Sylvano Bussotti was born in Florence on 1 October 1931. His father, Gino, loved painting, and his mother, Ines, created rag animals Bussotti would memorialize years later in his compositions. Bussotti had not yet turned five when he began taking violin lessons, and he started composing just two years later, while also creating dramas written in strict hendecasyllabic meter, in the classic Italian style, and devouring novels and short stories. Once enrolled at the Conservatorio Luigi-Cherubini, he studied harmony and counterpoint with Roberto Lupi and piano with Luigi Dallapiccola. His studies were cut short by the Second World War, and he was unable to complete his degree. His brother Renzo Bussotti, and his mother’s brother, Tono Zancanaro, both painters, and, later on, the poet Aldo Braibanti, were all formative influences in Bussotti’s first years of creation.

From 1949 to 1956, Bussotti continued studying composition on his own. In Paris, from 1956 to 1958, he took private lessons with Max Deutsch, himself a student of Arnold Schoenberg. Through Luigi Nono, Bussotti was introduced to Pierre Boulez and Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who brought him to Darmstadt, where he met John Cage. The first official performance of one of his works was by Françoise Deslogères, who performed Breve at Galerie 22 in Düsseldorf, in 1958 – with John Cage in attendance. The following year, at Darmstadt, David Tudor performed Pièces de chair II, and the year after that, in 1960, Cathy Berberian premiered Lettura di Braibanti at the Domaine Musical. Bussotti was part of a group of Florentine artists that included Marcello Aitiani, Giancarlo Cardini, Giuseppe Chiari, Pietro Grossi, Daniele Lombardi, Sergio Maltagliati, and Albert Mayr, and with them, he experimented with the interaction among sound, movement, and images.

On 5 September 1965, Bussotti’s La Passion selon Sade: “mystère de chambre” was performed at the Teatro Biondo in Palermo with the titled altered from the composer’s original intention: selon Sade (“according to Sade”) replaced de Sade (of Sade), as it was considered too scandalous to associate the Passion of Christ with the Marquis de Sade. In spite of this precaution, the production caused a scandal significant enough that the work’s title was changed again for the French premiere at the Theâtre de l’Odéon on 7 December 1966: this time, to avoid the shock of associating the name ‘de Sade’ with any religious imagery, the title was given as Passion selon x (“Passion according to X”).

Bussotti spent the year 1964-1965 in Buffalo and New York City as a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1972, he travelled to Berlin as a guest of the DAAD on a fellowship from the Ford Foundation. He won many awards and honors, including the SIMC (Société Internationale pour la Musique Contemporaine) in 1961, 1963, and 1965; the Venice Biennale Prix all’Amelia in 1967; the Toscani d’Oggi Prize in 1974; and the Psacaropulo Prize in 1979.

Bussotti was a regular contributor to the journals Discoteca and the monthly Piano Time and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Musica/Realtà. His book publications include I miei teatri (My Theaters), Letture del Tieste (Reading Thyestes) and Disordine alphabetico (Alphabetical Disorder), a collection of his major writings from 1957 to 2002, as well as two volumes of poetry, Letterati ignoranti (Ignorant Learned) and Non fare il minimo rumore (Don’t Make the Slightest Noise). Other publications related to his work include an illustrated volume on his dramatic and stage works titled Moda e musica nei costumi di Sylvano Bussotti (Fashion and Music in the Costumes of Sylvano Bussotti) and a catalogue of an exhibit held in Florence in 1988 titled L’opera di Sylvano Bussotti (The Works of Sylvano Bussotti). Bussotti was the artistic director of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, of the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago, and from 1987 to 1991, of Biennale Musica, the international festival of contemporary music of the Venice Biennale. He has taught history of musical theatre, composition, and analysis at the Accademia di Belle Arti dell’Aquila, the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, the Festival de Royan, and, from 1980 to 1991, at the Fiesole School of Music.

Since childhood, Bussotti practiced drawing and painting alongside composition. Exhibits of his visual art have been organized around the world, notably at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Bussotti was also a concert pianist as well as an actor, performing for stage, television, and film. Indeed, in 1988, it was the filmmaker Derek Jarman, a friend of his, who directed his opera L’Ispiratione, based on a work by Ernst Bloch, at the Teatro Comunale di Firenzi, as part of the Florence May Music Festival. Starting in 1965, he composed mostly musical theatre pieces, in which he sought to showcase his own artistic practice, produced under the aegis of the Bussottioperaballet (B.O.B), an institution he founded in 1984 in his hometown of Genazzano, which organized concerts, performances, exhibits, and international conferences.

In parallel, Bussotti composed scores for stage productions (notably for plays by Mayakovski, Osborne, Beckett, Hofmannsthal, and Strindberg), directed short and feature-length films (including RARA (film), Solo, Cinque frammenti all’Italia, Apology, Immagine, Pausa), and directed lyric performances for theaters and festivals such as the Florence May Music Festival, the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, the Teatro Regio in Turin, the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, the Torre del Lago Festival, the Arena di Verona Festival, and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. He directed operas by Bizet, Chailly, De Falla, Donizetti, Ghedini, Leoncavallo, Malipiero, Mascagni, Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Mozart, Ponchielli, Poulenc, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz (Benvenuto Cellini in Florence in 1987), and Dallapiccola (Ulisse in Turin, 1985), as well as Verdi (I due Foscari, Simon Boccanegra, Il finto Stanislao, Un ballo in maschera, Aida) and Puccini (Gianni Schicchi, Palermo, 1969; La fanciulla del West, Florence, 1974; La Bohème, Torre del Lago, 1981; Turandot, Torre del Lago, 1982 and Rome, 1985; Il Trittico, Milan, 1983; and Tosca, Verona, 1984).

Bussotti was a member of the Accademia Filarmonica Romana and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, an honorary citizen of the cities of Palermo and Rouen, a Knight of the Order of Mark Twain, and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.