
A pendulum swinging between music and art
At the age of five Riccardo Riccardi played like all children his age.
He probably drew and he generally did well. At ten, he still preferred playing or riding his bicycle to reading, studying, or playing the piano. This “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (man without qualities) - as he often describes himself - would never have thought of becoming a musician when a teenager. He was more inclined toward mathematics, painting or architecture. In fact, he did work as an architect and painter at various times of his life, but composing music is the activity that has been his constant focus since the beginning of the seventies. As he says, it was by chance that he discovered its charm and magic. Music reflects his Apollonian, clear, contemplative side; painting, his Dionysian, material, passionate side. When he pursues an idea, his involvement is total. “I have to get to the bottom of something” - he says - “before thinking about something else.
In fact after having painted, written instrumental music and a period of composing vocal music, he developed an interest for opera to which he has devoted himself in the last half of his career.
His music for the stage
As he points out, theater can communicate ideas, express points of
view, and arouse emotions as well as music by itself can. For this reason he started creating his own librettos, first adapting them from the writings of authors mostly from the turn of the twentieth century and then writing his texts from scratch. “I didn’t know how to write librettos” he says “when I made my first attempts. Writing is a profession that must be learned, just like music. It took me twenty years to produce something acceptable." The subjects of his librettos, especially the most recent ones, reflect current society, our everyday life. Riccardi focuses on common themes that express the most petty human moods, but always are treated with a touch of comedy, irony and lightness.
His chamber opera in one act, Una questione d’onore, adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl is an example of this approach.
Compared to Schnitzler’s original text, the action is moved from Vienna to Venice and the clock is set back to the middle of the eighteenth century. The focus of his opera is on an officer of the Most Serene Republic, who mulls all night over the dishonor that will befall him as a result of his cowardly behavior towards a baker with whom he had an altercation in line at the theater.
A further example is an opera, Shakespeare & Gossip, drawn from Ronald Firbank's, Caprice, where Riccardi reduces the cast to three singers/actors, contrary to the many characters in the original novel.
The protagonist, the very young daughter of a canon, grew up in a village in the North of England and does not hesitate to steal the family silverware and an expensive pearl necklace in order to move to London to attempt a career as an actress. Her dream is to play Juliet in Shakespeare's tragedy. The vicissitudes she endures to reach her goal will be tragicomic.
The psychological probing of everyday characters, grappling with trivial issues, is a leitmotif of Riccardi’s works for the stage. His characters don’t measure themselves against the universal archetypes of ancient philosophies or oriental doctrines, but breathe in a circumscribed world of envy, spite, whims and pettiness and this is true, above all, in Riccardi’s own, original librettos.
Three of his works make up what he has called Il trittico della banalità:
1. Talk Show
Inspired by two short-stories from Rainer Maria Rilke's Totentänze, the action takes place in a television studio where three famous people and two audience members are invited to tell an important fact from their lives in front of the cameras. Some have too much to tell, others almost nothing. Then someone from the audience with a gun in his hand bursts onto the scene to tell his own story.
2. F.S.S.P.A.
The action takes place in a train station where travelers are angry for many reasons: train delays, argumentative commuters in line at the ticket office, the menu advertising the station bar-restaurant, the police inspection of an unattended suitcase. Two of the travelers, a man and a woman, engage in an intense conversation about their lives.
3. L’ascensore
The third work in The Triptych of Banality, unfolds in three condominium meetings to decide on the installation of an elevator. Quarrels, alliances and money under the table are the core of the plot. A few additional examples:
Il testamento (The Will)
Two sisters meet in their childhood home after the death of their father. Their father had been a famous pianist but he had retired following an accident. Between memories, reproaches and recriminations, but thanks to the help of an elderly maid, the sisters make an important discovery: the manuscript of an opera composed by their father.
Moving Out
The opera takes place in New York City and the conflict is between an upper class Italian woman who has moved to America and her daughter. A touch of comedy is given their story by an eccentric New York realtor who enters the scene.
Il direttore
Set in the 1970’s, an old composer manages to gain access to the young artistic director of a theater. The composer wants the director to stage one of his works. To get rid of him, the director waffles with promises of a performance in the future. The old master, feeling cast aside yet again, leaves with shattered pride. The performance will happen after he dies.
Duello
Two sopranos have reached the final auditions for a planned theater premiere. The Jury includes a mature female singer and an elderly male judge who takes advantage of his position to sexually harass the two contenders. They are required to sing pieces by Gazzaniga, Salieri, Cimarosa, Mozart, and Rossini: pieces chosen for both the meaning of their texts and for their music.
Questionario
Set in the very near future, a woman, alone on stage, has to pass yet another questionnaire posed by disembodied artificial intelligence. The issues are thorny: the hypocrisy of human behavior, the absurdity of the laws and the arrogance of private and public institutions. She wonders, "What's the purpose of this questionnaire?"
La via del mare
The action takes place in 1985 in an unspecified town on the Italian coast. The mayor, an architect and a contractor are working on a large urban project. The cast is completed by the mayor's secretary and an elusive stranger. What is really going on? Who is the stranger?
La disfatta
The action takes place in the late 1980’s. The first act is set in a psychologist’s office where a man and a woman are discussing their marriage crisis. In the second act they are meeting at a bar with telephone access at the tables. He is waiting for a phone call from overseas that could change his life.
Riccardi’s earlier theatrical works had more traditional, sometimes even classical, librettos.
Il ritorno di Casanova, a three act opera based on Casanovas Heimfahrt by Arthur Schnitzler;
Casanova, now 53 and on the way back to Venice, meets the husband of an old lover at the gates of Mantua and is invited to the man’s villa. Casanova recounts his latest desperate adventure with memories and regrets.
The Man Who Loved Islands, based on the short story by D. H. Lawrence, tells the story of a man fleeing from civilization.
L'avvenimento-opera, music interspersed with the remarks of two actors, based on Vincent Van Gogh’s letters;
Vincent Van Gogh remembers the women in his life: his mother, his sisters and the women with whom he fell in love. This female cohort confronts the painter with expressions of their own feelings The two actors provide the plot continuity, serving as lawyers for the defense and prosecution and giving their own irreverent and provocative views of Van Gogh's paintings.
The Odyssey, a classic from the dawn of Western civilization, inspired Riccardi to write his opera, Odisseo, a work in three tableaux. The plot, however, differs somewhat from Homer’s original and ends with Odysseus sitting on the seashore in Ithaca, dreaming of living his entire past again.
After reading the wide range of subjects Riccardi has chosen for his works, one wonders: How does he structure his stage works? How does the music fit the texts of his librettos? How he structures his stage works has an easy answer: some of his operas are sung throughout, others are Singspiele with spoken comments interspersed.
How he fits his music to his texts is more complicated.
Music, of course, speaks to the emotions and is not reducible to words, but how Riccardi works on his music is describable. As in the classical tradition, his compositional technique is to prepare the harmonic and rhythmic elements of each section at the piano. This includes careful attention to each melodic cell. His outcome is similar to a fresco or a paneled artwork. He has the soul of an anarchist and replaces the time-honored concept of development with different elements, juxtaposed and expanded in time.
