Music
Petrassi's early work was part of an attempt by several Italian composers to create a national "Italian" revival in classical music, corresponding to the romantic work of Germans such as Richard Wagner. During this time, his work was characteristically neoclassical in style, influenced by Bartók, Hindemith and Stravinsky.
In later years, Petrassi's open musical mind and acute personality led him to experiment with different post-Webernian influences and a wide range of poetic materials, from Latin hymns to Ariosto's La follia d'Orlando and Cervantes' Ritratto di Don Chisciotte. All these influences are present in a remarkable series of eight Concerti for Orchestra which he composed between the late 1930s and the late 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Goffredo Petrassi
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.”
—Thomas Beecham (1879–1961)
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)