Life
Riccardo Eugenio Drigo was born in Padua, Italy on 30 June 1846. His father Silvio Drigo was a barrister and his mother, a noble Lupati, was active in politics. None of Drigo's family was distinguished in music, but at the age of five he began taking his first piano lessons from a family friend, the Hungarian Antonio Jorich. Drigo excelled quickly, and by his early teens he attained some local celebrity as a pianist. His father eventually agreed to allow Drigo to attend the prestigious Venice Conservatory, where he studied under Antonio Buzzolla, a student of Gaetano Donizetti. Drigo scored his first compositions in his early teens, which were primarily romances and waltzes. In 1862 he was allowed to perform some of his pieces with the local amateur orchestra in Padua. Through this performance, the young Drigo began to show interest in conducting.
Drigo graduated from the conservatory in 1864, and was hired as a rehearsal pianist at the Garibaldi Theatre in Padua. His experience as a rehearsal pianist soon lead him to find work as a conductor for various amateur opera troupes in Vicenza, Rovigo, Udine and Venice.
At age twenty-two, Drigo presented his first opera at the Garibaldi Theatre. The two-act Don Pedro di Portogallo (Don Pedro of Portugal) premiered to considerable success on 25 July 1868, but performances had to be cancelled due to a cholera epidemic which closed all theatres in the vicinity of Padua for some time.
Drigo's first major opportunity as a conductor occurred in 1868 when the Garibaldi Theatre's kapellmeister fell ill on the eve of the first performance of Costantino Dall'Argine's 1867 comic opera I Due Orsi (The Two Bears). When the concertmaster refused to conduct the performance, he recommended Drigo, if only because the rehearsal pianist would know the score intimately. Drigo's conducting successful, and soon he was named second kapellmeister.
Drigo gained experience serving as a conductor in provincial theatres throughout Italy and various parts of Europe for almost a decade, conducting many celebrated works in the great theatres of Europe. These included performances of Bizet's Carmen in Seville, Rossini's The Barber of Seville in Marseille, Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore and Caterina Cornaro in Venice, Gounod's Faust in Paris, and Bellini's La sonnambula and Norma at La Scala. In time he was conducting some of the first performances of Wagner's operas at La Scala.
In 1878 Drigo's life would change drastically. During the opera season in Padua the director of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, Baron Karl Karlovich Kister, attended a performance of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore which Drigo conducted. Kister was much impressed with Drigo's conducting talent, which was done without the aid of a score. Drigo then presented Kister with some of his own compositions, which prompted Kister to offer Drigo a six-month contract to conduct the St. Petersburg Imperial Italian Opera.
Read more about this topic: Ballets By Riccardo Drigo
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“We find it easy to set limits when the issue is safety.... But 99 percent of the time there isn’t imminent danger; most of life takes place on more ambiguous ground, and children are experts at detecting ambivalence.”
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man,—and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages,—it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)