Maderna was born Bruno Grossato in Venice but later decided to take the name of his mother, Caterina Carolina Maderna.[1][2][failed verification] At the age of four he began studying the violin with his grandfather. "My grandfather thought that if you could play the violin you could then do anything, even become the biggest gangster. If you play the violin you are always sure of a place in heaven."[3] As a child he played several instruments (violin, drums and accordion) in his father's small variety band. A child prodigy, in the early thirties he was not only performing violin concertos, he was already conducting orchestral concerts: first with the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, then in Trieste, Venice, Padua and Verona. He was originally Jewish.[4]
Orphaned at the age of four,[5] Maderna was adopted by a wealthy woman from Verona, Irma Manfredi, who saw to that he received a solid musical education. He took private lessons in harmony and musical composition from Arrigo Pedrollo from 1935 until 1937 and studied composition with Alessandro Bustini at the Rome Conservatory from 1937 until 1940.[5]
In 1950 Maderna started an international career as a conductor, first in Paris and Munich, then across Europe. In 1955 he founded the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano with Luciano Berio[7] and Incontri musicali, a series of concerts disseminating contemporary music in Italy.
With his later wife Beate Christina Koepnick, a young actress from Darmstadt, Maderna had three children.[1]
In 1957–58, at the invitation of Giorgio Federico Ghedini, he taught at the Milan Conservatory, and between 1960 and 1962 he lectured at Dartington International Summer School in England. From 1961 to 1966, Maderna and Pierre Boulez were the main directors of the International Kranichsteiner KammerensembleinDarmstadt. Despite this heavy workload throughout these years Maderna found time to compose.
During the 1960s and '70s he spent much time in the United States, teaching and conducting. In 1971–72 he was appointed director of new music at Tanglewood. In 1972–73 he became the principal conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica of RAI in Milan.
Maderna died of lung cancer in Darmstadt in 1973, at the age of 53.
A number of composers wrote pieces in Maderna's memory, including Pierre Boulez (Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna)[8] and Luciano Berio (Calmo for voice and orchestra).[9]Earle Brown's Centering, dedicated to the memory of Maderna, ends with a short quotation from Maderna's First Oboe Concerto.[10]
Maderna composed much music in all genres: instrumental, chamber, concertos and electronic, as well as large amounts of incidental music (for theatre and radio) and transcriptions and editions of early music.
At the heart of Maderna's output are a number of concertos, including one for violin, one for two pianos, two for solo piano and several for flute and orchestra. He was particularly drawn to the oboe, composing three concertos in all: the first in 1962–63 followed by two more in 1967 and 1973.[2]
Other major orchestral works include Aura and Biogramma (both 1967) and Quadrivium, for four percussionists and four orchestral groups (premiered at the 1969 Royan Festival). Giuseppe Sinopoli recorded all three of these pieces with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979. Maderna's Requiem, composed between 1944 and 1946, was rediscovered and performed in 2009; the American composer Virgil Thomson saw an unfinished version of the score in 1946 and praised it as a masterpiece.[11][12][13]
Goffredo Petrassi: Noche Oscura (Chor und Orchester des Hessischen Rundfunks; Stradivarius, 1952)
Henri Pousseur: Rimes pour différentes sources sonores [for ensemble and pre-recorded sound on magnetic tape]onPanorama della musica nuova RCA MLDS 61005, 1964
Anon. (2011b). Bruno Maderna. bach-cantatas.com. Retrieved 8 January 2016. Compositeur et chef d'orchestre italien né le 21 avril 1920 à Venise, mort le 13 novembre 1973 à Darmstadt, Allemagne
Anon. (2013). Centering. Retrieved 8 January 2016.
Baroni, Mario (2003). "The Macroform in Post-tonal Music: Listening and Analysis". Musicae Scientiae. 7 (2) (Fall ed.): 219–240. doi:10.1177/102986490300700202. S2CID146970743.
Baroni, Mario; Dalmonte, Rossana, eds. (2015). Pour Bruno. Memorie e ricerche su Bruno Maderna. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana.
Baroni, Mario; Dalmonte, Rossana, eds. (1985). Bruno Maderna, Documenti. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.
