Twilight of an Artist’s Life
On January 21, 1948, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari died in the Palazzo Malipiero in his native city of Venice. His final work, Le chiese di Venezia, a symphonic poem about the Venetian churches San Marco, Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari remained in draft form. The last movement, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, is the only one for which the composer had begun the orchestration.
Conceived as a kind of musical tour through the Frari Basilica, the orchestration breaks off just before the section that was intended to contemplate the famous altarpiece, Titian’s Assunta. The mysterious beauty of the final completed bars, in pianissimo with the marking perdendosi and a fermata over the concluding rest, feels like an unconscious farewell from the Venetian-German composer.
Thanks to the meticulous work of violinist Giulia Zoppelli, a graduate of the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in Venice and a doctoral candidate at the Conservatorio di Verona, this completed section of the score has finally been published after decades of silence. It can be regarded as a self-contained work.
The score, whose original manuscript is held at Yale University, is published by Sugar Music (SZ Sugar, Milan).
https://szsugar.it/catalogo/17472-santa-maria-gloriosa-dei-frari/
