Italo Fischetti(1911-1989)

Although long suspected to be a pseudonym of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino or even the name of a stock music library, Italo Fischetti was in fact a genuine composer who was born in 1911 and was a member of the Italian performing right society SIAE until his death in 1989. His career stretched from the 1940s to the 1970s. Italian reference sources first mention him as re-scoring British and American films for Italian release (a frequent practice at one time to please the music unions), beginning with the Will Hay comedy The Black Sheep of Whitehall made in England in 1941, but not released in Italy until after the war. Then there were re-scores of a number of Hollywood B-westerns, including Waco (1952), Rebel City (1953) and The Forty-Niners (1954). Re-scoring so many imported films, Fischetti was fast becoming the Les Baxter of the Italian cinema. He then turned his hand to re-doing French film scores, including Strip-teaseuses ou ces femmes que l'on croit faciles (1964) originally scored by Francois de Roubaix, and the feature documentary Laissez-les Vivre (1969/70) originally scored by Michel Hausser; also, a Japanese classic With Beauty and Sadness (1965) originally scored by Toru Takemitsu. For the home Italian industry Fischetti is credited with eight scores from 1965 to 1969, all of them copyright registered by CAM. However, in each and every case the official record at CAM credits the music to "repertorio" (stock library), giving rise to doubts that Fischetti was a real person. Indeed, if one examines the soundtrack of Ali Baba and the Seven Saracens (1965) - credited in the original main title and in Bianco e Nero to Italo Fischetti -- some of it is obviously lifted from Lavagnino's Kali-Yug, Goddess of Vengeance (1963), whilst other cues are officially logged as compositions by Ammonini, De Masi, Fusco, Giombini and Rustichelli. Therefore, speculation began that Fischetti was the fictional "Alan Smithee" of Italian film music, a private joke whose main function was to make credit titles of movies scored with stock music look more respectable. Another misleading clue occurred in 1979 when Lavagnino admitted in an interview that he was popularly known round the Rome studios as the "Italian composer who whistles" because he liked to do his own whistling, especially in the spaghetti westerns. The Italian word for whistling is "fischiettio" which appeared to tie in with the theory that Lavagnino and Fischetti were the same person. However, SIAE confirm that the only pseudonyms Lavagnino ever registered were "Quequito" and "Farva Dino." Furthermore, say SIAE, the heir to the Fischetti estate continued to receive royalties after the composer died in 1989, right up to 1997 when (for undisclosed reasons) the mandate ceased.