Lenny Cavallaro

Literature & Music

“Anthony Tomassini recently prepared his "top-10" list of composers. His top three were Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, while Schubert took the fourth slot. There is no reason why we should not seek to emulate these four giants.”

Lenny Cavallaro is a “Renaissance man,” steeped in the classics: Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and classical music. He has also boxed, earned a third-degree black belt in karate, run marathons, and practiced hypnosis and reiki professionally.

Cavallaro’s first novel was Trojan Dialogues: The Memoirs of Diomedes, an audacious retelling of the Trojan War. He has also written a novella about a bare-knuckle boxer, The Greatest Champion Who Never Was. His interests in Shakespeare and Sophocles spawned two dramatic efforts, Hamlet, Revisited, a one-act play, and Odysseus Acanthoplex, a conjectural “completion” of fragments by the great Greek tragedian.

In addition to the novels in this series, Cavallaro has recently completed The Sherlock Holmes Chess Mysteries and “edited and revised” Paganini Agitato, a novel by Ann Abelson, based on the life of the legendary violinist, Niccolo Paganini. Both are scheduled for publication in 2022.

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An accomplished pianist, Cavallaro was a top prizewinner in the J.S. Bach International Competition and subsequently performed that composer’s Six Partitas to the highest critical acclaim in Carnegie Recital Hall. He has achieved even more recognition as a composer, with eleven published volumes, most notably his works for English horn and piano (released by Forton Music) and violin and piano (Broadbent & Dunn). In 2015, he wrote a conjectural "completion" of Contrapunctus XIV from Bach's unfinished masterpiece, The Art of the Fugue.

Cavallaro majored in literature at the University of Connecticut and later earned his Doctor of Musical Arts (D.M.A.) degree from West Virginia University. He has served on the English and/or music faculties of several colleges in New England.

The father of two children, Cavallaro currently resides in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Composer & Pianist Lenny Cavallaro

Lenny Cavallaro notes with some wry amusement that the top four names on Anthony Tommasini’s list of “Top 10 Composers” were Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. These men, he asserts, are his gods, and the geniuses whose works he seeks to emulate. The result, not surprisingly, is that most of Cavallaro’s music sounds as though it was written between 1720 and 1830. He has been called “the reactionary neoclassicist,” and one critic went so far as to call him “a throwback to Schubert.”

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Latest Blog Post from Lenny Cavallaro

Jun 23, 2023

Music Review Published (23 June 2023)

My review of a recital by fortepianist Daniel Adam Maltz "went live" in The Marblehead Current. It was a fine concert and the first...

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