Angelo Francesco Lavagnino

Angelo Francesco Lavagnino was born in Genoa on 22 February 1909 and died on 21 August 1987. An Italian composer, he devoted much of his career to film, a field in which he became one of his country's most acclaimed figures.

He trained at the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with Mario Barbieri, Renzo Bossi and Vito Frazzi, graduating in 1933. Between 1929 and 1938 he directed the Liceo Musicale in Genoa, and between 1949 and 1962 he taught film music courses at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. In his early years he wrote concert works in a traditional vein, with some modernist ambitions inherited from the Pizzetti school.

From 1950 onward he devoted himself entirely to scoring films, including documentaries, producing around two hundred and fifty scores and winning two Nastri d'argento awards. His most celebrated works are linked to exploration films, such as Magia verde, Continente perduto, L'ultimo paradiso, La muraglia cinese and Calypso, in which he skilfully combined exoticism with original ideas. He was also among the first Italian composers to specialise in collaborating with foreign directors, among them Henry Hathaway, René Clément and Christian-Jacque.

His most notable collaboration was the music for Orson Welles's Othello (1952), whose openly rhetorical character, paradoxically, heightens the metaphysical tone of the film. His legacy rests above all on this contribution to cinema, where his work continues to attract interest.