Giuseppe Pietri

Giuseppe Pietri (Sant’Ilario, frazione of Marina di Campo, comune of Campo nell’Elba, 6 May 1886 – Milan, 11 August 1946) was an Italian composer, known primarily for his work in operetta. Excerpts from one of his works, the opera Maristella, were widely recorded and continue to be so on CD. The aria “Io conosco un giardino” from that work has been popular with tenors, and has been frequently recorded separately; among the singers to record it are Luciano Pavarotti, Beniamino Gigli, Joseph Calleja and more recently, Rolando Villazón.

Pietri studied composition at the Milan Conservatory at Gaetano Coronato. He studied harmony and counterpoint with Amintore Galli. He composed operas in versistical tradition, but it was his operettas that made him a popular success. He developed an independent Italian idiom for the operetta. The most famous was L’acqua cheta, which premiered in Rome in 1920. The text was from a 1908 Tuscan dialect piece by Augusto Novelli, a romantic comedy in the Florentine petty bourgeois style. Rompicollo was premiered in 1928 in Milan, and was translated into German as Das große Rennen (“The Big Race”).

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