HISTORY

About Sugar Music

Sugar Music is the number-one independent music publisher and record producer in Italy and one of the most important in Europe. Run by Filippo Sugar, currently President of Italy’s Federation of Music Publishers FEM, it is a family business following the steps of founder Ladislao Sugar since 1932. Over the years the Sugar company has built up an impressive catalogue of modern classical works by distinguished composers such as Ennio Morricone, Luigi DallaPiccola, Luciano Berio, Goffredo Petrassi, Ivan Fedele among others, while continuing to invest in the creation of popular music with over ninety thousands copyrighted songs that often reach international fame like Time to say Goodbye, Gloria, More. Through the recent acquisition of the CAM catalogue, home to Grammy and Academy Awards winners Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Nino Rota, Luis Bacalov,  Sugar is now a leading brand in movie soundtracks and film music internationally.

Aside publishing, Sugar renowned and extremely effective talent scouting abilities that were the founding pillars of Andrea Bocelli’s world-wide success since 1993, have continued to positively perform under deputy chairman Caterina Caselli Sugar.

Several times a winner of Italy’s Sanremo Festival with its tunes and artists, Sugar’s always-on approach to popular music as a venture that must appeal to international taste has managed to consistently promote the Italian tradition of popular and operatic melodies together with some of the most elegant fruits of contemporary popular music as represented by the growing European standing of artists such as Elisa, Negramaro, Malika Ayane, Raphael Gualazzi.

Behind the birth of a star, a great song, or a show always lays the patient work of many well-trai­ned, highly motivated and well directed professionals. The world-wide success of Andrea Bocelli, as well as the growing european standing of Elisa, Negramaro, Malika Ayane, Avion Travel, and many others before them, is but the most recent and exciting chapter in the history of a family of impresarios, publishers and record producers born almost eighty years ago with Ladislao Sugar.

A talented and enterprising "self-made man" who arrived in Milan from Hun­gary in the early ‘thirties’ Ladislao set up a business that was ultimately to range from music publishing to record making, from opera to musicals, from pop music to chain-stores. One of the few truly independent still left in Europe holding out and growing even amid the deep transformations taking place in the world of music and the mass-media.

For almost eighty years the history of Ladislao Sugar, his son Piero with his wife Caterina Caselli, and now his grandson Filippo, and that of brand names like Suvini Zerboni, Melodi, Cgd, Messaggerie Musicali, Insieme (to mention but the most important) is bound up with that of international culture and entertainment, the great names of opera, singers, composers, and other stars.

It is a wonderful fairy tale, where art and human being are the winners, the latter with his courage, imagination and values amid the ups and downs of capital invested, technology and political changes. A true fairy tale where each character-hero contributes his enthusiasm, skills and ideas, to keep the ball rolling and the firm moving forward.

Everything stemmed form a happy blend of business acumen and love of music – something that could be properly  defined as “genius”- of a young Hungarian who moved to Italy in the wake of a Viennese operetta company. Starting his career with having published the "White Horse Inn" score in his homeland, Ladislao Sugar at barely 35 years old set up his first italian company in Milan in 1932. The company was Melodi, just a tiny office right at the heart of the city in an imposing building part of the Galleria del Corso, a hundred metres from the Duomo, what was for deca­des the Mecca of Italian Song. Melodi was to publish musical scores and librettos of successful operettas, such as "The Merry Widow”, “Victoria and her king”, "Dancing at Savoy", and again the "White Horse Inn".  But Ladislao was already swept away by the irresistible charm of Italian popular music, and started publishing works by the Who's Who of the musical world of the day: authors like Gorni Kramer, Eldo Di Lazzaro, Mario Schisa, Nino Ravasini, Carlo Alberto Rossi, Mario Ruccione, Ermenegildo Rusconi, Mario Panzeri…

Like the snowball starting an avalanche, in less than twenty years out of that small office grew a huge publishing and recording holding company. "One of the largest in the world", as ack­nowledged in the mid-seventies by an unbiased witness such as the American music magazine Billboard.

The escalation began in 1934 when he joined as a partner Suvini Zerboni, the largest music publisher of the time,a house originally specialized in operettas that was launched actively into both popular music and contemporary-classical where the more representative Italian composers were signed up: Pizzetti, Ghedini, Malipiero, Petrassi, Dallapiccola….

Ladislao worked side by side with the original owner, the lawyer Paolo Giordani, building the company up, and moving to general management in 1935 when his partner had to keep a low profile because of continuous contrasts with the fascist regime. A few years after the end of  World War II, he became the sole owner of Suvinì Zerboni when Giordani died in 1948.

The publishing activities of the enterprising Hungarian, who in 1935 had married the Milanese Marta Soleri and two years later had befathered Piero, were further increased when he acquired the Mascheroni publishing house, set up by the famous songwriter who was invited to stay on as creative director and main author.

