Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was an Italian-born composer, pianist, and writer, born 3 April 1895 in Florence and died 16 March 1968 in Beverly Hills, California. He studied composition under Ildebrando Pizzetti and became one of Italy’s leading young composers in the 1920s. After meeting guitarist Andrés Segovia in 1932, he began writing extensively for guitar, eventually composing nearly 100 works for the instrument, including his Guitar Concerto No. 1 (1939) and 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195 (1961), a cycle inspired by Francisco Goya’s etchings. Italy’s 1938 racial laws forced him, as a Jew, to emigrate to the United States in 1939, where he became a prolific Hollywood film composer for MGM and other studios while continuing to compose concert music.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco is regarded as one of the foremost guitar composers of the 20th century, whose close partnership with Segovia produced a substantial and technically idiomatic body of concert repertoire that helped modernize the instrument’s literature beyond its Spanish nationalist roots. As a teacher in Hollywood he also had an outsized influence on American film music, mentoring composers including John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, and André Previn.

Sources:

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mario-Castelnuovo-Tedesco