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Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno (1876-1948): The Complete Music Autographs in the BSB

The German-Italian composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, actually Hermann Friedrich Wolf, was son of the German painter August Wolf and the Venetian Emilia Ferrari. Wolf-Ferrari studied at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich with Josef Rheinberger. After several years in Italy he returned to Munich. His highly successful comic operas 'Le donne curiose' (1903), 'I quattro rusteghi' (1906) and 'Il segreto di Susanna' (1909), with which his name is still associated to this day, were all premiered in Munich. After severe creative crises, Wolf-Ferrari turned more to instrumental music in his later years. Wolf-Ferrari suffered psychologically under German and Italian fascism. After the Second World War he returned to his native city of Venice, where he died in 1948. For decades the BSB had already been single-mindedly collecting the works of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, whose life and work are so closely connected with the city of Munich, when it achieved a particularly great success at a London auction in December 2000: it purchased a huge collection of the composer's autograph music manuscripts with a total of over 3,600 pages. The Bavarian State Library thus now has a unique Wolf Ferrari collection, which also contains many unknown treasures.