Vittorio Monti

Vittorio Monti wrote a great deal of music and is remembered for four minutes of it. Born in Naples, he studied violin and composition at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella and worked further with the violinist Camillo Sivori; by the turn of the century he was in Paris, attached to the Lamoureux Orchestra and turning out ballets, pantomimes and operettas, among them Noël de Pierrot and the one-act Mam'zelle Frétillon, first given in Rome in 1904. Csárdás dates from that same year. Built on the Hungarian dance, it sets a slow, improvisatory opening against sections of mounting speed, and asks the violin in turn for its singing line, its harmonics and its abrupt changes of colour. It has since been arranged for orchestra and for very nearly every solo instrument that exists. Monti lived from 1868 to 1922, and it was in 1886 that he went to Paris, where Sivori, the one pupil Paganini took, refined his playing. He was a mandolinist as well and founded a school for that instrument, its material drawn from his own pieces and those of Paolo Tosti.