Research lecture Elena Minetti
The phenomenon of the unfinished has aroused great interest in the humanities and, in the field of musicology in particular, has triggered research into fragmentary compositions with aesthetic, philological and historical questions. Beyond sketch research, however, the considerable interest in the fragmentary has so far not extended equally to the phenomenon of the completion of fragmentary works.
The habilitation project presented in this lecture is dedicated precisely to this phenomenon and its manifold manifestations.A particularly fascinating case study will be used to illustrate the research approaches: the completion of the opera Lucrezia (1936), which Ottorino Respighi left unfinished and which was finalised posthumously by his wife, the composer Elsa Respighi. Based on archive materials kept at the Fondazione Cini in Venice and the Archivio Ricordi in Milan, it can be reconstructed that the work was completed in a remarkably short time - within just two months - on the basis of the composer's fragmentary draft. Correspondence, diaries and reviews provide an insight into the artistic network that surrounded Elsa's completion: including the director of the Teatro alla Scala, Jenner Mataloni, the opera's librettist and close friend of the Respighi couple, Claudio Guastalla, the directors of the Ricordi publishing house, Renzo Valcarenghi and Claudio Clausetti, and the composer's pupil, Ennio Porrino.
The completion of the opera is thus the result of a complex web of different motivations and interests: first and foremost Elsa's love, which moved her to honour her husband's artistic legacy; then there is Ottorino Respighi's fame and the affection of the public, as reflected in the contemporary press, as well as the commercial interests of the Ricordi publishing house and the Teatro alla Scala. Against the background of this historical-musical scenario, the "time-delayed collaboration" of the Respighi couple is explored, which unfolds in the compositional practice of finalisation based on Elsa's intensive engagement with Ottorino's musical, literary and autobiographical materials.
Elena Minetti has been working as a university assistant at the Department of Arts and Musicology since the beginning of November. Her habilitation project is dedicated to the analysis of posthumous finalisations of music-theatrical fragments. Using selected case studies, she is investigating the questions of who took up and completed an unfinished work, for what reasons, with what intentions, in what context, with what compositional techniques and aesthetics and at what point in time.
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