Petrobelli, Pierluigi

Petrobelli, Pierluigi,distinguished Italian musicologist; b. Padua, Oct. 18,1932. He studied at the Univ. of Rome (Laurea in Lettere, 1957), with Strunk, Mendel, Lockwood, and Babbitt at Princeton Univ. (1959–61; M.F.A. in music, 1961), with W.G. Waite (musicology) at the Harvard Summer School (1960), and at the Univ. of Calif, at Berkeley (1962–63). From 1968 to 1971 he was ed. of the Rivista Italiana di Musicologia. In 1968 he became a teaching asst. at the Univ. of Padua, where he was assoc. prof, of music history from 1970 to 1972. He was librarian and teacher of music history at the Rossini Cons, in Pesaro from 1970 to 1973. After serving as a lecturer in music at King’s Coll., Univ. of London from 1973 to 1977, he was a reader in musicology at the Univ. of London from 1978 to 1980. In 1980 he became director of the Istituto di Studi Verdiani in Parma, which became the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani in 1989. He became ed. of Studi verdiani in 1981. From 1981 to 1983 he was prof, of music history at the Univ. of Perugia, and then at the Univ. of Rome “La Sapienza” from 1983. In 1989 he was made a corresponding member of the American Musicological Soc. He became a member of the Academia Europaea in 1992, and in 1996 he served as the Lauro De Bosis Lecturer in the History of Italian Civilization at Harvard Univ. He was made a foreign honorary member of the Royal Musical Assn. of England in 1997. Petrobelli’s articles, ranging in subject matter from Gregorian chant to Dallapiccola, have appeared in various learned books and journals.

Writings

With V. Duckies and M. Elmer, Thematic Catalog of an 18^th-Century Collection of Italian Instrumental Music in the Music Library, University of Calif at Berkeley (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963); Giuseppe Tartini-Le fonti biografiche (Vienna, London, and Milan, 1967); Tartini, le sue idee e il suo tempo (Lucca, 1992); Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers (Princeton, 1994; It. tr., 1998, as La musica nel teatro: Saggi su Verdi e altri compositori).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire