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.
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