CANTONI, Lina Orefice

Lina Orefice Cantoni was an Italian composer, pianist, and painter active during the first half of the twentieth century. She was connected by marriage to the family of Italian composer Giacomo Orefice. Her surviving musical work is Quattro poemetti d’amore su parole di Rabindranath Tagore, a cycle of four melodramas for narrator and piano based on poems from Tagore’s The Gardener, in the Italian translation of Maria Sesti-Strampfer. The score was published in Milan in 1920.
During the German occupation of Italy, Cantoni lived in hiding at the Dorothean Sisters’ institute in Venice together with writer and teacher Laura Lattes and educator Marta Minerbi. The three women escaped shortly before an SS raid. Cantoni’s Quattro poemetti d’amore, long forgotten, received its documented modern premiere in 2019 at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, with Gabriele Dal Santo at the piano and Nicola Caruso as narrator.