Lanfranco Rasponi
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Lanfranco Rasponi (11 December 1914 – 9 April 1983) was an Italian author, critic, and
publicist A publicist is a person whose job is to generate and manage publicity for a company, a brand, or public figure – especially a celebrity – or for work or a project such as a book, film, or album. Publicists are public relations specialists wh ...
. He is primarily known for his writing on opera and opera singers, especially his 1982 book, ''The Last Prima Donnas''. Born in Florence, he was the son of an Italian aristocrat and an American mother. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s Rasponi was the publicity agent for many opera singers as well as for socialites and fashionable restaurants in New York City. For a while, he also owned the Sagittarius Gallery in
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
which specialised in introducing contemporary European artists. After a financial scandal in 1963, he left the United States for Italy and dedicated himself to writing. He spent his last years in Rio de Janeiro where he died at the age of 68.


Life and career

Rasponi was born in
Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...
, the son of Count Nerino Rasponi Dalle Teste and Caroline Montague, the daughter of a successful businessman in
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and divided his youth between Italy and the United States. He received a BA in English from the University of California Berkeley, which he attended on an exchange scholarship, and then an MA from the
Columbia School of Journalism Columbia most often refers to: * Columbia (personification), the historical personification of the United States * Columbia University, a private university in New York City * Columbia Pictures, an American film studio owned by Sony Pictures * ...
in 1937, after which he began writing articles and reviews for the ''
New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' and ''
Opera News ''Opera News'' was an American classical music magazine. It was published from 1936 to 2023 by the Metropolitan Opera Guild—a non-profit organization, located at Lincoln Center, that was founded to promote opera and support the Metropolitan ...
''. With the outbreak of World War II, he was briefly interned as an "enemy alien", but was paroled and then removed completely from his parole restrictions when he was drafted into the US Army and stationed at
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in Washington State. After the war, he resumed his career as a music journalist and also began working for the public relations firm Hope Associates which handled publicity for the
Metropolitan Opera The Metropolitan Opera is an American opera company based in New York City, currently resident at the Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center), Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Referred ...
. Then in 1948 he and Frank Chapman, a former opera singer and the husband of
Gladys Swarthout Gladys Swarthout (December 25, 1900 in Deepwater, Missouri – July 7, 1969 in Florence, Italy) was an American mezzo-soprano opera singer and actress. Career While studying at the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago, a group of friends arra ...
, formed the public relations firm Chapman–Rasponi. However, they soon fell out and Rasponi opened his own firm, Rasponi Associates. His first two clients were the opera singer
Licia Albanese Licia Albanese (July 22, 1909 – August 15, 2014) was an Italian-born American operatic soprano. Noted especially for her portrayals of the lyric heroines of Verdi and Puccini, Albanese was a leading artist with the Metropolitan Opera from 1940 ...
and the cosmetics tycoon
Elizabeth Arden Elizabeth Arden (December 31, 1881 – October 18, 1966), also known as Elizabeth N. Graham, was a Canadian-American businesswoman who founded what is now Elizabeth Arden, Inc., and built a cosmetics empire in the United States. Backg ...
. He soon added other opera singers, including
Renata Tebaldi Renata Tebaldi ( , ; 1 February 1922 – 19 December 2004) was an Italian spinto soprano, lirico-spinto soprano popular in the post-World War II, war period, and especially prominent as one of the stars of La Scala, Teatro di San Carlo, San ...
,
Franco Corelli Franco Corelli (8 April 1921 – 29 October 2003) was an Italian tenor who had a major international opera career between 1951 and 1976. Associated in particular with the spinto and dramatic tenor roles of the Italian repertory, he was ce ...
, and
Cesare Siepi Cesare Siepi (10 February 19235 July 2010) was an Italian opera singer, generally considered to have been one of the finest Bass (voice type), basses of the post-war period. His voice was characterised by a deep, warm timbre, a full, resonant, w ...
, as well as the fashionable New York restaurants
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and The Colony. In 1955 Rasponi opened the Sagittarius Gallery in Manhattan as a sideline and travelled to Europe seeking out the work of artists to sell there. Artists whose work was exhibited at the gallery included Fabrizio Clerici, Horst (an old friend of Rasponi's from his army days),
