Life
Trained at the height of Risorgimento Romanticism, his long career led him to reach artistic maturity in the Late-Romantic phase, in a cultural climate that already heralded the new demands of Realism.
Gaetano Amadeo was born in Porto Maurizio (now part of Imperia) on February 4, 1820, the youngest of seven children of Francesco and Angela Anselmi. Although started in humanistic studies, the young man early manifested an irresistible musical vocation. His career officially began at only thirteen years old, in September 1833, when the prior of the Confraternity of San Pietro al Parasio appointed him organist of the Oratory, succeeding Marco Anselmi. For this first assignment, which provided for a compensation of 19.33 lire per four-month period, the boy had the honor of playing a precious G.B. Peretti organ from 1694. The bond with the Confraternity was deep: in July 1834 he entered as a member (registration number 218) and remained linked to it for life, regularly paying the membership fee even during his long years of voluntary exile abroad.
The formative turning point occurred in 1840, when he left his post in Porto Maurizio to go to Lucca to the school of the great Giovanni Pacini. It was the latter who, sensing the melodic gifts of the pupil, directed him towards the prestigious Liceo Filarmonico in Bologna, where Amadeo studied under the guidance of Antonio Fabbri. In Bologna, thanks to Pacini's recommendation, he entered the circle of Gioachino Rossini, then honorary consultant of the lyceum. Between the "Swan of Pesaro" and the young Ligurian a solid friendship was born that culminated in July 1843 with Amadeo's admission to the Accademia Filarmonica, obtained by presenting a Fuga whose manuscript is still preserved in the institute.
Having obtained his diploma in 1845, Amadeo temporarily returned to Porto Maurizio, where he remained until 1848. These were years of not only musical but also political fervor, as the chronicles describe him as a "patriot musician". He collaborated with the writer Gustavo Strafforello setting to music a National Anthem which was performed in the city's Cathedral on November 7, 1848, to celebrate the reforms of Carlo Alberto, an occasion on which Amadeo tested the new large Lingiardi organ (opus 85).
Towards the end of 1848, he initially settled in Marseille as organist of the church of San Giuseppe (equipped with a Callinet organ), and in 1852 he obtained, once again thanks to Rossini's intercession, the prestigious post of Maestro di Cappella in the Marseille Cathedral. He remained here until 1875, founding a school of piano and singing and passionately dedicating himself to the teaching of Gregorian chant. It is to this period that the composition of the opera Jeanne d'Arc dates back, which never saw the stages of the Marseille theater due to the intransigence of the author, who refused to insert the ballet then in vogue in French taste.
Leaving Marseille, after a brief interlude in Toulon, Amadeo moved to Cannes, where he resided until 1892. It is hypothesized that he served at the church of Notre Dame de l’Esperance, where another instrument by the Lingiardi brothers was located, organ builders whom Amadeo deeply esteemed and whom he had helped to introduce to France. An anecdote tells that in June 1856 he played that same organ in the company of the famous builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, arousing mutual enthusiasm.
Despite the distance, he never forgot Italy. During brief stays in his homeland in 1883 and 1884, he established relationships with Pier Costantino Remondini, actively supporting the Cecilian reform for the renewal of sacred music. Amadeo died single in Nice on April 8, 1893, assisted by a few acquaintances to whom he entrusted his manuscripts, now preserved at the Nice Conservatory. The obituary in Le Ménestrel remembered him by the nickname of "The Troubadour", perhaps to emphasize his incessant search for new sonorities. In 1972, his hometown wanted to honor his memory by dedicating a street to him in the center of Porto Maurizio.
Video selezionati dal canale ItalianOpera:
Aneddoto
A "no" to French fashion
Although Gaetano Amadeo had the opportunity to become a famous opera composer in France, his artistic integrity prevailed over the thirst for success. During his Marseille period he composed an opera titled Jeanne d'Arc, which was accepted and scheduled by the city's Opera House. However, the curtain never rose on that work. The rigid convention of the French Grand Opéra imposed the mandatory insertion of a ballet in the third act, regardless of the plot. Amadeo judged that request artistically incoherent with the story of the Maid of Orléans and categorically refused to modify the score. He preferred to withdraw the opera and leave it unperformed rather than debase it with a fashionable ballet that had nothing to do with his dramaturgical vision.
Works
The beating heart of Gaetano Amadeo's creative activity undoubtedly resides in sacred music, a field in which he moved with an impressive fecundity. His liturgical catalog is monumental and includes ten multi-voice masses, flanked by five Te Deums and three different settings of the Stabat Mater, in addition to a myriad of psalms, vespers, and motets. These were not simple pieces of occasional music: many of these pages reveal a constructive wisdom and an inspiration worthy of the great masters of the time, so much so that they found space in prestigious Italian anthologies of the era such as L'Organista and L'Arpa sacra d'Italia, as well as in the catalogs of French publishers.
However, limiting the figure of Amadeo solely to the organ or the ecclesiastical choir would be reductive. His bel canto training, refined at Rossini's school, emerges clearly in his copious secular production. He passionately dedicated himself to instrumental music, composing symphonies and concertos that demonstrate a solid mastery of the orchestra, and assiduously cultivated the genre of the chamber romance, where his melodic vein could express itself with greater intimacy and lyrical freedom.
A separate chapter is deserved for his relationship with musical theater. Amadeo left two unperformed operatic works, among which stands out a Jeanne d'Arc in four acts on a French libretto. This work is a witness to his artistic integrity: its staging in Marseille fell through precisely because of the composer's refusal to bow to the fashions of the French Grand Opéra, which imposed the insertion of ballets even where dramaturgically superfluous. To complete the profile of a well-rounded musician, his theoretical treatises on the fugue and counterpoint remain, texts that attest to the depth of his academic and didactic rigor.
Briciole di storia
The Five Days of Milan
While the young Amadeo's career was beginning to take shape, Italy was shaken by a revolutionary wind that spared no one. The most explosive episode occurred on March 18, 1848, when news of the uprisings in Vienna reached Milan, triggering a spontaneous revolt against the Austrian garrison of the dreaded Marshal Radetzky. It was the beginning of the famous "Five Days," an event that profoundly marked the collective conscience of that generation.
It was not a battle between armies, but a desperate struggle of the people fought neighborhood by neighborhood. The streets were transformed into trenches made of improvised barricades, where members of the bourgeoisie, workers, students, and even priests—central figures in the world of sacred music so dear to Amadeo—united under the strategic guidance of Carlo Cattaneo. The resistance was total: tiles and furniture rained down from windows, while enemy positions were assaulted in the street. On March 22, after five days of heroic fighting that cost the lives of about 400 Milanese, the Austrian army, one of the most formidable military powers in Europe, was forced into a humiliating retreat. That victory did not just liberate a city, but lit the fuse of the First War of Independence, redrawing the emotional and political map of the Italy that the composer was preparing to leave a few years later for France.
Pubblico dominio (Commons)
