Italian composer and conductor
Bruno Maderna was one of the preeminent figures in contemporary European music in the mid-twentieth century. Born in Venice,
Maderna was a child prodigy who played hot violin in a local combo and made his conducting debut at La Scala at age 12. By 1935 the course of
Maderna's career was redirected by Italian fascists, who sent the talented child out to tour the capitals of Europe as a symbol of the superiority of the fascist order.
Maderna was rescued from this depressing situation by prominent Veronese fashion designer Irma Manfredi, who took the now-adolescent professional musician under her wing and provided for his education.
By the age of 20
Bruno Maderna had already earned his degree in composition from the Conservatory of Rome and returned to Venice to continue under composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Under Malipiero,
Maderna began to master the complexities of serial composition, but this was interrupted by his conscription into the fascist army. By 1943
Maderna had deserted, and in 1945 he turned up fighting on the side of the partisans. At war's end, Malipiero helped get
Maderna a teaching job at the Venice Conservatory. He supplemented his income by making transcriptions of Baroque music for the publisher G. Ricordi, composing pop tunes and creating scores for radio drama and some rather undistinguished Italian films.
In 1948
Maderna took a conducting class with legendary maestro
Hermann Scherchen and through him probably got to know Wolfgang Steinecke, the founder of the Darmstadt Festival.
Maderna had already met composer
Luigi Nono at Ricordi, and would meet
Luciano Berio in Milan after leaving the Venice Conservatory in 1952. Steinecke engaged
Maderna as a conductor at the Darmstadt Festival, a post that made
Maderna a celebrity in postwar European avant-garde and one that he would hold until the end of his days. With
Berio,
Maderna co-founded the Studio Fonologia Musicale of the RAI in 1955, a major electronic music facility that hosted composers such as
John Cage, Francesco Donatoni, Henri Pousseur, Niccolò Castiglioni,
Luc Ferrari, and others.
As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s,
Bruno Maderna's work as a composer began to take a backseat to his activity as a conductor. He was named principal guest conductor with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, appeared frequently with the Juilliard Ensemble, and was musical director for two years at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood. He also spent a great deal of time in the recording studio and produced many fine albums of contemporary music, although in concert
Maderna was equally well known for conducting the symphonies of
Mahler and other well-worn repertoire of the Viennese classics. Perhaps this had some effect on
Maderna's personality as a composer, as well, for by the end of his life he'd turned his back on the serial aesthetic espoused by the Darmstadt Festival and his colleague
Pierre Boulez. This phase of
Maderna's career is experienced in his opera Satyricon (1973), the orchestral piece Quadrivium (1969), and in his never-finished series of pieces blanketed under the title Hyperion (1964-1973), unofficially an opera but officially a "lyric (drama) in the form of a spectacle."
When the end came for
Maderna at age 53, it did so swiftly -- he was diagnosed with lung cancer during the rehearsals for Satyricon, which premiered in March 1973, and was dead by that November. His celebrity in America was so short-lived that by 2004
Maderna's name was largely forgotten there, but not so in Europe, where he is yet regarded as one of the giants of postwar modernism.