The Riccardo Zandonai International Study Centre in Rovereto is one of the SISS project’s prestigious collaborations.
SISS can boast numerous collaborations with organisations, foundations and musical institutions — more than thirty in Italy and abroad — for the realisation of this extensive audiovisual project.
Among these partners is the Riccardo Zandonai International Study Centre in Rovereto.
Active since 2010, the Study Centre builds on the consolidated experience of the ‘R. Zandonai’ Permanent Laboratory, established within the “Tartarotti” Municipal Library in Rovereto. The Library preserves most of the musician’s materials, including scores, letters, testimonies, period press and objects.
The Study Centre’s support has been fundamental to the organisation of cine-concerts by the “Bonporti” Conservatory of Trento and Riva del Garda, the lead partner of SISS. These concerts explore the adaptation and modern arrangement of original music from rare Italian films (WP#1 – Sounding Images: Reshaping the heritage of Italian cinema Classics).
The historical films that will be reviewed during the Bonporti Orchestra’s concert tour in early 2026, made available thanks to the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, include “Amami Alfredo!” (1942), directed by Carmine Gallone. Not everyone may know that the opera composer Riccardo Zandonai was one of the composers of the soundtrack. The Bonporti Conservatory commissioned this music to be rearranged based on a manuscript in Rovereto.
Federica Fortunato, vice president of the Study Centre and member of the Scientific Committee, tells us more: In common perception, Zandonai is an opera composer who is almost automatically (and reductively) associated with Francesca da Rimini.
After many successful works, Zandonai noticed a change in the audience and, above all, in the organisation of the theatrical world during the 1930s: «It is a time of mediocrity in art, and yet true artists are retiring and the thermometer is pointing towards decline.
Day by day, I feel more and more alienated from the world that fascinated me so much in my youth — the theatre — and day by day, I wait for the moment to close my shop for good!». Lamenting the boycotts orchestrated by the business world, Zandonai temporarily closes the theatrical opera section of his “atelier” to pursue cinema, which he finds seductive: «I have faith in this new, complex and mechanised art, which will inevitably replace the old, decrepit theatre».
Within a few years, he wrote for several films, collaborating with prestigious directors. In 1941, he composed the soundtrack for the film Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto (Caravaggio, the Cursed Painter), directed by Goffredo Alessandrini. The previous year, he collaborated with Giuseppe Verdi on the music for the film Amami Alfredo (Love Me, Alfredo), directed by Carmine Gallone. As the title suggests, the popular story of Violetta is in the background, but completely reworked and updated: a famous singer asks La Scala to stage her boyfriend’s new opera as part of her contract. When the protagonist falls ill, the young composer’s work is also jeopardised. Against the advice of doctors who fear for her life, the singer takes to the stage in a production of La Traviata in an attempt to save the new opera.
The ending is as it should be: happy, with success for both Verdi’s and her lover’s music. A manuscript dated 5 June 1940 at the Rovereto Civic Library contains the so-called “Greek scene”, a stirring passage from the film. Based on a sumptuously classical text by Ettore Romagnoli (from Aristophanes), Sappho and the women of Lesbos are called upon to play and dance while the choir repeats: «Let us spend the night singing your praises, love! Love… love…». This page, for voice and piano with few instrumental indications, is the only fragment of the entire soundtrack found, and it reveals the difficult balance between artistic ambition and the need to correspond to the spectacular style required by the historical moment and the charisma of a director like Gallone.