About Bruno Maderna

Bruno Maderna (Venice 1920 - Darmstadt 1973) was an Italian-German director and composer. At the age of four he was taught violin in Chioggia, and his grandfather noticed he was a little genius; Madame de Polignac (a French princess and patron) paid his following studies, so at the age of eight he was able to direct the Milano La Scala theatre and the (Verona's) Arena orchestras. From here, he started an enfant prodige career, internationally known as "Brunetto" (italian for Little Bruno). He protracted his studies in Milan (1935), Venice (1939) and in Rome (1940), where he finally took his degree in composition and musicology at the "Santa Cecilia" Academy under the guide of Alessandro Bustini and Antonio Guarnieri. After his degree he studied also composition with Gian Francesco Malipiero and conducting with Hermann Scherchen. During the Second Word War he joined the army, the Partisan Resistance and he was also imprisoned in a concentration camp. After the war years, he taught composition at the Conservatory of Venice (from 1947 to 1950), where he was called by Malipiero; here he studied a lot the ancient and medieval music, which was the base for many of his early works. In those years he held a very big class, in which there was also Luigi Nono (at that time only a young law student). Karl Amadeus Hartmann called him to conduct a concert in the "Musica Viva" festival in Munich; this was the first time a foreign director was called, and for Maderna it was the beginning of a fabulous career. Whilst at the (1951) Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt he founded the Internationales Kranichsteiner Kammer-Ensemble; here he met, among others, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Henri Pousseur and the most important players of the neue musik that inspired him to compose new pieces (for example he wrote Musica su due dimensioni for Severino Gazzelloni). Maderna was an eclectic director, so he was able to switch between different musical styles: he directed Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Richard Wagner's Parsifal, many works by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, classical and romantic symphonies; he also liked jazz music. Together with Luciano Berio, he founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale of the RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) in 1955 and they also organized the Incontri Musicali music review and concert series. In 1957-58 he taught dodecaphonic technique at the Milan Conservatory; in this period he also taught composition seminars at the Darlington's Summer School of Music. In 1963 he became a German citizen. From 1967 to 1970 he taught conducting at the Salzburg Mozarteum and also at the Rotterdam Conservatory. In 1970 he obtained the Darmstadt's citizenship (but he never changed his Italian citizenship for the German one). In 1971 and 1972 he was the Tanglewood (MA, USA) Berkshire Music Center's director. In 1971 he became the Milan RAI Symphony Orchestra's director. He died in 1973, when he was working on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.