Little is known about the life and career of Lorenzo Molajoli, other than his work associated with the recording industry in Italy during the inter-war years. Born in Rome, he studied there at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and began his career as a professional musician in 1893. He seems to have been active as an operatic coach in North and South America, South Africa and various provincial Italian opera houses; he was certainly involved in the 1912 season at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, when he wrote to a friend about a dramatic falling-out over the interpretation of Massenet’s Manon between conductor Arturo Toscanini and tenor Giuseppe Anselmi, as well as criticising another conductor of the season, Bernardino Molinari.

Following the introduction of electrical recording in 1925, the British Columbia Graphophone Company embarked on an extensive programme of recording using the new system and commenced recording in Italy in March 1926. Molajoli was engaged by the company as its house conductor, which generally involved the organisation of recording sessions with artists and technicians, decisions about side-breaks and musical cuts, as well as conducting in the studio. Columbia’s programme initially involved only the recording of operatic excerpts, most usually with singers then appearing at Milan’s opera house, La Scala. At the end of 1928 the company decided to embark on the recording of complete operas, using the chorus and orchestra of La Scala. In November of that year Molajoli conducted the first three works in this series, Verdi’s La traviata and Aida, and Puccini’s La Bohème. As a result of the commercial and artistic success of these recordings Columbia decided to continue to record complete operas during the following years. In total twenty operas, either complete or abridged, were captured on wax, despite the downturn in activity in the recording industry following the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Ultimately however this nearly drove Columbia into bankruptcy, for as sales declined it was forced by its bankers to merge with its larger rival The Gramophone Company, whose major label was His Master’s Voice (HMV), to form Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) in 1931. The chairman of The Gramophone Company, industry veteran Alfred Clark, was less than wholly enthusiastic about this change: Columbia was to be seen very much as the junior partner in the new arrangement. It had been in head-to-head competition with The Gramophone Company, which had also used the La Scala forces for its own recordings of complete operas. These had been conducted by its own Italian recording director, Carlo Sabajno, who had been recording for The Gramophone Company since 1905: many record critics of the 1930s took sides on whether they preferred the HMV Sabajnos or the Columbia Molajolis, as their repertoire often overlapped. Molajoli conducted his last recordings for Columbia in 1932. His only recording for another company was of his own arrangement of Vivaldi’s Concerto in A major, which he recorded for HMV with the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. He died in Milan in 1939.

Molajoli’s conducting is notable for its sure sense of style and unanimity of ensemble, especially between orchestra and singers: classic characteristics of a solid opera professional. Many of his recorded performances possess an enjoyably fiery sense of drama, as well as frequent headlong tempi, which give his readings an engaging and often appropriate sensation of forward propulsion. Although Columbia’s casts are generally held to be on a slightly less exalted level than those employed in the rival HMV recordings, they are never less than wholly competent and in fact frequently much more than this. Occasionally they featured the same casts as those of current La Scala productions, such as in Molajoli’s recording of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Among his most successful recordings are complete accounts of Boito’s Mefistofele, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Manon Lescaut, and Verdi’s Aida, Falstaff, Il trovatore, La traviata and Rigoletto. His exciting abridged account of Verdi’s Ernani has yet to appear on compact disc.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

Arrigo Boito is probably better known as a librettist than as a composer, especially for his texts for Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and the Shakespearian Otello and Falstaff, as well as the libretto of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda.

Opera

Boito’s only completed opera, for which he wrote both words and music, was Mefistofele, based on Goethe’s Faust, a work to which he made considerable alterations. ‘Ave, Signor’, sung by Mephistopheles in the prologue, and the prison scene for the soprano Margherita (Gretchen) remain familiar recital items.

Rossini occupied an unrivalled position in the Italian musical world of his time, winning considerable success relatively early in his career. The son of a horn player and a mother who made a career for herself in opera, as a boy he had direct experience with operatic performance, both in the orchestra pit and on stage. His operas from his first relative success in 1810 until 1823 were first performed in Italy. There followed a period of success in Paris, leading to his final opera, Guillaume Tell (‘William Tell’), staged in Paris in 1829. The revolution of 1830 prevented the fulfillment of French royal commissions for the theatre, but in his later life he continued to enjoy considerable esteem—both in Paris, where he spent much of his last years, and in his native Italy. There he spent the years from 1837 to 1855, before returning finally to France, where he died in 1868. The last 40 years of his life were creatively silent: no more operas issued from his pen.

Operas

Of Rossini’s three dozen or so operas, Il barbiere di Siviglia (‘The Barber of Seville’) is probably the best known, a treatment of the first play of the Figaro trilogy by Beaumarchais on which Mozart had drawn 30 years earlier in Vienna. Other well-known comic operas by Rossini include La scala di seta (‘The Silken Ladder’), Il Signor Bruschino, L’italiana in Algeri (‘The Italian Girl in Algiers’), Il Turco in Italia (‘The Turk in Italy’), La Cenerentola (‘Cinderella’) and La gazza ladra (‘The Thieving Magpie’). More serious subjects were tackled in Otello, Semiramide, Mosè in Egitto (‘Moses in Egypt’) and the French Guillaume Tell (based on the play by Schiller). The overtures to many of these operas are a recurrent element in the repertoire of the concert hall.

Church Music

Church music by Rossini includes the Petite Messe solennelle, originally for 12 solo voices, two pianos and harmonium but rescored four years later, in 1867, with orchestral accompaniment. Rossini’s Stabat mater was written in 1841 in its final version.

Chamber Music

Instrumental compositions by Rossini include his early string sonatas, designed for two violins, cello and double bass and thought to have been written when the composer was 12. The string sonatas show a precocious command of Italian operatic style, here translated into instrumental terms. The so-called Péchés de vieillesse (‘Sins of Old Age’) consist of 13 volumes of varied music, some vocal, some instrumental (five designed for the piano). They consist of pieces that demonstrate both the well-known wit of the composer as well as his continuing technical command of musical resources.

Verdi dominated the world of Italian opera from his first considerable success in 1842 with Nabucco until his final Shakespearean operas Otello, staged at La Scala, Milan in 1887, and Falstaff, mounted at the same opera house in 1893. His career coincided with the rise of Italian nationalism and the unification of the country, causes with which he was openly associated.

Operas

The best known of Verdi’s 28 operas are Nabucco (‘Nebuchadnezzar’), Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Les Vêpres siciliennes (‘The Sicilian Vespers’), Simon Boccanegra, Un ballo in maschera (‘A Masked Ball’), La forza del destino (‘The Force of Destiny’), Don Carlo, Aida, Otello and Falstaff.

Church Music

In addition to settings of the Te Deum and the Stabat Mater Verdi wrote an impressive large-scale setting of the Requiem, its origin stemming from the death of Rossini in 1868 and the death of the writer Manzoni. The Requiem is a work of operatic magnificence, none the less moving for its theatrical elements.

The Quattro pezzi sacri (‘Four Sacred Pieces’) were written at various times in Verdi’s later years. The first, Ave Maria sulla scala enigmatica, written in 1889, was followed in publication by Stabat mater, Laudi alla Vergine Maria (on a text from Dante), and Te Deum for double chorus and orchestra. The Quattro pezzi sacri were published in 1898.