Guido Cantelli - Biography

Biography

Born in Novara, Italy, Cantelli was named Musical Director of La Scala, Milan on 16 November 1956 but his promising career was cut short only one week later by his death at the age of 36 in an aircraft crash in Paris, France.

Cantelli studied at the Milan Conservatory in Italy and began a promising conducting career, which was interrupted by World War II, during which he was forced to serve in the Italian army, then placed in a German labor camp because of his outspoken opposition to the Nazis. He became ill and managed to successfully escape the camp. He resumed his musical career after the Allies liberated Italy.

The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini saw Cantelli conduct at La Scala and was so impressed that he invited him to guest conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1949. In a note written to Cantelli's wife Iris in 1950 after four of these concerts, Toscanini said:

I am happy and moved to inform you of Guido's great success and that I introduced him to my orchestra, which loves him as I do. This is the first time in my long career that I have met a young man so gifted. He will go far, very far.

Toscanini, who died less than two months after Cantelli's plane crash, was never told of Cantelli's death.

In the course of his brief career, he had conducted not only in many of the most famous concert halls of Europe but also in the United States and South Africa. Besides conducting the NBC Symphony from 1949 to 1954, Cantelli also guest conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the U.S. and the Philharmonia Orchestra in the UK.

At the time of Cantelli's death, he was being considered as the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, as successor to Dimitri Mitropoulos; instead, Leonard Bernstein (who also guest conducted the NBC Symphony) took over the leadership of the Philharmonic in 1958.