Antonio Veretti

Antonio Veretti (Verona, February 20, 1900 - Rome, July 13, 1978) was an Italian composer. He studied at the Conservatory Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna, where he was a pupil of Franco Alfano, and graduated in composition in 1921. Friend of Riccardo Bacchelli, who was also the author of some librettos of his works, attended the literary environment that gravitated around the magazine La Ronda.Veretti began composing in Milan in 1926, when he was music critic for La fiera letteraria and, at the same time, an active popularizer of contemporary music in Italy. In Rome he founded the Conservatorio Musicale della Gioventù Italiana, where he taught until 1943. Later he was director of the Conservatory of Pesaro (1950-1952), Cagliari (1953-1955) and finally of the Conservatory Luigi Cherubini in Florence in the period 1956–1970. He was a member of the Accademia di S. Cecilia and of the Accademia Filarmonica in Rome, of the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna and president of the Accademia Luigi Cherubini in Florence. He also wrote film music.

His music represented for a long time the avant-garde of the Italian production, both from the stylistic point of view (with the overcoming of verismo and the rediscovery of pre-nineteenth-century repertories) and methodological (with the progressive acceptance of the novelties of the Second Vienna School, up to the definitive acceptance of dodecaphony and post-Webernian serialism) and formal (in the musical theater he refused the traditional numbers introducing forms of instrumental music, on examples that started from the results of Alban Berg).