Giuseppe Martucci was born at Capua in Campania on 6 January 1856 and learned the rudiments from his father Gaetano, a trumpeter. A prodigy, he played in public at eight and entered the Naples Conservatory at eleven on the recommendation of Beniamino Cesi, a former pupil of Thalberg, taking his first composition training from Paolo Serrao. His career as an international pianist began with a tour of Germany, France and England in 1875, at nineteen; he was appointed professor of piano at Naples in 1880, moved to Bologna in 1886 to replace Luigi Mancinelli, and returned to Naples in 1902 as director of the Royal Conservatory. His son Paolo also became a pianist and taught briefly at the Cincinnati Conservatory. He died in Naples on 1 June 1909.

He began composing at sixteen with short piano pieces and wrote no operas at all, which set him apart from every Italian composer of his generation; he worked instead in instrumental music and song, with the oratorio Samuel beside them, and has been called the Italian Brahms. As a composer and teacher he did much to revive Italian interest in music outside the theatre, and Respighi was among the pupils he took at Bologna. He first conducted in 1881, was among the earliest Italian admirers of Wagner and led the first Italian Tristan und Isolde at Bologna in 1888, and his programmes carried Brahms, Lalo and Goldmark; in 1898 he gave Stanford’s Irish Symphony at Bologna and one of the very few all-British orchestral concerts heard on the continent in that century. Toscanini championed him for much of his own career, and the NBC Symphony played his orchestral works repeatedly between 1938 and 1953.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Martucci
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q769966