Riccardo Zandonai

His essay for graduation was an opera named Il ritorno di Odisseo (The Return of Ulysses), based on a poem by Giovanni Pascoli, for singers, choir and orchestra.

[2] Zandonai's fame rests largely on his opera Francesca da Rimini, a free adaptation of a tragedy which Gabriele D'Annunzio had written expanding a passage from Dante's Inferno; it has never fallen entirely from the repertoire, and has been recorded several times.

Some time after the premiere, he married soprano Tarquinia Tarquini, for whom he had created the role of Conchita in the eponymous opera (dealing with a topic that Puccini had first considered and then rejected).

When Puccini died without completing the music for the last act of Turandot, Zandonai was among several composers the Ricordi publishing firm considered for the task of finishing it.

Various symphonic compositions: Konrad Dryden: Riccardo Zandonai: A Biography (Peter Lang Publishing, Berlin, 1999), ISBN 0-8204-3649-6 Foreword by Renata Scotto and Magda Olivero.