Daniele Amfitheatrof

DANIELE AMFITHEATROF BIOGRAPHY

DANIELE AMFITHEATROF was born in St Petersburg, Russia on 29th October 1901 into a family distinguished in pre-Soviet Russia in various fields of arts and culture. His father, Alexander V Amfitheatrof [1862-1938], was a noted historian and writer. His mother, Illaria (Sokolof), an accomplished singer and pianist, had studied privately with Rimsky-Korsakoff.

The composer's early life was one of extreme hardship. In January 1902, at the age of three months, he was removed to Siberia, where his father was imprisoned for publishing anti-Czarist articles. In 1904 the authorities returned the family to St Petersburg, following which they migrated to Italy. At the age of six he began music studies with his mother.

In 1914 he commenced studies in composition under Ottorino Respighi in Rome, but returned with his family to Russia where his father was appointed advisor to Kerensky during the few months he was Prime Minister before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In spite of this social and political upheaval he managed formal instruction in harmony under Nicolas V Scherbatchef and Joseph Wihtol at the Petrograd Conservatory between 1916 and 1918. In 1921 he was permitted travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia to study counterpoint with Jaroslav Kricka.

After four years of hardships the Amfitheatrof family under the auspices of Maxim Gorky succeeded in their escape from Russia by way of a perilous crossing in a small boat across the Gulf of Finland. Following their return to Italy in the Spring in 1922 the young composer became a naturalized citizen and settled down to a peaceful pursuit of his musical activities. He resumed studies with Respighi. In 1924 he received his diploma in composition from the Royal Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome. To his other accomplishments as a professional pianist he enrolled in a two-year course of Gregorian Music and Organ at the Superior Pontifical Academy of Sacred Music at the Vatican between 1925 and 1927. In 1926 he was also appointed as private music teacher to HRH Princess Giovanna di Savoia in Rome for three years. During these formative years he took his place in Italian professional life. He was appointed pianist, organist and assistant choral director at the Augusteo in Rome in 1924, and between 1926 and 1929 conducted their resident orchestra as the associate to Bernardino Molinari. Successive appointments included those as the artistic director of the Italian Radio Stations in Genoa and Trieste [1929-32] and management of the RAI in Turin, where he also conducted many symphony concerts, choral works and operas at the Teatro di Torino [1932-1937]. He also composed his first film score [Max Ophuls' La Signora di Tutti, 1934] and appeared as guest conductor of many of the leading European orchestras.

His success as a composer in his own right was assured early on by premier performances of Poema del Mare [Poem of the Sea, 1925] and Miracolo delle Rose [Miracle of the Rose, 1926] by the Augusteo Symphony under Molinari. Likewise, a performance of Christmas Rhapsody for Organ and Orchestra by Fernando Germani and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Fernando Germani under Frederic Stock on 14th December 1928 was well received by American audiences. His popular programmatic work American Panorama [1935], premiered by Dimitri Mitropoulos at Turin in 1937, resulted in an invitation from the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra for Amfitheatrof to take up the post as his associate for the first two-months of the 1937-38 concert season.

He arrived in the United States with his wife of seven years [nee May C Semenza of Milan], his son Erik [b 1931] and daughter Stella Renata [b 1934] aboard the Italian liner Vulcania at New York Harbour on 21st October. His busy schedule with the orchestra, which included concerts in Canada (Winnipeg, Manitoba) and regional Minnesota (Moorhead), received much positive press. The music critic for the 20th November edition of the Minneapolis Progress-Register, reviewing the 13th November concert at Northrop Auditorium, noted in earnest, 'both as a conductor and composer Daniele Amfitheatrof was an unqualified success...he won his audience completely from the beginning through his sincere and ardent interpretations, and the reception of his final number [the US premier of American Panorama] amounted to a veritable ovation with many recalls...'. His brief engagement with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accepted at the behest of Serge Koussevitsky, to conduct concerts there in January 1938 was similarly lauded by audiences and critics alike.

With the war imminent in Europe he decided to remain in the United States. He relocated his family to California, where he was employed under an exclusive four-year contract [1939-43] to the music department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Culver City. In May of 1950 he represented the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Screen Composers' Association of America as their official delegate to the International Music Congress in Florence, Italy. During his twenty-six years in Hollywood he was twice nominated for the Academy Award for best original score for Guest Wife [1945] and Song of the South [1946]. He composed over fifty film scores (many of them uncredited), and worked at all the major film studios before he retired in 1965.

He returned to Italy in 1959, where he lived for the most part until 1967. During this time he dedicated himself to the completion of several new concert works. He made frequent visits to the United States during the last fifteen years of his life, but plans to secure the financing for a stage musical, the production of a film and the completion of an operatic work were not successful there. His final years were spent in relative seclusion in Venice and Rome, where he died on 4th June 1983.

Amfitheatrof once remarked rather philosophically that his career in Hollywood as a 'prostitute composer' ultimately tarnished his image, making it difficult - if not impossible - for him to secure performances of his concert music. Nonetheless, he considered his film work to be professional in every respect, citing Lassie Come Home, The Beginning of the End, Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Last Hunt - the latter recorded in three-track stereo by the MGM Studio Symphony Orchestra - as the scores he was particularly proud of. Until certain 'hand-made' labels, claiming first-rights to the vaults of MGM and 20th Century-Fox, release albums featuring the music of this most neglected of all the major Hollywood composers those interested in his oeuvre have little recourse at present other than a limited selection of commercially available CDs, videos & DVDs.

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