Today is a big day: the official publication date of my book, Succeeding Puccini: The Operatic Career of Italo Montemezzi, 1875–1952, coauthored with Raffaele Mellace. I first fell in love with Montemezzi’s music around 2006. I was then consciously working through the major works of all Puccini’s leading contemporaries and rivals, feeling sanguine that I would discover operas that I would admire above Puccini’s. This proved to be the case. The two composers in this group who most impressed me were Alfredo Catalani (1854–93) and of course Montemezzi (1875–1952). Montemezzi’s opera L’amore dei tre re of 1913 struck me as a most extraordinary masterpiece, and over the years I’ve come to love it more and more. It is, to put it simply, my favourite opera.
Back in 2006, there was very little information available about Catalani and Montemezzi in English. In Italian, Catalani had fared reasonably well, and been the subject of a number of books. Montemezzi, by contrast, had been very inadequately treated. Just after his death, a volume of tributes to him and his music had been published under the title Omaggio a Italo Montemezzi. After that, not a single book had been devoted to him or his music. What is more, even reputable encyclopedia articles were riddled with errors. To take one example, it was claimed that, having moved to the United States in 1939, Montemezzi moved back to Italy in 1948. This was not true at all. Though he happened to die on a trip to Italy, Montemezzi’s final home was in Beverly Hills.
In 2010, I began planning a book on Montemezzi: a simple, straightforward biographical account and examination of his critical fortunes. But the project gradually grew and grew. It became clear that there was a lot of information about Montemezzi in old newspapers and various manuscript collections, but tracking it down, and synthesizing it into a coherent narrative, was a huge challenge. What is more, and this was most exciting, some very important Montemezzi letters were regularly coming on the market, each one opening new doors. I began building my own Montemezzi archive. In 2014 and 2016 I was able to visit the Villa Montemezzi in Vigasio, the house where Montemezzi was born and raised, and where he composed much of his greatest music. It contained a positive treasure trove of Montemezzi related materials.
By 2018, I felt I had a reasonably full biography completed, and I began approaching publishers. They all said basically the same thing: Montemezzi was not a big enough figure to justify a purely biographical study; there would need to be analysis of his music too. I was not equipped to do this, so in 2020 I established a collaboration with Raffaele, a brilliant Italian musicologist who had already written at length on Montemezzi’s opera La nave (1918). At every stage of working on Montemezzi, there were remarkable—providential—coincidences, and here was another: Raffaele shared a birthday with Montemezzi! It has been a very happy collaboration, with Raffaele writing lots of brilliant analysis, and me then weaving it into the biographical narrative I’d already largely constructed. There were constant new discoveries along the way.
We approached Oxford University Press in 2022 and were over the moon when they accepted our proposal. And now, after goodness knows how many thousands of hours of work, Succeeding Puccini is finally published.