Viterbo – Homage to the great musician Cesare Dobici, the journalist Vismara defined him: “Glory of Viterbo art”

Eighty years after his death, the Cesare Dobici association and study center meets with citizens at the polyphonist’s tomb

VITERBO – On April 25th at 3.30 pm there will be a commemorative moment dedicated to the great Viterbo musician Cesare Dobici, on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the death of this great artist from Viterbo. On his tomb, at the Monumental Cemetery of Viterbo, the Cesare Dobici Association and Study Center will place a floral tribute followed by the president
Ferdinando Bastianini, the vice president Maria Loredana Serafini and the musicologist Wanda Folliero will briefly illustrate the figure of Dobici, an eminent polyphonist and valid teacher, to those who wish to attend the ceremony.
In fact, April 25th occurs

CESARE DOBICI

After his first piano and composition studies, he entered the “S. Cecilia” in Rome, where he graduated in composition with Cesare De Sanctis in 1899. In his hometown, in Viterbo, he began his artistic activity as director of the Cappella Musicale del Duomo, as well as a teacher, teaching choral singing in master’s school “G. Carducci”.

The fame of Dobici, defined as “the best teacher in all of Italy”, was linked above all to his activity as a distinguished teacher, thanks to his rare competence and profound preparation, as well as his clear and patient method. He taught first at the “Royal Conservatory of Music of S. Cecilia” (which later became the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome) and then at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome. Here he was entrusted with the chairs of Superior and Methodical Harmony, Counterpoint and Fugue.

His teaching activity, particularly appreciated, trained illustrious generations of Italian and foreign students.

Dobici, together with Lorenzo Perosi, Luigi Bottazzo, Raffaele Casimiri, Licinio Refice, was among the proponents of a necessary renewal of sacred music, in the wake of the Motu proprio promulgated in 1903 by Pius closer to the purity of Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony.

In an article in “Il Messaggero” of Friday 25 February 1947, three years after the musician’s death, the journalist Alessandro Vismara thus he outlines with a few but decisive strokes the figure of what he defines as a “glory of Viterbo art”:

Despite our aversion to clichés, we are forced to begin this re-enactment of an authentic glory of the art and culture of Viterbo with a phrase that occurs very often in the biographies of great artists: “His father wanted to start him on a judicial career, but he ran away from home to devote himself to art”.

Cesare Dobici’s father probably did not have to complain for too long about his son’s lack of obedience, because he soon managed to acquire a solid reputation not only in the musical circles of his city (where at the age of 12 he had amazed everyone by playing with incomparable mastery of the organ of the Trinity), but also in those of Rome and then of the whole world.

Furthermore, again in the Messaggero article of 25 February 1947, Vismara, who had collected the testimonies directly from the master’s family, wrote:

figure of an adamantine rectitude and endowed with a religious sense of life, Maestro Dobici could not approve of fascism, which he, far from political life and entirely dedicated to his studies, condemned above all in the name of his very firm moral principles. Thus he was included in the lists of anti-fascist intellectuals to be deported to the north, but, when the SS showed up at his home in Rome, he had already left for a few days on a much longer journey. Indeed, upon seeing the works of their great compatriots Beethoven and Wagner in his study in a place of honor, the Nazi soldiers seemed to feel a very human sense of shame and walked away without touching anything.

bf