Polibio Fumagalli (1830-1900)

Within this album is proposed a small part of the immense Polibio Fumagalli organ music production. Prolific and talented composer, Fumagalli found himself through the great crisis that shook the world of the organ music in Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, culminated with the famous Motu Proprio of Pope Pius X in 1903, that officially gave way to the Cecilian reform. Through his best student, Marco Enrico Bossi, who quickly became the greatest world-renowned concert player of his time, Fumagalli realizes that the organ music developed in Italy till that time was coming to an end, and from the rest of the world a new music was coming completely apart from the world of the opera. For this reason, and understanding he had nothing to learn from the Italian organ panorama, too tied to the stylistic features of melodrama, Bossi abandoned his studies. Finally Fumagalli will react by experimenting new forms and innovating his writing, engaging in an arduous task here credited by organist Fabio Re on the monumental Serassi (1852) organ in the cathedral of Valenza.