Ottorino Respighi was an Italian composer, violinist, teacher, and musicologist and one of the leading Italian composers of the early 20th century. His compositions range over operas, ballets, orchestral suites, choral songs, chamber music, and transcriptions of Italian compositions of the 16th–18th centuries, but his best known and most performed works are his three orchestral tone poems which brought him international fame: Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924), and Roman Festivals (1928).
Respighi in 1927
Respighi in 1903
Respighi in 1912
From 1913 to 1935, Respighi taught at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.
Vyšehrad over the Vltava River, evoked musically in the first poem of Smetana's Má vlast.
Hans Baldung Grien, Witches, woodcut, 1508. Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain was meant to evoke a witches' sabbath.
Michael Wolgemut, The Dance of Death (1493) from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel, evoked musically in Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre.
Honoré Daumier, Painting of Don Quixote, c. 1855–1865