During the Roman audience’s frenzied bursts of enthusiasm for [Mascagni’s] Cavalleria rusticana, I had the opportunity to meet the Maestro [namely, Verdi] in Genoa. “Well—he said immediately when he saw me—so it really has been a huge success, that of Cavalleria at the Teatro Costanzi? Will you tell me something about it?” It was the first time in many years, that I saw the Maestro show such a lively interest in a musical fact. About a year later, when I met Verdi again, he said to me at one point, when the conversation warranted it: “You know, I have heard Cavalleria.” “And?” I exclaimed with curiosity. “Ah—a beautiful moment of sincerity! Truly!” That was all he added. Another few years later, when Mascagni had already written Fritz, Silvano, and Ratcliff [i.e., around 1895-1896], Verdi expressed himself about the young and fortunate musician as follows: “Pity! Pity! It is a young man who feels the music more deeply than he knows himself! … He would be capable of much … but … now I believe he has lost his way.”
—Gino Monaldi, Verdi nella vita e nell’arte (Conversazioni verdiane), Milan, 1913, p. 187.
Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) wrote a total of 17 serious and comic operas, but was and is world-famous for one short, less than 80-minute opera: Cavalleria rusticana (‘Rustic Chivalry’). The opera’s music was created in just four months as an entry to a competition launched by music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno for new ‘one-acters,’ operas consisting of only one act. In late February of 1890, Cavalleria is one of three remaining contenders for first prize out of 72 entries. Mascagni was invited to Rome to defend his opera before the jury consisting of five composers. The jury was so impressed that he was told confidentially that the first prize could not escape him. However, he was advised to shorten the opera here and there, advice that Mascagni took to heart.
The world premiere at the Roman Teatro Costanzi on the 17th of May,1890, had an overwhelming effect on the sparse audience, despite the fact that the choir proved incapable of singing Mascagni’s demanding choral parts adequately, even after the composer led the final choral rehearsals himself. The premiere audience was initially sceptical: the young baker’s son from Livorno, working as an underpaid piano teacher and orchestra conductor in the rather insignificant town of Cerignola in Puglia—what could he possibly have to tell the cosmopolitan audience in Rome? But excitement and enthusiasm grew by the minute, and after the final chord, the audience erupted in enthusiastic jubilation to which there seemed to be no end.
In no time, Mascagni’s opera was a household name in Italy and abroad. None other than Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of Cavalleria in Budapest less than seven months after its world premiere. A dream come true? Financially yes, artistically less so. During the rest of his life, the popularity of Cavalleria regularly drove the composer to despair, as this short opera dwarfed all his other works. On his deathbed, Mascagni is said to have sighed that he was crowned before he became king, but there seems to be no evidence that he actually made this statement. The same fate, incidentally, would befall Mascagni’s contemporary Ruggero Leoncavallo, who would achieve a success with his Pagliacci (1892) that he would never match thereafter.
The story of Cavalleria rusticana (based on Giovanni Verga’s play of the same name) is set in a Sicilian village on an Easter Sunday and is extremely simple. The young peasant Turiddu and Lola love each other, but when Turiddu is absent for military service, Lola marries another man, the waggoner Alfio. After Turiddu returns, he finds solace with the young peasant woman Santuzza, but cannot forget Lola. Alfio is away from home regularly as a waggoner, which gives Turiddu and Lola the opportunity to meet at night. But Santuzza discovers Turiddu’s unfaithfulness. Tormented to the extreme, she tells Alfio everything. The latter challenges Turiddu to a duel, with fatal results for the young peasant.
An ordinary story with simple people, who experience the most unusually intense emotions and immediately turn those emotions into actions. Mascagni managed to find just the right music to go with it: the theatre-goer enters a musical rollercoaster that does not allow him or her a moment’s rest. A sparkling drinking song, singing peasants, a hymnic Easter chorus, a love song, shimmering confrontations, a rest in the form of a masterful instrumental interlude for the orchestra alone: it’s all in there.
In any text about Mascagni, the term ‘verismo’ comes up sooner or later. Verismo—from ‘vero,’ ‘true’—is the literary movement that emerged in Italy around 1875, influenced by the French naturalism of writers such as Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Notable features of verismo include: focus on ‘ordinary people,’ social wrongs, and a direct writing style in which characters interact without the writer providing much background information or moral commentary. Giovanni Verga published eight of his novellas, including Cavalleria rusticana, in the collection Vita dei campi (‘Life in the Fields’) in 1880. At the urging of renowned Italian actress Eleonora Duse, Verga adapted his novella into a play, which premiered with great success in Turin in 1884. Mascagni’s librettists based the libretto on this stage version, but provided a new dramatic element by having the villagers constantly present as spectators. This enabled Mascagni to give the chorus a remarkably large part. The downside is that the conventional literary language of the choruses added by the librettists is very different from Verga’s pared-down language and makes anything but a ‘veristic’ impression. It is just one of the reasons why there is no end to the eternal debate on whether or not Cavalleria is an example of musical verismo.
Another reproach is that an opera as full of beautiful melodies as Cavalleria can never adequately portray the harsh reality of peasant life in Sicily. Be that as it may, the 27-year-old Mascagni succeeded musically in speaking the language of the working class to which he himself had belonged in his youth, while convincingly fusing the sound world of folk song and operetta with the traditional sounds and techniques of the aristocratic Italian operatic tradition. An impressive achievement.
What can be said about the 16 other operas composed by Mascagni? A lot, if only because of the fact that in each work Mascagni tried to create something entirely new. For instance, the lovely pastoral atmosphere in L’amico Fritz, composed immediately after Cavalleria, contrasts sharply with the swirling passion of its predecessor. Mahler admired L’amico Fritz even more than Cavalleria; Verdi was of exactly the opposite opinion. Anyway, L’amico Fritz held repertoire for decades, only to disappear from the scene completely for several decades after World War II, except for the renowned ‘Cherry duet.’
Recommended recordings
There are many convincing recordings of Cavalleria rusticana, but there are also very many that (though admirable in various respects) I cannot wholly recommend, such as Giuseppe Sinopoli’s on DGG (too perfumed) and, also on DGG, Herbert von Karajan’s 1966 recording (verging on the violent). I prefer the natural and unforced approach of Gianandrea Gavazzeni (Decca), or that of James Levine (RCA). L’amico Fritz is also set in the countryside, but it hugely contrasts with Cavalleria: it is a pastoral work full of nostalgia and sweetness. EMI made a recording in 1968 with 33-year-old soprano Mirella Freni as Suzel and the equally young, then still little-known tenor Luciano Pavarotti as Fritz Kobus. Their interpretation is unforgettable.
