Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) began life in Bologna, where he studied the violin at the local conservatory. His first job out of school was at the Russian Imperial Theatre in Saint Petersburg, where he played violin in their season of Italian opera. While there, he took composition lessons from legendary Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Upon his return to Bologna, he continued composition studies, which would soon become the focus of his career. He became a figure of international renown, producing dozens of orchestral and vocal works as well as several operas. He is best remembered for three sets of tone poems: Fountains of Rome (1916, the piece which cemented his international reputation), Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals. He was also a teacher, holding a position as professor of composition at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome from 1913 until his death at age 56 in 1936. Read up on Respighi at Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Brittanica, The Right Notes, and the Atlanta Symphony.
“Airs of the Court” is the second movement of Respighi’s third suite of Ancient Airs and Dances, composed in 1931 for string orchestra. In all three of the suites, Respighi freely transcribed Italian lute music for orchestra, drawing upon several sources. The second movement of the third suite uses exclusively the music of Jean-Baptiste Besard (c. 1567-c. 1625), a lute composer and anthologist who lived in several places throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Robert Longfield’s 2009 transcription of the movement has entered the wind band repertoire as Airs of the Court. It is a faithful and colorful adaptation of Respighi’s original string orchestra transcription:
Respighi’s version is a whole step higher, but follows the same form:
Respighi’s source material spans six of Besard’s lute songs. They are listed at the Wind Repertory Project as part of a reprinted program note from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. As an example, here is a contemporary performance of the first, “C’est malheur”: