Франческо Фаччо: Итальяндық композитор және дирижер өмірі мен шығармашылығы

Italian composer and conductor

Francesco (Franco) Antonio Faccio (8 March 1840 – 21 July 1891) was an Italian composer and conductor. Born in Verona, he studied music at the Milan Conservatory from 1855 where he was a pupil of Stefano Ronchetti Monteviti and, as scholar William Ashbrook notes, "where he struck up a lifelong friendship with Arrigo Boito, two years his junior" and with whom he was to collaborate in many ways. Initially, he became known as the composer of two operas and, in his years (1871–1889) as music director of the Teatro alla Scala opera house, Faccio became known as a conductor of Verdi's music at La Scala, in different parts of Italy, and abroad.

Faccio left Italy for two years and "honed his skills as an opera conductor in Scandinavia [but] secured a post at the Teatro Carcano on his return to Milan in the Autumn of 1868". at La Scala, he was named as music director of that house which mounted a revised version of Amleto on 12 February that year. It was not a success, and was never performed again during Faccio's lifetime. At La Scala, he conducted the first Italian performance of Aida in 1872 and this was followed by the first performance of Verdi's Otello in 1887, and Don Carlo in 1884. Faccio helped to launch Puccini's career, conducting his graduation piece from the Milan Conservatory, Capriccio sinfonico, in 1884. When Victor Maurel was planning to revive the Théâtre Italien company at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1883, it was hoped that Faccio would be chief conductor. He was hoping for not less than 100,000 francs. However, the managers at La Scala, the Corti brothers, agreed a new contract with Faccio which kept him in Milan. In the end Gialdino Gialdini was engaged instead, with a young Arnaldo Conti as assistant conductor: Faccio only conducted four of the eight performances of Simon Boccanegra in Paris through the 1883 1884 season. He continued to have an active conducting career in several Italian cities, as well as abroad where Otello was given its première. These included London on 5 July 1889 After a diagnosis related to syphilis, he was institutionalized in Monza and died there.

Faccio also continued to compose after the premiere of Amleto, writing among other things a "Quartetto". Sometime in 1870 Giovanni Ricordi commissioned him to write a third opera, Patria, based on a play by Victorien Sardou. Verdi himself intervened on Faccio's behalf to try to secure the rights to the play, but Sardou, hoping that Verdi himself would set the drama to music, refused. In 1874 a symphony Faccio had composed as early as 1859 was finally published, in piano duet reduction, by Ricordi. In 1866 both Boito and Faccio joined the Italian army to fight alongside Garibaldi. In addition to his purely militaristic excursions, Faccio used the opportunity to travel extensively throughout Europe, perusing Beethoven's autograph of Fidelio in Berlin in addition to getting to know Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. As his European travels came to an end in 1867, he traveled to Copenhagen on a steamship named Hamlet, and was amused to see other ships named after Shakespeare's tragedy. While in Denmark, he made a special trip to Elsinore and visited the Royal Castle where he had the feeling that at any moment one could imagine seeing the "wandering and troubled shade of the assassinated king." The disastrous premiere of Boito's Mefistofele at La Scala in 1868 added to the growing necessity of a compositional success by Boito and Faccio, self appointed representatives of the "Music of the future" in Italy.