Giannini's father, Ferruccio Giannini, was an opera singer and founder of the Verdi Opera House in Philadelphia. Vittorio's two sisters were celebrated singers as well. Euphemia Giannini Gregory taught Voice at the Curtis Institute for 40 years counting among her students the opera divas Anna Moffo and Judith Blegen.[2]Dusolina Giannini was a dramatic soprano and prima donna who performed throughout Europe, until moving to the United States to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, and finally to spend her remaining years teaching. Dusolina was a pivotal figure in the success of some of her brother's operas. Her career was already well underway when she took the lead in the 1934 premiere (Munich) of his first opera, Lucedia, as well as the lead (Hester Prynne) in his 1937 opera based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Hamburg, 1938).[3] Both operas enjoyed successful premieres, but have never been produced again. His most successful opera proved to be a 1950 adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.[citation needed]
Giannini's partnership with poet Karl Flaster was a fruitful one. In addition to his work on The Scarlet Letter, Flaster was the librettist for several of Giannini's operas, including Lucedia and The Harvest. Flaster also provided the lyrics for dozens of Giannini's art songs, including several that have become staples of the song recital repertoire, most notably "Tell Me, Oh Blue Blue Sky,"[4] recorded by Mario Lanza, Leonard Warren, and others.[citation needed]
His operas and songs brought Giannini his initial success during the 1930s and early 1940s. (Beauty and the Beast was commissioned by CBS in 1938--the first opera composed specifically for radio.) He then began to focus on instrumental works, many of a diverting nature. Some of these works show a fondness for infusing Baroque forms with a romantic warmth. During his last few years he revealed a more serious side to his creative personality, broadening his tonal language with greater harmonic dissonance and melodic chromaticism, in the service of greater expressive depth, all within a romantic aesthetic framework. Among those considered his greatest works are the vocal monodrama The Medead, Psalm 130 for double-bass or cello and orchestra, and his Symphony No. 5. In addition to his seven symphonies (of which only the last five were numbered), he composed 15 operas and several concerti, as well as music for chorus, solo piano, and chamber ensembles. During the last eight years of his life he composed five works for wind band and, ironically, they are his most widely performed compositions today. One, his Symphony No. 3 (1958), has become a staple of the band repertoire. Despite the wide range of his output, little of his other music is in the active repertoire. However, today a representative sample of all aspects of his work is available on recording.[citation needed]
Giannini died in New York City on November 28, 1966, at the age of 63.[5]
Selected works
Stabat mater (1922), SATB and orchestra
"Tell Me, O Blue, Blue Sky" (1927), voice/piano
String Quartet (1930)
Suite (1931), orchestra
Piano Quintet (1932)
Lucedia (1934), opera, libretto K. Flaster
Piano Concerto (1935)
Symphony ‘In memoriam Theodore Roosevelt’ (1935)
Organ Concerto (1937)
Triptych (1937), soprano choir and strings
IBM Symphony (1937), orchestra
Requiem (1937), choir and orchestra
The Scarlet Letter (1938), opera, libretto Flaster after Nathaniel Hawthorne
Beauty and the Beast (1938), radio opera in one act
Simmons, Walter G. 2001. ""Giannini, Vittorio". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Simpson, Anne Key, and Karl Wonderly Flaster. 1988. "A Working Relationship: The Giannini-Flaster Collaboration". American Music 6, no. 4 (Winter): 375–408.
Villamil, Victoria Etnier. 1993. A Singer's Guide to the American Art Song: 1870–1980, with a foreword by Thomas Hampson. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN978-0-8108-5217-4.
Wynn, James Leroy. 1964–65. "An Analysis of the First Movement of the Symphony No. 3 for Band by Vittorio Giannini". Journal of Band Research 1, no. 2:19–26.