Luvada Harrison

Lyric Art Songs for the Salon of Franco Alfano: More Than a Composer of Operas Luvada Harrison

This treatise will focus on the solo art song literature of the Italian composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954). Although, Alfano composed a total of fifty-three solo vocal pieces,these works are not generally known and are deserving of more widespread performance and study. Franco Alfano is recognized outside of Italy solely as the composer who completed the third act duet of Giacomo Puccini's final opera, Turandot,and little scholarly research in English is available on the subject of his art songs. The first part of this treatise will provide a brief biography of Alfano. The second part will discuss the poetry Alfano used for his art songs,focusing primarily on Rabindranath Tagore,the Bengali poet,composer and educator who was the recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature. More than half of Alfano's art songs are set to Tagore's poetry. The third section will be a discussion of five art songs that are representative of the different compositional periods in Alfano's life.