The Catanese Amici della Musica Society dedicates a meeting to the composer Francesco Paolo Frontini (Catania 1860-1939)

The SCAM Catanese Society of Friends of Music invites to a encounter dedicated to the Sicilian composer Francesco Paolo Frontini: Saturday October 29, 2022 (5.30 pm) at theSacred Heart Institute, as part of the review "New Art Meetings", the Prof. Salvatore Armando Sapienza he will hold a conversation to introduce this interesting unjustly forgotten author.

Francesco Paolo Frontini (Catania 1860 - 1939), having begun his musical studies with his father, at 15 he was admitted to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Palermo, later moving to Naples to study with Lauro Rossi at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory. He later became director of the Musical Institute of Catania, a position he left in 1923 while maintaining the role of honorary director. His activity as a composer extends from 1875 to 1939, and includes a vast production: 6 works, a lyric poem, 150 romances, 5 collections of Sicilian songs, 7 Neapolitan songs, 58 pieces for orchestra, 38 for strings, more than 170 for piano, 5 musical commentaries for theater and 8 rearrangements and reductions of pieces by other composers.

Little inclined to seek fame and worldliness, Frontini was nevertheless appreciated by intellectuals such as Giuseppe Pitre, writer, doctor, ethnologist, the greatest scholar of Sicilian folklore, to whom he dedicated the collection of songs in the vernacular "Eco della Sicilia" but also by Jules Massenet.

«I will die with a thorn in my heart: those who do not know me will believe that I have not been able to write anything other than" The Little Mountain Man "and the" Arabian Serenade "». In one of the few confessions of Francesco Paolo Frontini we can read the composer's fear of not being adequately appreciated. Realist musician, son of romanticism, during the twentieth century he actually fell into oblivion, being known today only to expert musicologists and a few music lovers.

A void which the work of diffusion started by the composer's great-grandson, Pietro Rizzo, who made all the inherited scores available to the virtual music community, and which sees the commitment of the Catanese Amici della Musica Society, which has always been active in the enhancement of local artists.

The conference Francesco Paolo Frontini also falls into this perspective: a Catania glory wrongly forgotten, promoted by SCAM and entrusted to prof. Salvatore Armando Sapienza.