Thanks to Francesco Castellano:

Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2003) died last Monday, March 3. His music combined vestiges of 16th-century sacred Italian polyphony with 20th-century techniques.

Though Mr. Petrassi is widely considered one of the three giants of Italian modernist music, along with Dallapiccola, who died in 1975, and their younger contemporary Luciano Berio, his music has not been performed in the United States as often. Unlike them, he never taught for an extended period in America, and always struggled with English.

Petrassi avoided Opera to concentrate on Choral, Symphonies, and Concertos, but he also composed film scores for such films as "Riso amaro" (Bitter Rice) and
"Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi" (No Peace among the Olive Trees), both by director Giuseppe De Santis.
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GOFREDDO PETRASSI, ITALIAN MODERNIST COMPOSER, DIES AT 98
New York Times
By Anthony Tommasini
March 5, 2003

Goffredo Petrassi, the Italian composer and a leading figure of Italian modernist music in the 20th century, died on Sunday in Rome. He was 98.

Mr. Petrassi was noted for his pluralistic exploration of compositional styles. Vestiges of the 16th-century sacred Italian polyphony he was reared in as a choirboy imbued his music; so did Stravinsky's polytonal harmonic innovations, which reoriented Mr. Petrassi's awareness when he came of age as a composer in the 1930's. His mature works are pungently atonal and spiked with elements of the 12-tone technique, though he never embraced it completely. Like Alban Berg, he adapted the 12-tone idiom freely, so as to write arching melodic lines.

Though he was part of a movement to wrest Italian music from its identification with opera, he was masterly in his dramatic handling of large choral and symphonic forces. His breakthrough came in 1941 with "Coro dei Morti," which he described as a dramatic madrigal for male voices, brass, three pianos, five double-basses and percussion.

Mr. Petrassi declared his seriousness of purpose in this work, a setting of an excerpt from a philosophical text by Leopardi. His spiritual bent was equally apparent in another influential composition, "Noche Oscura" (1951). A cantata for mixed chorus and orchestra, it is based on a poem by St. John of the Cross about the solitary path of a mystic who severs connections with humanity in pursuit of Jesus. The cantata boldly juxtaposes music of diverse idioms within an asymmetrical yet vividly geometric framework.

Despite the spiritual content of many of his works, Mr. Petrassi often said that he strived to maintain an ironic detachment from his subject. The drama of his music, he explained, came from his grappling with whatever compositional language he was fixed on at the time.

In his later years, he increasingly wrote chamber works in which his rigorous handling of contrapuntal elements took the forefront: for example, "Tre per Sette" (1967), last heard in New York in a concert by the ensemble Speculum Musicae in late 2001. In this piece three musicians perform on different types of clarinets, flutes and oboes: seven all together. Every coloristic possibility is explored. Though the contrapuntal writing is gnarly and intricate, the music's cerebral quality is undercut by playful taunts exchanged by the pugnacious individual instruments.

The composer Elliott Carter was among Mr. Petrassi's devoted colleagues. They met in 1952 while at the American Academy in Rome. "Petrassi's music was colorful, brilliant and interestingly orchestrated," Mr. Carter said on Monday. It has, he added, "a kind of dreamy atmosphere, very different from his fellow modernist Luigi Dallapiccola, who was Florentine. Mr. Petrassi was a Roman, and more effusive."

Goffredo Petrassi was born on July 16, 1904, in Zagarolo, a village in the Sabine Hills near Rome. In 1911 his family moved to Rome, where the 7-year-old Goffredo, who had had no musical training but sang beautifully, was enrolled in the choir school of St. Salvatore. Family finances forced him to take a job in a music shop when he was 15. He would often play the piano in the back room, where Alessandro Bustini, a teacher of piano and composition at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, overheard him. Bustini became his mentor and prepared him for the conservatory.

As Mr. Petrassi used to explain, the conservatory's wide repertory affected him like a culture shock. But he reveled in the experience and progressed steadily. His Partita for Orchestra, composed in 1932, won two composition prizes, one from the International Society for Contemporary Music. In 1933-34, he wrote his First Concerto for Orchestra. Though 17 years would pass before he wrote another, he eventually composed eight such works, each emblematic of his approach.

While visiting the United States in 1955 to hear the conductor Charles Munch lead the Boston Symphony in performances of his Fifth Concerto for Orchestra, Mr. Petrassi explained why he preferred this genre to the symphony in an interview with The New York Times.

Described as "of medium stature, with slightly Mephistophelean eyebrows and the well-groomed look of a man fresh from the barber shop," Mr. Petrassi said that he had no use for the traditional mélange of orchestral sounds, and that his aim was to write in the style of each instrument. "I seek to create new sonorities based on pure instrumental sounds rather than a big, muddy ensemble," he told The Times. "It naturally follows that every instrument has its own direct responsibility; it cannot hide behind the other instruments."

Though Mr. Petrassi is widely considered one of the three giants of Italian modernist music, along with Dallapiccola, who died in 1975, and their younger contemporary Luciano Berio, his music has not been performed in the United States as often. Unlike them, he never taught for an extended period in America, and always struggled with English. For more than 30 years, he was an influential teacher at the Conservatory and at the Academy of Santa Cecilia.

Mr. Petrassi is survived by his wife, Rosetta Acerbi, a painter, and a daughter, Adriana.

He stopped composing in the early 1980's. Mr. Carter, who wrote "Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi" ("Gratitude for Goffredo Petrassi"), an animated, mercurial work for solo violin, said that for the last 10 years, Mr. Petrassi was essentially blind.

Goffredo Petrassi, Italian Modernist Composer, Dies at 98
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/05/obituaries/05PETR.html

Link in Italian:
http://www.italica.rai.it/principali/argomenti/biografie/petrassi.htm