Documents for a Franco Donatoni biography. Letters to Goffredo Petrassi and Ildebrando Pizzetti. Letters to relatives

Abstract

Several Italian and foreign archives host letters composer Franco Donatoni (1927-2000) sent his family and teachers. This essay includes over hundred letters he sent to various recipients: his teacher Goffredo Petrassi, from the 1950s to 1992 (at the Goffredo Petrassi Institute of Musical Studies, Latina); his family members (his wife, Susan Park, and their sons, Roberto and Renato), written between 1958 and 1977, now at the Donatoni Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel; and a December 1954 letter to Ildebrando Pizzetti, at the Pizzetti Collection, Istituto per l’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, Rome. This material adds many details to his biography (he often hints at pieces he is working on) and offers a somewhat new image of his personality: his well-known admiration for Petrassi, combined with sincere affection, is confirmed, and a husband and father figure is revealed, that was so far little known in its private aspects.