«Quella fiamma di fede e di passione». Lettere di Marco Enrico Bossi a Giovanni Tebaldini
edited by Andrea Macinanti, Anna Maria Novelli, Mariateresa Storino

(Essays, 10)

XXXII, 212 pp.; 21 x 15 cm

Marco Enrico Bossi saw “Faith, enthusiasm, and passion” in one of Giovanni Tebaldini’s many musicological writings, and he did not readily praise people. He was as strict and uncompromising in his work as cordial and affectionate with his beloved family and friends. Bossi and Tebaldini were among the Cecilian reform supporters in Italy. They had become friends when both were students at the Milan Conservatory, that is when those who wanted to play Bach had to “fight” (so Tebaldini wrote) to get an instrument not suited for the, then fashionable, opera-oriented repertoire. The Bossi–Tebaldini correspondence documents an era of radical stylistic change. They had to be forefront “fighters” to have the sacred music reform triumph, raise Italian musical art level, and educate music students along the lines of Italian tradition and culture, expressed with “firm intentions, inspired by pure fervor for art in its noblest manifestation”.

Andrea Macinanti graduated in organ, harpsichord, and singing at the Bologna and Parma Conservatories. He then studied under Klemens Schnorr in Munich, graduated cum laude in Letters and Philosophy at the Bologna University, and got his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Music “with honorable mention” from the Geneva University. He is currently teaching organ at the Martini Conservatory, Bologna. He recorded for Tactus the complete organ works by Marco Enrico Bossi (17 CDs), Ottorino Respighi, and Goffredo Giarda, as well those by Guido Alberto Fano and Giovanni Tebaldini for Elegia. He produced many scholarly editions, including Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali, the complete keyboard music by Alessandro Scarlatti and Giovanni Battista Martini (Ut Orpheus), an anthology of Italian organ music, and Bossi’s complete organ works (Carrara). He penned a study on César Franck’s Trois Chorals analysis and performance (Carrara) and a book entitled “Fabricato alla guisa del corpo humano”. L’organo come metafora antropomorfa (Zecchini). Besides music, he is a karate practitioner (black belt, 5th dan). In 2021 President Sergio Mattarella awarded him Officer of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana.

Anna Maria Novelli (San Benedetto del Tronto, 1942 – 2019) was a teacher, a local history researcher, and a coordinator of “Iconic-linguistic creativity workshops” based on the methods devised by the artist/designer Bruno Munari and writer Gianni Rodari. She wrote for pedagogy, poetry, visual arts, and musicology periodicals. A granddaughter of composer and musicologist Giovanni Tebaldini, she founded and directed the Centro Studi e Ricerche named after him, helped organize events celebrating him, managed the www.tebaldini.it Web site (in progress), wrote papers for musicology meetings, edited books, assisted students in their dissertations, and was a Pier Luigi Gaiatto Prize committee member. Together with her husband, art critic Luciano Marucci, she conducted inquiries on art and sociology and published books. She wrote on the Juliet Art Magazine (both printed and online editions) and co-edited Tebaldini’s correspondence with 19th- and 20th-century musicians until she passed away. More on her on www.lucianomarucci.it, “Novelli / Anna Maria Area”.

Mariateresa Storino is Professor of History of music at the Conservatoire of Music ‘G. Rossini’ (Pesaro) and collaborates with the ‘Fondazione Istituto Liszt’ (Bologna). After receiving her Ph.D. in Science of Music at the University of Trento, she held post-doc research fellowships at the University of Bologna. She was rewarded with the prize “Psicologia e musica” (2008) thanks to her Ph.D. thesis and with the “Premio Liszt” (1999) thanks to her degree thesis. After different researches in the field of the psychology of music, she chose the historical musicology as her elected field, with a particular interest towards Franz Liszt, the genre of the symphonic poem and the musical works of women composers. In 2017 she participated as a co-curator in organizing the exhibition “Italy through the eyes of Franz Liszt” for the Liszt Museum in Budapest (11 May 2017 - 8 May 2018, http://www.lisztmuseum.hu). In the same year she won the grant “Liszt a Pisa” (University of Pisa) in order to realize a research about the presence of Liszt in Pisa in 1839; the results of the research have been published in the volume Liszt a Pisa. Alle radici del recital pianistico tra suggestioni pittoriche e letterarie (Pisa University Press 2018). She is the author of the miscellaneous book Franz Liszt and Jessie Taylor Laussot Hillebrand: un capitolo inedito della storia musicale del secondo Ottocento (LIM 2016), the monograph Franz Liszt. Sonata in si minore (Albisani 2009), the essays “Le Triomphe de la mort: il Totentanz di Liszt come espressione dell'unità delle arti” (Brepols 2020), “Il soggetto o i soggetti? La Dante-Symphonie di Franz Liszt” (Università degli Studi di Torino 2018) and of numerous articles and reviews in academic journals and in miscellaneous works. https://mariateresastorino.academia.edu/