“Quei due fenomeni estetici”. Ildebrando Pizzetti e il conte Guido Chigi Saracini

Count Guido Chigi Saracini, the founder of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, nurtured a fruitful collaboration with many musicians of his time, including the composer Ildebrando Pizzetti. By examining their correspondence and a large corpus of unpublished documents kept in the archives of the Accademia Chigiana, the essay retraces the steps of their artistic collaboration: from Pizzetti’s role in the conception of the allegorical sculptures of Harmony and Melody placed in the concert hall of the Chigi palace, to the first Italian performance of the cantata Epithalamium, given in Siena in 1940; from the support provided by the composer, as Member of the Italian Academy, to the Chigiana’s activities, to his lectures given during the “Settimane musicali senesi”. Their correspondence also reveals lively contrasts between Pizzetti’s modernist vocation and the count’s firm reticence to modernist poetics: contrasts that reached their peak after the Second World War, when the work of many musicians who had played an active role during the fascist regime was censured. Nonetheless, their common interest in nineteenth-century Italian opera ensured the continuity and sol­idity of a relationship in which an important mediating role was also played by Adelmo Damerini, one of the main members of count Chigi’s entourage and at the same time an attentive scholar of Pizzetti.