Antonio Virgilio Savona (21 December 1919 – 27 August 2009) was an Italian composer, arranger, and singer in the Italian vocal group, the

Quartetto Cetra Quartetto Cetra (; ) was an Italian jazz vocal quartet established during the early 1940s and active until 1988. Career The band was based on the Mills Brothers and started performing under the name Quartetto Egie from the initials of the singers ...

.Mario Luzzatto Fegiz,

Corriere della Sera The ''Corriere della Sera'' (; en, "Evening Courier") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Milan with an average daily circulation of 410,242 copies in December 2015. First published on 5 March 1876, ''Corriere della Sera'' is one of It ...

(29 August 2009)
Addio a Virgilio Savona, ideologo del Quartetto Cetra.
Retrieved 13 December 2012.

Biography

Savona was born in

Palermo Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital (political), capital of both the autonomous area, autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan ...

, Italy. His artistic career started very early. In 1926, aged 6, he began studying music. Two years later, he joined a choir and at the age of 10, he debuted in a radio broadcast playing a piece on a piano during a children's program. After high-school, Savona enrolled at the

Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia ( en, National Academy of St Cecilia) is one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, founded by the papal bull ''Ratione congruit'', issued by Sixtus V in 1585, which invoked two saints prom ...

in Rome to study piano. In 1941, he replaced

Iacopo Jacomelli Iacopo Jacomelli (born 12 July 1921) is an Italian singer mostly active in the 1940s and the 1950s. He was born in Bordeaux, France. In 1940, he founded a vocal quartet named Quartetto Egie together with Tata Giacobetti, Enrico Gentile and En ...

in a vocal quartet called

Quartetto Egie Quartetto Cetra (; ) was an Italian jazz vocal quartet established during the early 1940s and active until 1988. Career The band was based on the Mills Brothers and started performing under the name Quartetto Egie from the initials of the singers ...

. The group changed name to

Quartetto Ritmo Quartetto Cetra (; ) was an Italian jazz vocal quartet established during the early 1940s and active until 1988. Career The band was based on the Mills Brothers and started performing under the name Quartetto Egie from the initials of the singers ...

at first, then to

one year later. On 19 August 1944 Virgilio Savona married the singer

Lucia Mannucci Lucia Mannucci (18 May 1920 – 6 March 2012)
– accessed 13 March 2012 was an Italian singer, best known as one o ...

, who later joined

to replace

Enrico De Angelis Enrico De Angelis (23 November 1920 – 21 August 2018)Enrico De Angelis – Scheda def ...

, who left the group in 1947. Besides singing, Savona composed and

arranged In music, an arrangement is a musical adaptation of an existing composition. Differences from the original composition may include reharmonization, melodic paraphrasing, orchestration, or formal development. Arranging differs from orchest ...

for the group. He wrote the music while

Tata Giacobetti Giovanni "Tata" Giacobetti (24 June 1922 – 2 December 1988) was an Italian singer and jazz musician. He is mostly known for being a member of the vocal quartet Quartetto Cetra. Biography Giacobetti was a self-taught musician. He learned to pl ...

, another member of the quartet, wrote the lyrics. They collaborated for four decades and produced hundreds of songs which made up Quartetto Cetra's vast repertoire. Savona composed music and wrote scripts for radio and TV programs, stage shows and films. During the 1970s, he was active as pianist, orchestra conductor, arranger and producer. He extensively researched on folk songs. In 1971, he wrote ''Angela'', a song for

Angela Davis Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, scholar, and author. She is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A feminist and a Marxist, Davis was a longtime member of ...

, Black American communist leader, innocent in prison at this time. In 70s, he published also other controversial songs, as ''Il testamento del parroco Meslier'' ("The Testament of Parson Meslier"), a violent attack on power and religion, based on the ''Testament'' of the priest and illuminist atheist philosopher

Jean Meslier Jean Meslier (; also Mellier; 15 June 1664 – 17 June 1729) was a French Catholic priest (abbé) who was discovered, upon his death, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism and materialism. Described by the author as ...

. In 1991, he wrote a popup book about Quartetto Cetra, published by

Sperling & Kupfer Arnoldo Mondadori Editore () is the biggest publishing company in Italy. History The company was founded in 1907 in Ostiglia by 18-year-old Arnoldo Mondadori who began his publishing career with the publication of the magazine ''Luce!''. In 1 ...

in the ''Supersound'' collection. In 2009, he passed away in Milan from complications of

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms usually emerge slowly, and as the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms becom ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Savona 1919 births 2009 deaths Musicians from Palermo Neurological disease deaths in Lombardy Deaths from Parkinson's disease Italian male songwriters 20th-century Italian male singers Male jazz musicians Quartetto Ritmo members Quartetto Cetra members Italian jazz pianists