Antonino Fogliani

Antonino Pierpaolo Fogliani was born in Messina on 29 June 1976 and died in Zurich on 29 August 2026, aged 50, after a long illness. He was an Italian conductor known above all for bel canto, especially the operas of Gioachino Rossini and Gaetano Donizetti, and for a parallel life of recordings that put rarely heard Italian works back into circulation. English and German Wikipedia, the Rossini in Wildbad festival, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and his official site agree on the outline of that career. The specific disease was not made public.

He grew up a Messinese, and he kept that identity in public even after years in Switzerland. In a May 2025 interview with Gazzetta del Sud, given while he was conducting Bellini's Norma at the Vienna State Opera with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, he laughed off the idea that a hometown headline would sound provincial. "I am Messinese from Provinciale, so I am completely free, of course," he said, using the street name of his part of the city as a joke. The same interview placed his family life in Lugano with his wife Angelica, also from Messina, who taught there, and their son Lorenzo, then 18, who was studying composition, had his own band, and wrote songs. 2026 obituaries name the family home as Cadempino, a municipality in the Lugano area.

His training was conservatory-first. He studied composition at the Conservatorio G. B. Martini in Bologna with Francesco Carluccio and took a piano diploma there. He then graduated with honours in orchestral conducting at the Milan Conservatory under Vittorio Parisi, and took a music degree at the University of Bologna. At the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena he studied conducting with Gianluigi Gelmetti and composition with Franco Donatoni and Ennio Morricone, and he became Gelmetti's assistant for opera and concerts, including Rossini's Otello at Covent Garden.

The public career began at 25. In 2001 he conducted Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. That debut opened an international path built on Rossini and his contemporaries. Early engagements included Donizetti's Ugo, conte di Parigi at La Scala in 2003, later Maria Stuarda at La Scala, Mascagni's Amica and Rossini's Mose in Egitto at the Rome Opera, Lucia di Lammermoor in St. Gallen, Verdi's Oberto in Verona, Il barbiere di Siviglia at La Fenice in Venice in the 2007/08 season, and Bellini's La sonnambula in Valladolid in 2009. In 2005 he led Paisiello's Il Socrate immaginario at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in Roberto De Simone's version. La Scala revived it the following season. German Wikipedia also notes cinema relays of the Fenice Barbiere and of Anna Bolena from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

Rossini in Wildbad, the bel canto festival in the Black Forest spa town of Bad Wildbad, became the other home of his work. He first conducted there in 2004, leading modern-times first performances including Mercadante's Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamaccio and I briganti, and Vaccaj's La sposa di Messina. For the 2011 festival he orchestrated the seven numbers Giovanni Tadolini had written in 1833 for Rossini's Stabat Mater, the original orchestration having been lost, and conducted them in first performance at Wildbad. He became the festival's music director in 2011. German Wikipedia dates the expanded collaboration from 2011 and the music-director title from 2012. English Wikipedia and his official biography use 2011 for the title. Either way, from the early 2010s he was the festival's musical centre, working with intendant Jochen Schonleber and recording rare Rossini, Mercadante, Vaccaj, Bellini, and Morlacchi for Naxos. A reviewer wrote that he "delivers intimate masterclasses in bel canto conducting, with subtly nuanced colours." On 2 August 2026 he conducted L'occasione fa il ladro at the festival, one of his last documented appearances.

In a 2013 festival interview marking ten years at Wildbad, published in German by Belcantissimo from the festival's own questions, he said the most important musical change had been in himself. His thinking and his ability as an interpreter had matured, and the trust of the festival was a spur to improve himself and, with that, his surroundings. "Wildbad is for me like a Rossini crescendo, in human as well as professional terms." He called the festival a family, a fixed date in his "biological yearly rhythm," and said he had been overwhelmed from the start by the seriousness and love the festival showed musicians. Asked about disadvantages, he said there were none, only that artists sometimes missed Wi-Fi in the town's houses, then added that less distraction was perhaps better. He named the 2012 Semiramide, a cast he said would have been worthy of La Scala or the Met, the premiere of a Rihm Oedipus, and the success of Cenerentola and I briganti as memories. He singled out Schonleber as "head and heart of the festival," and singers Bruno Pratico and Lorenzo Regazzo as Wildbad friends. He said he wanted to conduct Donna del lago and Ermione there, and to have a regular symphonic programme. He later did lead La donna del lago in concert at Zurich Opera in April 2021, and Ermione entered both the Wildbad and Naxos lists, including a 2024 Naxos recording.

