Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco free sheet music, program notes, recordings and biography

The Florentine in Hollywood: The Man Who Gave the Guitar its Voice

In the golden age of Hollywood, behind the scenes at the MGM studio, a classically trained Italian composer was hard at work, scoring horror films, swashbuckling adventures, and romantic dramas. He was a ghost, his name often left off the credits, yet his music subtly shaped the emotional landscape of over 200 films. This same man would go home in the evenings and compose brilliant concertos for Jascha Heifetz and Andrés Segovia, or work on his life’s project of setting all of Shakespeare's sonnets to music. This was the extraordinary dual life of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Forced into exile by fascism, he was a man who straddled two worlds: the rarefied air of the European concert hall and the commercial dream factory of Hollywood. In the process, he became the most important composer for the classical guitar in the 20th century and the secret mentor to a generation of film music legends.

A Florentine Prodigy

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence in 1895 to a prominent Sephardic Jewish family that had lived in Tuscany for centuries. He was a precocious musical talent, composing his first pieces as a child. He studied piano at the Cherubini Conservatory under the famed composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, who became his mentor. Pizzetti encouraged him to draw inspiration from his Tuscan heritage and his Jewish faith. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s early works, such as his piano pieces and his settings of Hebrew melodies, quickly established him as a leading voice of his generation in Italy, alongside composers like Ottorino Respighi and Alfredo Casella.

His style was neo-classical, characterized by its lyrical clarity, rich but clear harmonies, and a deep connection to the forms and spirit of the Italian Renaissance. He was not a modernist revolutionary, but a master craftsman who sought to infuse traditional forms with a modern sensibility. His reputation grew throughout the 1920s, with his works being championed by the great conductor Arturo Toscanini. He seemed destined for a celebrated career as one of Italy's premier classical composers.

The Segovia Collaboration

A fateful meeting in 1932 changed the course of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's creative life. He was introduced to the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, who was on a mission to elevate the guitar to the status of a serious concert instrument. Segovia was tirelessly commissioning works from the world’s best composers, and he asked Castelnuovo-Tedesco to write a piece for him. Though he knew little about the instrument, the composer was intrigued. The result was his Variazioni attraverso i secoli (Variations through the Centuries), Op. 71, a brilliant and idiomatic work that delighted Segovia.

This marked the beginning of one of the most fruitful composer-performer collaborations in music history. Over the next several decades, Castelnuovo-Tedesco would compose nearly one hundred works for the guitar, single-handedly creating a modern repertoire for the instrument. Segovia would provide technical advice, and the composer, a natural melodist, would provide works of enduring beauty and substance. His most famous work from this period is the Guitar Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 99 (1939), a piece filled with Italianate grace and sparkling orchestration. It remains one of the most popular and frequently performed concertos in the guitar repertoire. Other masterpieces followed, including the dramatic Capriccio Diabolico (an homage to Paganini) and the vibrant sonatas and suites that are now staples for every serious classical guitarist.

Exile in Hollywood

The idyllic Florentine life Castelnuovo-Tedesco had known came to an abrupt and brutal end in 1938. Benito Mussolini's fascist regime enacted its antisemitic "racial laws," which banned the performance of works by Jewish composers and stripped Jewish citizens of their rights. Suddenly, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an outcast in his own country. With his career and his family's safety in peril, he knew he had to leave.

With the help of his powerful friends—Toscanini, Segovia, and the violinist Jascha Heifetz—he and his family escaped Italy in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. They settled in Beverly Hills, California, a world away from the Renaissance beauty of Florence. Heifetz, who was already a star in Hollywood, secured Castelnuovo-Tedesco a contract as a film composer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). And so began the composer's second life.

The Secret Composer

For the next fifteen years, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a working composer in the Hollywood studio system. It was a strange and often frustrating existence. He was a ghostwriter, one of many composers on the studio payroll who contributed music to films, often without receiving any on-screen credit. His name appears on only a handful of the more than 200 films he worked on. He scored everything from the classic Ingrid Bergman thriller Gaslight to the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None, as well as countless comedies, Westerns, and B-movies.

Despite the often-uninspired nature of the work, he approached it with professionalism and craft. But his heart remained in the world of concert music. The studio job was a means to an end—it provided a steady income to support his family in a new country. In the evenings, after a long day of scoring movies, he would return to his true passion, composing the operas, concertos, and Shakespeare settings that were his life's work. During his Hollywood years, he wrote two more guitar concertos, a violin concerto for Heifetz, and continued his monumental project to compose an overture for every one of Shakespeare’s plays.

He also became one of the most sought-after and influential composition teachers in Los Angeles. His students were a new generation of brilliant, ambitious musicians who would go on to define the sound of Hollywood for the next fifty years. Among them were John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Nelson Riddle, and André Previn. He taught them the classical techniques of orchestration and counterpoint, giving them the solid foundation they would need for their own legendary careers.

A Lasting Legacy

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco became an American citizen in 1946 and lived in Beverly Hills until his death in 1968. He left behind a staggering body of work—hundreds of concert pieces in addition to his film scores. While his neo-classical style fell out of favor with the post-war avant-garde, his reputation has steadily grown in the decades since his death. He is remembered as a composer of immense melodic gifts, a master of form, and, above all, the man who, with Andrés Segovia, created the modern classical guitar repertoire. His music, born in the hills of Tuscany and refined in the studios of Hollywood, continues to be cherished by performers and audiences around the world.

Section 4: References and Further Reading

• Westby, James. Catalogo delle opere: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2005.

• Rossi, Nick. Catalogue of Works by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. International Castelnuovo-Tedesco Society, 1977.

• Palmer, Christopher. The Composer in Hollywood. Marion Boyars, 1990.

• Wade, Graham. A Concise History of the Classic Guitar. Mel Bay Publications, 2001.

• Smith, William C., and James Westby. "Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario." Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press, 2001.