Now expansion abroad could begin. With two songs by Eldo Di Lazzaro, "Reginella campagnola" followed shortly after by "La piccinina", the Sugar publishing house topped the US hit parade, while other hits were to spread all over Europe, North and South America and Japan the name of the Italian naturalized publisher : from "Piccolissima serenata" (Little Serenade) launched by Teddy Reno, to "Come prima" (For the First Time), launched in Italy by Tony Dallara and then re-launched worldwide by Mario Lanza in the movie bearing the same title; from "Chitarra romana" to “A Man without Love" (Quando m'innamoro) sung by Engelbert Humperdinck or "On an Evening in Roma" (Sott'er celo de Roma), one of Dean Martin's hits.

At the time being a successful publisher meant playing the key role in the business of music, but Ladislao Sugar realized well ahead of many that to expand the publishing business he had to diversify. Quick to transform intuition into action he moved fast. In 1937 Messaggerie Musicali was launched, a disc distributor that was the first to publish the "Canzoniere della radio" with lyrics of the popular songs broadcast by Eiar (the one and only Italian radio station of the time).

In 1948 through Messaggerie Musicali Ladislao was able to secure the distribution of CGD, Compagnia Generale del Disco, a record company founded in 1948 by Teddy Reno, one of the most internationally renown italian singer of the time.

So successful was Messaggerie Musicali with distribution that in 1952 Sugar was offered the chance to acquire a fifty percent interest in the record company itself, and seven years later bought up the remaining shares to become the sole owner of CGD.

As a record businessman Ladislao signed up popular names like Betty Curtis and Johnny Dorelli, while over the following decades the honour role of the Milan firm was to be graced in turn by Adriano Celentano and Ornella Vanoni, the pop group Pooh, Loredana Berté, Raf, Pierangelo Bertoli, Umberto Tozzi, Enrico Ruggeri, Paolo Conte and many other big Italian singers, many of whom were popular also abroad.

By 1955 the small operetta publisher, now a king of international publishing, had become a top flight record mogul.

Although the business expanded mostly in the field of popular music, it must be stressed that this was not to cause any detriment to the “contemporary-classical” heart of Sugar publishing that was Suvini Zerboni.

Ladislao was convinced that music was in essence one whole and considered its duty to re-invest in the creation of “new” music and in the work of new classical composers part of the profits that pop music brought about.

He is often quoted telling his niece Susy, who run the Suvini-Zerboni catalogue, that he would be happy to through 100 million lira per year at a loss into this area because of every penny earned through popular music a farthing was to be re-invested in the creation of “new” music.

Sugar was in short  undertaking an anything but easy task and making an extremely original commitment. Indeed most other publishers preferred to run fewer risks and work with a more traditional repertoire that would guarantee a wider circulation of their catalogues among the public at large. On the other hand, a publishing activity based on contemporary composers, although hardly providing an immediate return, was a challenge that often paid off in the future.

In the classical music sector Suvini Zerboni covered the entire range of music from the seventeenth century (see the ongoing publication of Girolamo Frescobaldi’s critical edition) to the avant-garde of the day with names like Pizzetti, Ghedini, Malipiero, Dallapiccola, Petrassi in the thirties-fourties; followed in the fifties-sixties by Berio, Maderna, Donatoni, Clementi, Manzoni…all the way up to Ennio Morricone in present days and "young" musicians like Ivan Fedele, Alessandro Solbiati, Gilberto Bosco, Riccardo Nova, Luca Mosca, Paolo Arcà and Giovanni Verrando.

And not only in Italy since over the years the number of its composers grew taking in South American, Japanese, Belgian, Hungarian and Spanish musicians. Suffice it to mention names like Kazuo Fukushima, Yoritsuné Matsudaira, Henry Pousseur, Sandor Veress, Vladimir Vogel, Matyas Seiber and Luis de Pablo.

In 1960 Ladislao, now 66, brought in his son Piero, aged 23, to help him run the company.

Piero was a cultivated young man of few words, with a bent for writing and literature who had set up his own book publishing  house named Sugar, with his partner Massimo Pini who later remained in charge of a re-named SugarCo.

The economic boom of the early sixties which launched Italy into the top seven economic powers of the western world rapidly expanded the number of italian radio and television households with radio audiences taken over by public television. The new affluence and media penetration were to give the recorded music market a powerful boost. Traditional events like the Sanremo Festival, the most important promotional event for music since 1951, became primetime material.

An habitué of the Festival from the very beginning Sugar was often a winner. As in 1964 when a barely fifteen years old shy girl from Verona, Gigliola Cinquetti, with a song modelled on herself ("Non ho l'età", or “I am not the right age”) won both the Sanremo Festival and then went on to triumph in the UER Euro-Song Contest in Copenhagen, becoming in just a few months one of Sugar's most sensational international successes.

All the way through to the victories of the trio Tozzi-Morandi-Ruggeri in 1987, the Avion Travel in 2000, and Elisa in 2001.

As a matter of fact it was another appearance at San Remo that had a decisive effect on the history of the Sugar label.

