Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Two things run through Castelnuovo-Tedesco's very large output: Shakespeare, who gave him overtures, song settings and the opera The Merchant of Venice, and the classical guitar, an instrument he had never written for until Andrés Segovia asked him to in 1932. His subsequent guitar works include the First Guitar Concerto, the Capriccio diabolico and the cycle Platero y yo. He was born in Florence in 1895, studied piano with Edgardo Del Valle de Paz and composition with Ildebrando Pizzetti, and had Alfredo Casella's advocacy behind his early music. In 1939 he left Italy for the United States and in 1940 settled in Los Angeles, where he wrote for the film studios and taught, among many others, Henry Mancini, André Previn, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams. Operas, concertos, songs and a large chamber catalogue stand beside the guitar music. He died in 1968. Works for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky came out of the same habit of writing for particular players, and an opera, La mandragola, had already reached the stage in Venice in 1926. Jewish liturgy and biblical texts run through the catalogue as steadily as Shakespeare does, and it was the Fascist racial laws that forced him out of Italy; the studio work in Los Angeles was done for MGM.