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Leone Sinigaglia 1868-1944: Spoliazione e Morte di un Compositore Ebreo Perseguitato dal Fascismo. Marco Fiorentino. Turin: Italy. Silvio Zamorani Editore. 2024.   

Reviewed by Jesse Rosenberg

In the early twentieth century the Turinese composer Leone Sinigaglia reached a measure of popularity inside and outside of Italy mainly on the strength of a handful of instrumental works. He was also identified with research into folk songs of his native Piedmont region, which he came to know “from the mouth of the people” (as he claimed in the dedication of his folk song collection Vecchie Canzoni Popolar del Piemonte) during excursions into the countryside, and of which he published a number of arrangements. But the days when works such as his concert overture Le Baruffe Chiozzotte appeared on concert programs and radio broadcasts are long gone. In recent years the music of Sinigaglia has undergone a reappraisal, and a fair selection of his works has been recorded. A modest-sized monograph devoted to Sinigaglia appeared in 2012. [1] The reasons for this are not exclusively musical. The proportion is impossible to quantify with any precision, but at least part of this renewed interest is the fact that Sinigaglia was a victim of the Holocaust.