Il Fásolo

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Il Fásolo: a composer whose strange pseudonym ("The Bean") conceals a mysterious identity. The only surviving printed book of his works, which had been consigned to oblivion for two hundred years, was bought by the musicologist Oscar Chilesotti in 1886. Unfortunately, the book was destroyed during the First World War, and Il Fásolo's works were thought to have been lost for ever. Less than a hundred years later, however in 1991, a manuscript turned up in the library at Bassano del Grappa: a copy made by Chilesotti. But that miraculous discovery still did not solve the mystery of the man behind the name. In his study of the composer, Chilesotti (one of the founders of Italian musicology) tells us that Il Fásolo was a composer and a guitarist, born in the city of Bergamo in the early seventeenth century. His study centres on the connections between the nature of the compositions attributed to Il Fásolo and the musician's geographical origin. But his interest as a musicologist concentrates on the rarity of the works discovered, the originality of the music and the composer's amazing harmonic achievements in the guitar tablatures, rather than on who the composer was. So Il Fásolo's identity remains shrouded in uncertainty. The various essays and chronicles of the time, which usually provide the musicologist with so much information, are amazingly uninformative on the subject. (Jean-François Lattarico) User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License;

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