Cecil Beaton Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was a British fashion, portrait and war photographer, diarist, painter, and interior designer, as well as costume designer and set designer for stage and screen. His accolades ...
, and
Don Bachardy Donald Jess Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. Bachardy was the partner of Christopher Isherwood for more than 30 years. Early life Born in Los Angeles, California, Bachardy ...
. Bachardy's lover,
Christopher Isherwood Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical ...
, was less than impressed with Rasponi who he felt had been dismissive of Bachardy's work despite the exhibition. He wrote in his diary after the opening of Bachardy's show: "He asponiis surprisingly undistinguished, prissy and languid and clerklike, like some unpleasant official at a passport office." As a publicity agent, Rasponi also had a clientele of established New York socialites and aspiring ones. Amongst these were Ann Woodward, the wife of William Woodward; Peggy Bancroft, the wife of William Woodward's nephew Thomas Bancroft; the banker Mary Roebling; and Rosetta Valenti who organized lavish charity balls in aid of her Renaissance for Italian Youth Foundation. Sam Aldrich, who worked with Peggy Bancroft on one of her charity events, described meeting Rasponi for the first time: "Her escort was a nice-smelling, polished, pomaded young man with an obsequious air, a smooth Italian accent, and a clipboard." Rasponi's association with Rosetta Valenti proved to be his undoing as a publicist. In 1963 Valenti's foundation was dissolved by the New York Supreme Court after charges were brought by the state's attorney general that the actual beneficiaries of her charity balls were herself, Rasponi, and others who helped her promote the events. Rasponi closed his public relations firm and left for Italy, never again to work in the United States. In the late 1960s, he published two books on the life of the
jet set The jet set is a social group of wealthy and fashionable people who travel the world to participate in social activities unavailable to ordinary people. The term was introduced in 1949 and replaced " café society"; it reflected a style of life ...
, ''The International Nomads'' and ''The Golden Oases'', which featured many of Rasponi's friends and clients from his New York days. He then worked on what was to prove his most enduring book, ''The Last Prima Donnas'', a 636-page exposition on 55 great women singers of the past whom he knew and had interviewed during his time New York and later in Europe. He spent the last years of his life in Rio de Janeiro because, he said, the city was "so soothing." From there he wrote reviews of Brazilian opera and ballet productions for ''Opera News'' and co-wrote
Dorothy Kirsten Dorothy Kirsten (July 6, 1910, Montclair, New Jersey – November 18, 1992, Los Angeles, California) was an American operatic soprano who was the first singer in the Metropolitan Opera's history to perform on that stage for 30 consecutive years, ...
's autobiography. ''A Time to Sing''. His final book, ''The Last Prima Donnas'', was published a few months before his death in Rio at the age of 68. He never married and was the last of the Rasponi Dalle Teste line. In 1977 he had sold the family's 17th-century palazzo in
Ravenna Ravenna ( ; , also ; ) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century until its Fall of Rome, collapse in 476, after which ...
to the city, where it has been since restored and opened to the public.
Ravenna Festival The Ravenna Festival is a summer festival of opera and classical music (as well as dance, jazz, ethnic, musical theater, ballett, sacred music, electronic music, drama, film, plus conventions and exhibitions) held in the city of Ravenna, Italy an ...
(2016)
Palazzo Rasponi dalle Teste
. Retrieved 16 February 2016 .


Books

*''The International Nomads'', 1966, Putnam (also published in Italian as ''I nomadi internazionali'', 1967) *''The Golden Oases'', 1968, Putnam *''The Last Prima Donnas'', 1982,
Alfred A. Knopf Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Blanche Knopf and Alfred A. Knopf Sr. in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers ...


Notes


References


External links

*Rasponi, Lanfranco (3 August 1966)
"Name-droppng Separates the Sheep from the Goats"
''
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'', p. 37 (excerpt from ''The International Nomads'') {{DEFAULTSORT:Rasponi, Lanfranco 1914 births 1983 deaths Italian music critics Celebrity biographers Italian biographers University of California, Berkeley alumni Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alumni Writers from Florence Italian male biographers 20th-century Italian non-fiction writers 20th-century Italian male writers 20th-century biographers Italian emigrants to the United States American public relations people