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Enzo Masetti

Enzo Masetti traded in a career writing for the opera house and the concert hall in favor of film music, and became the most influential film composer and teacher of film composition technique in Italy. Born in Bologna, he was drawn to music at an early age and entered the Bologna Conservatory, studying under its director, composer Franco Alfano. Masetti graduated in 1920, and eight years later published his first major orchestral work, Sagra, and his opera La Fola Delle Tre Ochette. A second opera, La Mosca Mora, followed two years later. His output during the early '30s was highlighted by the orchestral work Contrasti, and chamber pieces Divertimento for four saxophones, and a Piano Trio (both 1933). In the mid-'30s, he turned to the writing of film music, making his screen debut with the 1936 feature Cavalleria. He kept his hand in the concert hall with Idillio e Ditirambo (1938) and the Legende Italiche (1941) for violin and orchestra, but from 1940 onward, most of Masetti's activities were devoted to film music. He authored nearly 60 scores over the next 18 years and earned a reputation for extraordinary quality -- he became a favorite of such diverse filmmakers as the neo-realist specialist Luigi Zampa and fantasy director Pietro Francisci, and his music was heard in many films that were widely seen internationally, including Volcano (1950) and Woman of Rome. Masetti was a highly acquisitive as well as fiercely original musician, keenly aware of the stylistic and musicological currents around him. By the same token, he was an excellent teacher and writer on music, and from 1942 taught classes in film music at the Conservatorio di Musica S Cecilia and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, where his students included a young Mario Nascimbene, who went on to a career in international cinema, including the United States. His own style was a mix of post-Romantic and melodic modernistic elements -- he could write material appropriate to popular songs, or rousing work songs and choruses worthy of the operatic stage. He returned to the latter in 1957 with La Bella Non Puo Dormire. In the two years that followed, he wrote the scores for two movies, Le Fatiche di Ercole and Ercole e la Regina di Lidia, which became the two most popular Italian-made films ever released in America, as Hercules and Hercules Unchained. Masetti retired following his work on the latter, and died two years later.
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Discography

10 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller

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