Education

Riccardo Riccardi was born in 1954 in Rimini where he studied piano with Guido Zangheri. At the same time he attended High School at the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare. In 1972 he moved to Florence to study architecture. He also studied piano concurrently with Franco Scala, graduating in 1976. Along with his study of architecture, he began studying composition at the Cherubini Conservatory. His composition teachers were, first, Pier Luigi Zangelmi and then Carlo Prosperi. It was from Prosperi, above all, that he learned the craft of composition. He concurrently studied piano with Franco Scala privately until graduating in 1976 at the Cherubini Conservatory. From 1977 to 1980 he spent his summers in Germany and, in 1980, worked as music coach at the Youth Festival Meeting in Bayreuth. In 1981 he earned his Doctorate in Architecture with a dissertation entitled “Theories of Harmonic Proportions in the Architectural Treatises of the Renaissance”. He earned his degree in composition in July 1982 and moved to Los Angeles that August. 

Activity as a composer 

From the first work in his catalog in 1973 until the early 1990’s, Riccardo Riccardi almost exclusively composed instrumental music in a late expressionistic style, the style in which he was educated. In the early 1980’s, with Ad libitum for piano, he turned toward the language he would increasingly develop in the following years: an emancipation of rhythm against a strongly melodic design. Ad libitum was the inspiration for a series of piano pieces revised in 1988 for an event dedicated solely to Riccardi’s piano music at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. 

Riccardi first approached musical theater in 1991 and 1992 with his ballet, Il brutto anatroccolo and with his scenic cantata for solos, chorus, and orchestra, La meraviglia e il dubbio. The sung word became central to his creative activity.  At the same time he began his song cycle, Canti da Pessoa, for voices and instruments—a project that involved him for more than a decade. These songs, with text fragments drawn from the great Portuguese poet, are newly envisioned in Italian and represent the most rarefied stage of Riccardi’s production.

In 1996 for Arcosanti, an utopian city built in the Arizona desert, Riccardi wrote L’avvenimento for piano and narrator, on fragments taken from Rainer Maria Rilke and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1997 he expanded this pianistic poem into his chamber opera,  L’avvenimento, a work in which he, for the first time, created his own libretto (albeit under the pseudonym, Filippo Candiani). 

In 2004, for the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Riccardi composed The Man Who Loved Islands for narrators and piano, a work that evolved in 2006 into  L’uomo che amava le isole – Racconto-Opera, for actor, soprano and orchestra. In both versions the libretto was written by the composer and based on a story by D.H. Lawrence.  Immediately afterward, he completed a libretto begun in 1998, Il ritorno di Casanova, from Arthur Schnitzler’s novel, Casanovas Heimfahrt, and then began composing the music for it. The opera Odisseo dates from 2008.  It’s a psychological drama inspired by the characters of Homer’s Odyssey but with the original outcome changed.

In 2009, under commission from Opera Bazar, Riccardi wrote, Talk Show. The libretto was inspired by two Rainer Maria Rilke’s Totentänze, adapted to the present-day. In 2010 Riccardi wrote two more operas: the first, F.S.S.P.A., based on his own libretto, is set in a modern train station. The second, Una questione d’onore, is based on Leutnant Gustl by Arthur Schnitzler and is set in Baroque Venice.  In 2011 he worked on a cycle of 22 songs entitled, Não sou nada. Again the material is taken from Fernando Pessoa but this time retains the original text and the Portuguese language. 

In 2012  Riccardi wrote a satyrical opera, Shakespeare & Gossip, drawn from the novel, Caprice, by Ronald Firbank, and in 2013, Il testamento (The Will), a theatrical play with musical arias, that had its premier at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. In 2014 he prepared a chamber revision of his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra for the Ferenc Liszt Academy in Budapest, and, after almost twenty years, dedicated himself again to a cycle of solo piano pieces, Diario 2014.  In 2015 for the Krakow Music Academy, Riccardi wrote an orchestral suite, Shakespeare & Gossip Suite, drawn from the opera of the same title, and for the Teatro sperimentale of Spoleto composed Contesa seconda for chamber ensemble. 

In 2016 Riccardi  received a request from the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C to compose a chamber theater work for the celebration of the Italian “Festa della musica” at the Embassy. Moving-out resulted, a play with arias and duets, whose action takes place inside a New York apartment. In the same year he revised and completed the instrumentation of his opera Shakespeare & Gossip for the Museo di Roma, in the Palazzo for the Anno per Anno Festival, in the Palazzo Braschi, Rome. Between 2016 and 2017 he wrote the libretto and music for L’ascensore, an opera in three condominium meetings and epilogue, conceived as the third and final work of his cycle, Il trittico della banalità (The Triptych of Triviality) whose first two dramas were Talk Show, set in a TV studio, and F.S.S.P.A., set in a train station. The premiere of L’ascensore was performed in May, 2018 in the Sala Accademica of the ‘Santa Cecilia’ Conservatory in Rome.

In 2017 he wrote the Missa ad vitam for mixed choir and organ ad libitum, his second sacred work after the Missa e veterum more of 1987. 

In 2018 he would finish the composition of Il direttore, an opera sung throughout and first drafted in 2012. For the libretto of Il direttore, Riccardi used a scene and two of the characters from Der Kammersänger by Franz Wedekind, but created a new story by inventing three completely new characters. Il direttore was staged at the Teatro di Villa Torlonia, Rome, in May, 2019. In 2018 he also wrote Duello, an opera that takes its inspiration from sexual exploitation in the world of entertainment. It is a play within a play and includes arias and ensembles drawn from the literature of classical opera. The composers cited are: Gazzaniga, Salieri, Cimarosa, Mozart, and Rossini.

In 2019 he wrote new versions, in Italian, of his two English theatrical works: Il testamento (The Will) and Moving Out. Their re-creation is not limited to a translation: both works, thanks to the addition of a mezzo-soprano in the first work and a tenor in the second, are expanded with new dialogues, arias and ensembles. Both productions were staged in October 2021 at the Theater of Villa Torlonia, with direction, sets, costumes and lighting design by the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

At the end of 2019 he turned to the creation of a satirical text of social criticism: Questionario. The play features a singer/actress alone on stage, dialoguing with the two voices, over loudspeakers, of offstage actors. It had its premiere at the Teatro Nacional de Panamá, Panama City, September, 2021.

In 2020 he composed his first string quartet, a genre that he hadn’t dealt with before. In that same year, he extensively reworked the libretto and vocal parts of L’avvenimento, an opera first written in 1996/97, and he changed the title to Le donne di Van Gogh. The texts of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters, which were only a part of the texts used in the original version, become the leitmotif of all the new work. Texts taken from critics of the painter are used for an epilogue that imagines a symposium of art historians on stage. Starting that August, he wrote the libretto and music for La via del mare, an opera with a prologue, three days of action and an epilogue. It takes place in 1985, in an unspecified location on the Italian coast. Central to the unfolding of the story is the issue of building abuses, dealt with in a light and amusing way.

In 2021, on a libretto developed from a 2009 sketch, he began work on the two-act opera entitled, La disfatta, which explores the psychological relationship between a writer and his ex-wife. Another work from 2021 is Tra mare e mare, a concerto for percussion and orchestra. 

In 2022 came the second, the third and part of the fourth string quartet (the latter finished in 2023). Currently (2023), he is revising some of his previous works and drafting a new piece for orchestra: Com’era bello quando sognavo.