Giovanni Sgambati was born in Rome on 28 May 1841 to an Italian father and an English mother, lost his father early, and was educated at Trevi in Umbria, where he wrote church music and gained experience as a singer and conductor. He settled in Rome in 1860 and set about winning acceptance for the German repertoire, then barely known in Italy. Liszt’s presence in Rome from 1861 and his support were decisive: concerts followed in which Sgambati both conducted and played. He first heard Wagner’s music in Munich, having travelled there in Liszt’s company. He died in Rome on 14 December 1914, aged seventy-three.

He conducted Liszt’s Dante Symphony on 26 February 1866 at the opening of the Sala di Dante in the Palazzo Poli, and gave the Italian premieres of Beethoven’s Third and Seventh Symphonies in 1867 and 1870 and of Liszt’s Christus. His own works from the mid-1860s include a quartet, two piano quintets, an octet and an overture; the first songs appeared from Schott in 1870, the First Symphony was played at the Quirinal in 1881, and that work and a piano concerto were heard on his first visit to England in 1882, with the Sinfonia epitalamio given at the Philharmonic on his second in 1891. His largest score, a Requiem Mass, was performed in Rome in 1901, and the piano pieces have kept their place. He also promoted other composers’ music, among them Dante Alderighi, and taught pupils including Lucia Contini Anselmi and Mary Augusta Wakefield.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Sgambati
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1339344