Musical composer

On 8 March 1876 Franco ALFANO, an Italian composer who died in Sanremo, where he had lived since 1940, was born in Naples on 26 October 1954.

He can be considered as one of the last representatives of the Italian verist school and had his greatest success in the theatrical field, where he progressively attenuated the verist emphasis to arrive at more meditated and complex compositions.
His most famous work is Resurrection, of 1904, inspired by the novel of the same name by Lev Tolstoy.
His name is mainly linked to the completion, in 1925-1926, on behalf of Arturo Toscanini, of the opera Turandot, which remained unfinished after Puccini's death.

Studied in Naples with Alessandro Longo, then attended the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella where he had as teacher of harmony, Camillo de Nardis (1857-1951) and composition, Paolo Serrao (1863-1907).
He moved to Leipzig in 1895 where he studied with Hans Sitt and Salomon Jadassohn, to Berlin in 1896 where he began his career as a pianist and composed his first opera.

On 30th November 1904 his main opera Resurrection, written a few years earlier when he was in Moscow, was performed at the Vittorio Emanuele Theatre in Turin. This verist opera gave international fame to the composer and will be performed in Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Paris and outside Europe. It was precisely this opera that led to the composer's classification as a verist.
However, Alfano's style was evolving under the influence of modern European currents and the Italian opera itself was acquiring new timbres under the influence of Debussy, Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakov and Richard Strauss.

Franco Alfano held prestigious positions including teaching at the Bologna High School, in 1918 he was the director of the Bologna Conservatory and from 1923 he was the director of the "Giuseppe Verdi" Conservatory in Turin, which he held until 1939.

In 1940 he became superintendent of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, a position he held for two years. Finally he was director between 1942 and 1947 of the Opera at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and between 1947 and 1950 at the Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro.

Although he wrote and completed twelve operas (two of which remained unfinished), Alfano owes his fame today, as already mentioned, especially to the completion of Turandot, based on Puccini's notes.
The choice to have the opera completed fell on Alfano and was due to Arturo Toscanini and the publisher Ricordi on the basis of the affinities that the opera La "Leggenda di Sakùntala" had with Turandot's unfinished finale.
To pay homage to his memory, the town of Sanremo named the Auditorium of the Marsaglia Park after him, where he also had a bust placed.

(from Wikipedia)