Antonio Rolla

Who was Antonio Rolla?

Giuseppe Antonio Rolla was an Italian violin and viola virtuoso and composer.

Antonio Rolla studied violin with his father, composer Alessandro Rolla. In 1803 the family is moved to Milan where Antonio began to work at a young age. He became a violinist with the Teatro di Pavia in the spring of 1807, but lost the post with the fall of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814. Having maintained contacts with the town of his birth, Rolla presented a concert at the Teatro Ducale in Parma on 11 June 1818. In a letter written in 1820, Niccolò Paganini praised Rolla's ability after they had played violin duets at the request of his father. In 1821, Rolla became the concertmaster of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and performed along with his father at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1823. The same year, he accepted the position of concertmaster at the Staatskapelle in Dresden on the recommendation of Paganini. Rolla contracted an illness in 1836 and died the following year at the age of 38.

Rolla was highly regarded as an instrumentalist and composed a few works, notably for violin and viola, of which the most famous are the posthumously published 24 Cadenzas for solo violin.