ALFREDO CASELLA Composer & Pianist TLS regarding his new symphony, 1941

Description

One page typed letter signed in French on the composer’s Rome letterhead, October 22, 1941.
His wife Yvonne has written a line of greeting to the left in pencil and signed.
The self-typed letter on onionskin paper has hand corrections and added accents in pen.
(He was fluent in French)
22 / X / 41
Dearest,
By a friend who leaves tomorrow, I send you a hasty but faithful thought. For a long time I have not had any news from you and would like to receive some. We are fine. The little girl becomes a big girl. I work a lot. After the Chicago Symphony, I engaged in a lot of other things and I was overworked. We live as well as we roam today in Europe.  Morale is very good. Let us hear from you and also from all the friends in the orchestra.
I embrace you with my most faithful affection
.
Casella (1883-1947) trained in Paris with Louis Diemer and Gabriel Faur
é
at the Paris Conservatoire where he was a classmate of Maurice Ravel.
His brilliance as a pianist-conductor-composer was well recognized by his elder contemporaries, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky among others, who were also his friends and influenced his composition style.
In 1939, Frederick Stock, the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra went to Europe on a mission to commission a group of important composers to write works for the Orchestras 50th anniversary. (1940-1941 season) The list included, Alfredo Casella, Reinhold Gliere, Zoltan Kodaly, Nicholas Miaskowsky, Darius Milhaud and William Walton.
Casella produced his 3rd Symphony “Elegy and Eroica” a rather long work which was influenced by his reversal of views on Fascism which he had initially supported.
The neoclassic work, influenced by the works of Bruckner, Mahler, Stravinsky and Shostakovich was hailed as revelatory at its’ premiere.
However, due to Casella’s political situation it did not reach a wide enough audience at the outset.
It has been re-discovered over the past 20 years and now receives performances and has been recorded multiple times.
Casella is best remembered today via his opera “La Donna Serpente” however, he wrote a large oeuvre of orchestral works including the three symphonies, concertos, chamber works, solo piano works, opera, ballet and song.
His autobiography
I Segreti della Giaria
was published this same year, 1941.
The English language version,
Music in my Time
, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1955.
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