Life
Trained at the height of Verdian Romanticism, his mature career took place in the complex climate of the Fin de siècle, a transitional era in which Realism poetics and the new sensitivity of Decadentism coexisted.
Born in Lucca in 1838, Alemanno Cortopassi began his musical training in the San Michele in Foro Seminary, later moving in 1842 to the city's Musical Institute under the guidance of Giovanni Pacini and Michele Puccini, father of Giacomo. Here he learned the foundations of composition and refined his skills as an organist and conductor.
In 1858 he appears registered for the festivals of the Chapel of Santa Cecilia in the church of Saints Giovanni and Reparata in Lucca. Having graduated in 1862 as a composer, he stood out in musical competitions and obtained appreciation for his early sacred works. His career took him to Sarzana, where he was chapel master of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and founded the Chapel of Santa Cecilia, becoming a reference point for local musical life.
His fame is also linked to his pedagogical activity: he was indeed among the first teachers of the young Giacomo Puccini, to whom he imparted the basics of music and whom he then encouraged to pursue studies in Lucca and Milan. Cortopassi thus represented an important link in the formation of the future author of La Bohème and Tosca.
A tireless composer, he wrote masses, sacred hymns, motets, "mottettoni," litanies, verses for organ, symphonies, dance music, and carnival songs. A significant portion of his production was unfortunately destroyed during the Second World War. He died in Sarzana in 1909, and in his memory, an effigy was placed in the Famedio of Lucca, alongside Boccherini, Catalani, and Puccini.
Aneddoto
Puccini's first teacher
Giacomo Puccini remembered Cortopassi's teachings with gratitude; he started him as a boy in the study of music and pushed him to perfect his skills outside of Lucca.Works
Among the main works of Alemanno Cortopassi are a Symphony for Band published in Florence by G. Venturini, the piano nocturne Aurora boreale, the motet Iste Confessor preserved in Brescia, and the opera buffa Il Tutore Burlato, performed at the Teatro Civico in La Spezia before 1880. His music, though not all survived, shows an author attentive to both sacred and secular repertoires, capable of combining contrapuntal rigor and melodic vivacity.
Many other compositions, including hymns and litanies, were lost during the war, but Cortopassi's memory remains alive thanks to the catalog of the Cortopassi family works preserved at the Library of the “G. F. Ghedini” Conservatory in Cuneo.
Briciole di storia
Italians against Italians
Impatient to liberate Rome, still under papal rule, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with the cry "Rome or death!", beginning to ascend the peninsula with an army of volunteers. The Italian government, led by Urbano Rattazzi and fearful of a reaction from Napoleon III's France, then decided to stop him. On August 29, 1862, on Aspromonte in Calabria, the royal army faced the Red Shirts, and a brief but tragic firefight followed. Garibaldi, who had ordered his men not to fire on Italian soldiers, was wounded in the leg. The hero who had united the South with Italy was arrested by the Italians, and that was one of the most painful pages of our Risorgimento.
Pubblico dominio (Commons)
