Vito Frazzi

Vito Frazzi (1888–1975) was an Italian composer and music educator. He taught piano, harmony and counterpoint at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory from 1912 until 1958. During his tenure at the Florence Conservatory, the composer established a friendship with Ildebrando Pizzetti, a director of the conservatory in 1917–23, who influenced Frazzi's compositional style. Vito also taught at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana from 1936 to 1963. Some of his notable students included Bruno Bartolozzi, Bruno Bettinelli, Valentino Bucchi, Luigi Dallapiccola and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. Frazzi had been using an octatonic scale of alternating tones and semitones in his works extensively. He became one of the first composers to explore it and wrote two manuscripts, Scale alternate ("Alternating scales") in 1930 and I vari sistemi del linguaggio musicale ("The various systems of musical language") in 1960. Apart from symphonic, choral and chamber compositions, Vito Frazzi wrote a few operas. Re Lear, which is loosely based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, was created in 1922–28 but not performed until the late thirties. He completed Don Chisciotte opera and wrote a libretto for it (derived from the Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes and Miguel De Unamuno's Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho) between 1940 and 1950. It was premiered at the Teatro Comunale Florence on April 28, 1952. Frazzi destroyed the score of his opera L'ottava moglie di Barbablù ("Bluebeard's eighth wife") after its premiere at Teatro Della Pergola in Florence in January 1940, and the work remained unpublished.