LECTURERS
QUIRINO PRINCIPE
Born in Gorizia on Tuesday 19 November 1935, he graduated in philosophy in Padua on 14 July 1956. A mountain artillery officer in 1958-1960, he taught Italian and Latin literature at the Liceo Classico in Belluno (1956-1958, 1959-1962) and in Milan from 1962 to 1980; at the Milan Conservatory, literature, musicology and German language (1980-2000).
He has taught and still teaches music history and musicology at various universities: Trieste (Portogruaro branch) from 2001 to 2008, at Roma Tre (2005-2008, Philosophy of Music), at the Accademia per l'Opera in Verona (2008-2021), at the IULM in Milan (2014-present). He is a translator of narrative, non-fiction, theatrical, philosophical and poetic texts from various languages, but especially from German, English, French, some Slavic languages and, of course, from Latin and Greek. He deals with Oriental languages (Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit) and Indo-European idioms. His exclusive interests include mathematical thinking, occultism, black magic and demonology.
He is the author of poetry (Il libro dei cinque sentieri, Scheiwiller 1973; Aion, 2016, and more), philosophical non-fiction, theatre, opera librettos, philosophy of music (Il fantasma dell'Opera, 2019), and Dantean philology and philosophy (I disegni di Botticelli per la ‘Divina Commedia’, 2021).
His major books are the two extensive biographical and musicological monographs Mahler (Rusconi 1982, Bompiani 2002) and Strauss (Rusconi 1989, Bompiani 2004). In 2006, he published Il teatro d'opera tedesco for L'Epos in Palermo.
He is an actor involved in his own texts or in the recitation of texts by opera singers (in particular, Petja i volk [‘Peter and the Wolf’] by Sergei Prokofiev, Enoch Arden and Das Schloss am Meere by Richard Strauss, Das zerbrochene Ringlein, words and music by Friedrich Nietzsche, all those by Robert Schumann, Histoire de Babar by Francis Poulenc, Lenore by Franz Liszt, and others.
In 1996, he received the Cross of Honour First Class (‘Ehrenkreuz’) from the President of the Republic of Austria; in 2009, the honour of Cavaliere della Repubblica from the President of the Italian Republic.