From 2017 he was principal guest conductor of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf and Duisburg. The house's own page, still describing the 2025/26 season before his death, called him one of the leading bel canto conductors of his generation and listed a long run of titles there: Bellini's I puritani and La sonnambula; Donizetti's Don Pasquale, Maria Stuarda, Lucia di Lammermoor, L'elisir d'amore, La fille du regiment, and Prima la mamma; Mozart's Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflote; Rossini's La Cenerentola, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and L'italiana in Algeri; Verdi's La traviata, Don Carlo, Macbeth, and Otello; Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Tosca, La boheme, and Turandot; Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur; Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites; and Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann. English Wikipedia says his last performance at that house was Il trovatore on 19 July, shortly after the premiere of that production. The year is 2026 in context. The same house page places Il trovatore and Prima la mamma in the 2025/26 season.

He was a regular guest at the Bavarian State Opera, conducting Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Lucrezia Borgia, and La fille du regiment, Verdi's Macbeth, Il trovatore, Otello, Falstaff, and I masnadieri, Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot, and the Mascagni/Leoncavallo double bill. The house said, after his death, that he had been due in the coming weeks to open a season event, "Operetta for All," with Diana Damrau, Benjamin Bernheim, and the Bavarian State Orchestra, and in December to conduct a new production of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda. The tribute said music was "deeply alive" for him, that it came from the heart, and that the same warmth heard in his conducting had marked him as a person.

The American debut was Lucia di Lammermoor at Houston Grand Opera in 2011. In the 2011/12 season he opened the Teatro Regio in Parma with Aida, later issued on video by Unitel as part of the Tutto Verdi project. He conducted at La Scala, the Rome Opera, La Fenice, the Teatro San Carlo, the Opera-Comique, the Wexford Festival, Zurich Opera, Valencia, Geneva, Liege, Rennes, and, by the Deutsche Oper's account, also Covent Garden, the Semperoper Dresden, La Monnaie, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, the Arena di Verona, and the Bregenz Festival. Symphonic dates included the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Gurzenich Orchestra Cologne, the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, and the Dusseldorf Symphony, including a filmed Rosenkavalier Suite. In May 2025 he stood on the Vienna Philharmonic podium for Norma, a title Vienna had not given for a long time. Riccardo Muti, the last conductor to bring it there, was in the house on Fogliani's first night.

He taught. German Wikipedia says he taught conducting at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Tartini in Trieste from 2011 to 2017, and from 2021 at the Conservatorio Alessandro Scarlatti in Palermo. In the 2025 Gazzetta interview he said teaching mattered because "by teaching I teach myself." He distrusted the beautiful empty gesture. "When you go up a level, no pretence holds: if you have nothing to give, an orchestra like the Vienna Philharmonic manages, ignores you, and goes on alone."

In 2018 President Sergio Mattarella named him an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. His recordings, mostly live festival documents for Naxos, Dynamic, Arthaus, and Bongiovanni, include Donizetti's Ugo, conte di Parigi and Lucia di Lammermoor; Rossini's Ciro in Babilonia, Mose in Egitto, Otello, L'occasione fa il ladro, Semiramide, L'inganno felice, Guillaume Tell, Il viaggio a Reims, the Stabat Mater, Sigismondo, Bianca e Falliero, Maometto II, Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, and Ermione; Mercadante's Don Chisciotte and I briganti; Vaccaj's La sposa di Messina; Bellini's Bianca e Gernando; Morlacchi's Tebaldo e Isolina; and a 2024 Opus Arte recital with tenor Saimir Pirgu. Video issues include the Fenice Barbiere, the Parma Aida, Maria Stuarda, and Lucia di Lammermoor.

He stayed on the podium until the illness stopped him. Vittorio Parisi told reporters that Fogliani died on the morning of 29 August after a long illness, and that he had kept working with remarkable strength until a few days earlier. He had been due to conduct Madama Butterfly at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago on 22 August 2026, and La boheme there on 28 August. Leonardo Sini replaced him. He had also been listed to open the Deutsche Oper Berlin season with Tosca in September and Maria Stuarda in Munich in December. A memorial service was held on 1 September 2026 at Lugano Cathedral. He is survived by his wife Angelica and their son Lorenzo. A burial place was not made public in the sources used here.