Baroni, Mario; Dalmonte, Rossana, eds. (1989). Studi su Bruno Maderna. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.
Clark, Philip (2011). Thoroughly Modern Maderna (January ed.). pp. 44–45.
Dalmonte, Rossana; Russo, Marco, eds. (2004). Bruno Maderna. Studi e Testimonianze. Lucca: LIM.
Dalmonte, Rossana (2001). Stanley Sadie; John Tyrrell (eds.). Maderna [Grossato], Bruno [Brunetto] (second ed.). London: Macmillan Publishers.
Drees, Stefan (2000). László Dobszay (ed.). "Renaissance-Musik als Inspirationsquelle für das Komponieren Bruno Madernas und Luigi Nonos". The Past in the Present. 1. Budapest & Visegrád: IMS Intercongressional Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the Cantus Planus: 545–558. ISBN978-963-7181-34-4. Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem
Fabbi, Roberto (2002). "Cena sociale. Satyricon e il 'politico". Musica/Realtà. 67.
Fearn, Raymond (1990). Bruno Maderna. Harwood Academic Publishers.
Fearn, Raymond (2000). László Dobszay (ed.). "Luft von anderem Planeten...': The presence of the Epitaph of Seikilos in Bruno Maderna's Composizione no. 2 (1950)". The Past in the Present. 1. Budapest & Visegrád: IMS Intercongressional Symposium and the 10th Meeting of the Cantus Planus: 559–568. ISBN978-963-7181-34-4. Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem
Feneyrou, Laurent; Mathon, Geneviève; Ferrari, Giordano, eds. (2007). À Bruno Maderna. Paris: Éditions de Basalte.
Ferrari, Giordano (2000). Les débuts du théatre musical d'avant-garde en Italie. Berio, Evangelisti, Maderna. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Gagné, Nicole V. (2012). Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN978-0-8108-6765-9. E-book: ISBN978-0-8108-7962-1
di Luzio, Claudia (2004). Peter Csobádi; Gernot Gruber; Jürgen Kühnel (eds.). "Traumnahe Welten—weltnahe Träume: Zum Verhältnis von Traum und Wirklichkeit im Musiktheater von Luciano Berio und Bruno Maderna". Traum und Wirklichkeit in Theater und Musiktheater: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions. 62. Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser: 342–356. Wort und Musik: Salzburger akademische Beiträge. ISBN978-3-85145-099-6.
Mathon, Geneviève (2003). Laurent Feneyrou (ed.). "À propos du Satyricon de Bruno Moderna". Musique et Dramaturgie: Esthétique de la Représentation Au XXème Siècle. Esthétique 7. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne: 571–593. ISBN978-2-85944-472-3.
Mila, Massimo (1999). Einaudi (ed.). Maderna musicista europeo. Vol. nuova serie 17. Turin: Piccola biblioteca Einaudi. ISBN978-88-06-15059-4.
Neidhofer, Christoph (2005). 'Blues' through the Serial Lens: Transformational Process in a Fragment by Bruno Maderna. Vol. 18 (March ed.). pp. 14–20.
Neidhofer, Christoph (2005). Bruno Madernas flexibler Materialbegriff: Eine Analyse des Divertimento in due tempi (1953). Vol. 9 (January ed.). pp. 30–47.
Palazzetti, Nicolò (2015). Italian Harmony during the Second World War. Analysis of Bruno Maderna's First String Quartet. Vol. 21. pp. 63–91.
van de Poel, Piet Hein (2003). Laurent Feneyrou (ed.). "Bruno Maderna sur le Satyricon: Pop art en musique". Musique et Dramaturgie: Esthétique de la Représentation Au XXème Siècle. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne: 599–601.
Verzina, Nicola (2003). Bruno Maderna: Etude historique et critique. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN978-2-7475-4409-2.
Zender, Hans; Roland Diry; Suzanne Laurentius (2007). Neue Musik erwartet Selbstandigkeit. Vol. 24 (January ed.). p. [page needed].
Bruno Maderna (2020), Amore e curiosità. Scritti, frammenti e interviste sulla musica, ed. by Angela Ida De Benedictis, Michele Chiappini and Benedetta Zucconi. Milan: Il Saggiatore. ISBN978-88-428-2721-4.
Classical music
