I have always had a predilection for the Figurative Arts, in particular for Paintings. However, I also love statues, architecture and antiques like furniture, ceramics, and porcelain, glass objects etc. I particularly love Russian and English Literature, but am a slow reader. I have a great many books on Art and love looking at the pictures, also on internet. However, since I have travelled a lot, I always try to see Art directly with my own eyes. Even as a little girl my father would take me to museums, particularly the Louvre during the 3 days spent in Paris on the occasion of our regular journeys by train from Milan to London and then on to St. Ives in Cornwall where my grandparents lived from 1940 to 1964. I went from my father’s arms to the first running about in the halls with Dürer’s Self Portrait, Moroni’s Tailor, Holbein’s Erasmus, Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronière, Tiziano’s Man with a Glove, Ghirlandaio’s Old Man with a Young Boy, Antonello da Messina’s Condottiero, Raffaello’s Baldassarre Castiglione, Piero della Francesca’s Sigismondo Malatesta…not forgetting the Monna Lisa. I knew by heart the names of the painters and of their paintings that I delighted in memorising better year after year for the first ten years of my life. I was instinctively fascinated by the portraits, in front of which I would linger for a long time. I still retain this attraction that conquers me every time I happen to visit museums around the world.
During those years I never thought that this would have proved beneficial to the inspiration of my compositions, just as it was with Literature. Only later did I understand the common thread that unites the Arts. The multiple aspects of Painting and of Literature have always had an immense influence on my inspiration. I regret not having had the same from Poetry, due to the hermeticism that sometimes is part of it. I have dedicated most of my time to Paintings because I find them more immediate and they don’t require the time and the concentration that I should inevitably dedicate to the assimilation of literary masterpieces and their intrinsic necessity of elaboration. Notwithstanding this, there have been periods during which my mind has been captured by the mastery of writers in their search for the depth of the soul of characters and of human conditions and not so much of generic descriptions of situations and places.
The most difficult thing has been the search for a common method to comprehend the personality and the characteristics of each artist through a personal effort finalised towards the knowledge of their works and of their single propensities towards the representation of Man. This is one of the reasons that have driven me towards the composition of works inspired by characters such as Florestan and Merlin. Even animals in Literature and Painting are frequently “humanised” and some of their “likenesses” with the human character are present in some of my compositions such as Favole, La Triade and Messidor.
All my music reflects characters and emotions pertaining to human nature, in particular the Marche Funèbre, the two Symphonies for large orchestra, Requiescat and Adagio. Since I do not write “objective” music like other composers, all my works reflect my character and the particular moments that have marked my life. This presumably reveals the unconscious interior need to merge my musical experiences with what has attracted me and still attracts me most in the other Arts.
I am here in a dirty and badly kept classroom of the Conservatorio where I was a student and where I have been teaching for 22 years. The room is not my usual one because I am recuperating a lesson I had to change and I’m waiting for 5 pupils who said they would come. The hours pass and none of them have come. Some study little and miss lessons because they contemporarily attend University, maybe Mathematics, Philosophy, but above all Business and Economics. The fault is exclusively of the parents.
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