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On the Genesis of Cavalleria Rusticana

Livorno: house where Mascagni was born

n December 7, 1863, a baby named Pietro Antonio Stefano was born to Domenico and Emilia Mascagni at their home in Livorno, Italy. Domenico was a practical man and even though his son showed an early interest in music he had no intention of having him fritter away his time playing an instrument. Unfortunately, when Pietro was only ten years old, his mother died and he had to spend a great deal of time unsupervised, but he learned to take advantage of this situation and managed to get some music lessons. Eventually, he went to live with an uncle who enrolled him at the Luigi Cherubini Institute where he studied with Alfredo Soffredini.

Some years later Mascagni began to compose small works, including a Symphony In C and a Kyrie for Cherubini's birthday, both of which were performed at the Institute in 1879. When his uncle died, in 1881, the young composer moved back to his father's home and by that time the older man had become reconciled to the possibility of his son being a gifted musician. That same year Pietro's cantata, In Filanda won a prize in a Milan competition. A short time later he composed a setting of Schiller's Ode To Joy, the same poem used by Beethoven for the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, and when it was performed it attracted the attention of a wealthy young gentleman named Florestano de Larderel who made an offer, right on the spot, to pay for the young composer's studies at the Conservatory in Milan.

Giacomo Puccini

Naturally, Mascagni took advantage of this wonderful opportunity, and he went off to Milan where he shared student lodgings in a rather bohemian setting with the somewhat older Giacomo Puccini.

Mascagni studied with the most important teachers in Milan at the time, Michele Saladino and Amilcare Ponchielli, but he was not happy with his life there. His strong-willed, stubborn and undisciplined nature came to the fore and he argued with his teachers. Because he thought he could get along without further musical study and was no longer disposed to continue the rigorous study of harmony and counterpoint, he left the conservatory without finishing his course or receiving a degree.

He immediately obtained a position as a conductor with a touring operetta company, and for several years he lived from hand to mouth conducting in small cities like Cermona and playing the double bass at the Dal Verme Theater in Milan between conducting engagements. In 1884 he played in the orchestra for the premiere of Puccini's Le Villi.

Eventually, Mascagni met a suitable young woman and settled down to start a family in Cerignola near Foggia where he became headmaster of a school for orchestral musicians. He also worked on composing the opera Guglielmo Ratcliff based on the Heine play and, on occasions when he felt depressed, wrote to Puccini bemoaning his plight in that small city.

In 1888 Mascagni went to Naples and again met with Puccini who advised him to give up work on Guglielmo Ratcliff, and compose a work that would be easier to produce. He took that suggestion seriously and began to search for a simpler play. The next year he saw an advertisement for a one-act opera contest sponsored by the publisher, Edoardo Sonzogno, and he began work on Giovanni Verga's simple, realistic play Cavalleria Rusticana,, asking Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, the friend who had suggested it, to write the libretto.

Mascagni and his librettists: Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci

Targioni-Tozzetti, like Mascagni, was born in Livorno in 1863. Altogether, he worked on six libretti for Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana, I Rantzau, Silvano, Zanetto, Il Piccolo Marat, and Nerone. When faced with the prospect of writing his first libretto for a major competition, however, he began to worry about his ability to satisfy the precise terms of the contest, and called in another writer from Livorno, Guido Menasci, to work with him.

Menasci was four years younger than Mascagni and Targioni-Tozzetti, with whom he worked on I Rantzau and Zanetto. The two writers also collaborated on the libretto for Umberto Giordano's Regina Diaz, besides working independently for various lesser known composers.

The novelist and playwright, Giovanni Verga, who was born in Catania, Sicily, on September 2, 1840, based his novella on an actual incident. When Eleanora Duse read his book she encouraged the writer to turn it into a play, enlarging the part of Santa so as to make it a suitable vehicle for her talents. The resulting work had a very successful premiere in Torino during January of 1884.

Mascagni said he began the composition of this opera with the finale and the words: "They have killed neighbor Turiddu." He decided on the chords while walking along the road to a lesson, and when he returned home he asked his wife to buy an alarm clock so that he could wake up before dawn each morning to work on the opera. After that the music seemed to come to him as fast as he could write it down, giving his librettists a great deal of difficulty keeping up with him. Tozzetti and Menasci, who were not in Milan with the composer, would write their lyrics on postcards, sending them off to the composer each night, but they seldom wrote fast enough for Mascagni. As a result, some of the music for this opera was written first, and the lyrics had to be adjusted to it.

When the opera was finished, in May of 1889, Mascagni sent a portion of it to Puccini. He, in turn, sent it to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, who rejected the work which would eventually make a fortune for the Sonzogno firm.

At this point the young composer was beseiged with doubts and toyed with submitting Act Four of Guglielmo Ratcliff, instead, as his entry in the Sonzogno contest. His wife, however, sent the Cavalleria score to the publisher without Mascagni's knowledge and it won first prize over more than 70 entries, receiving its premiere on May 17, 1890, conducted by Leopoldo Mugnone, starring Roberto Stagno as a smoldering Turiddu, and his wife, the fiery Gemma Bellincioni, as Santuzza.

Mascagni and the cast after the premiere of Cavalleria

Cavalleria was a tremendous popular success and it marked the beginning of the "Verismo" period in opera. "Verismo," or realism, a movement which began long before in France, had already made significant contributions to the renewal of literary prose by adding new areas of subject matter, including everyday life events occurring to ordinary people. Instead of elevated rhetoric, accurate and frank description became the norm. As it progressed as a literary genre and metamorphosed into "Naturalism," the lives of lower class and underworld characters were included, introducing a note of the sensational. In Italy the "Verismo Movement" culminated in the development of more flexible and realistic dialogue, regional settings and considerable local color. As a result the works of the late nineteenth century helped regenerate the then stagnant Italian theater.

Carmen was the precursor of "Verismo" in opera, although Mascagni disavowed any relationship between his first opera and the Bizet masterpiece. In La Traviata Verdi also utilized some of this type of material, but following the tumultuous success of Cavalleria, in which the rapid pace of the action in the Verga play has been preserved, the floodgates opened and verismo operas became the rage.

After its premiere, Cavalleria was soon produced all over Europe and the Americas, allowing Mascagni to fill his pockets with money and his lapels with medals. It would be a pleasure to say that he shared his success with his librettists, but according to Tozzetti, the only remuneration that each of them received was a gold watch and heartfelt thanks. Mascagni, though, was touted as the successor to Verdi and, even though none of his later operas ever reached the level of success of his first effort, he brought new life into Italian opera at the turn of the Twentieth Century and will always maintain a place among the great composers of all time.