In 1966 Adriano Celentano was to participate in the Festival with the song "Nessuno mi può giudicare", for which he had already cut a record. Eventually though the milanese singer and songwriter was more inspired by the idea of "Il ragazzo della via Gluck", and decided to take to Sanremo this first song "about the need to protect the environment'' for many years to come. So “Nessuno mi può giudicare” was offered to Caterina Caselli, an exuberant twenty-year-old from Modena who loved rock and rhythm and blues. It was a howling success: the CGD record presses had to work day and night to keep up with orders. Caselli became a star overnight and four years later, at the height of her success, was to marry Piero Sugar and decide to put an end to her short but fortunate career as a singer of her own free will.

In 1971 Piero and Caterina announced the birth of Filippo, currently the chairman and CEO of the Sugar Group.

That very year the Sugar Group operated in Italy alone through fifty wholly owned publishing houses as well as thirteen outside of Italy plus several others in partnership. But Ladislao was not a man to rest on his laurels: the now elderly publisher celebrated his seventieth birthday by founding the April Music company and signing an agreement with the powerful American label CBS for establishing an Italian CBS that would later be merged with CGD to become CBS Sugar.

In 1974, the family opened their new headquarters in a twenty-thousand square metre complex that by itself occupied a five storey building not far from Milan Linate airport. A confirmation of the international attitude that the founder of the group had passed on to his heirs.

It was in this new context that Caterina Caselli Sugar made her debut as record producer, setting up and running Ascolto, a label that would work along the "alternative" trends of the day. Among others Caterina signed up a highly committed singer-songwriter like Pierangelo Bertoli, an experimentally minded group like Area (with the great vocalist Demetrio Stratos), a cultivated musician with a fine sensitivity for the Italian traditional folklore such as the violinist Mauro Pagani, formerly a leader of the PFM rock band. And in the early eighties “Ascolto” would turn into the new label “Insieme”

In the second half of the seventies many events were to happen starting with the mutually agreed termination of the agreement with CBS in 1977 and ending with the new birth of CGD .

In 1981 at the age of 85 Ladislao Sugar’s terrestrial journey came to an end dying suddenly of a stroke.

Yet the family continued to run the business with Piero as president and his wife Caterina as deptuy.

Just eight years later increasing competition threatened the survival of more vulnerable Italian labels. In the face of a crisis sweeping the international record market multinational record companies were able to expand into the italian market on the strength derived from the digitization of their immense catalogues into the new state-of-the-art and increasingly dominant Cd format.

Notwithstanding an average turn-over of 40-50 billion Lira per year CGD did not reach the critical size needed to fight on and had to surrender. It was July 1989 when Piero Sugar went to New York to sign with Ramon Lopez, President of Warner Music International (then WEA), the agreement that handed to WEA the Compagnia Generale del Disco with its historical recording catalogue of artists and interpreters like Adriano Celentano, Ornella Vanoni, Gigliola Cinquetti, Paolo Conte, Pooh, Matia Bazar, Enrico Ruggeri, Umberto Tozzi, Raf, Loredana Bertè, the cherry-picking of Italian popular music.  

Sugar maintained the two big shops in central Milan and Rome that were the stronghold of its Messaggerie Musicali commercial activity and concentrated on catalogue exploitation and innovation through its many publishing companies. Talent scouting and record production started from scratch under the management of Caterina Sugar with the label Insieme-Sugar (currently Sugar).  Now Company President, Caterina Caselli proved she had fully assimilated her father-in-law's lesson - that combination of enthusiasm, entrepreneurship and international outlook - and success came in harness.

Only one year after Caterina produced Notte Italiana, the 1990 World Soccer Championship anthem written by Giorgio Moroder and interpreted by Gianni Nannini and Edoardo Bennato, that was to become an international hit dominating the hit-parades for almost an entire year.

Then came the breakthrough of Gerardina Trovato at the Sanremo Festival 1993. And of course the greatest of them all, the  tenor Andrea Bocelli, launched in 1994 at Sanremo and soon firmly established worldwide in his dual role as pop star and opera singer, a unique artist capable of producing sales of more than 60 million copies over ten years and regularly dominate both the classical and popular hit-parades of the world with his albums. Especially in the USA a market mostly barred to Italian artists, where Andrea represents a sure exception with 40 million record sold, several Grammy Awards, coming close to winning the Oscar in 1999 for “The Prayer” in duet with Celine Dion, and receiving standing ovations at each and every sold out live concert ever since. Andrea is so much beloved in the USA that he was asked to sing Schubert’s Ave Maria at Ground Zero only a few months after the September 11^th disastrous terrorist attack .

Andrea Bocelli with his exceptional performances belongs to a class of his own, but the Sugar Group honour roll has continued to grow ever since. To the point that in 1997 the authoritative Financial Times, quoting a market research of the English magazine Music & Media, wrote "After Virgin, Sugar is surely now the second European label in terms of records sold…" due to Bocelli’ sales of course, but also exceptionally good management and other successful artists discovered by Caterina over the years: Gerardina Trovato and Paolo Vallesi in the early nineties; Elisa, Avion Travel at the end of the century; Negramaro and Malika in the new millennium; Rafael Gualazzi these very days….