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Pietro Mascagni - A Tragic Figure?

Magazine Cover	Mascagni at the Piano

Some time before the first World War I attended one of the small opera houses in Rome to see a performance of Mascagni's "Iris." I remember that evening well and recall that the performance took place not in the big opera house, the Teatro Costanzi, but in one of the small and extremeIy popular opera houses in which the average citizen could get good music for little money. Good music that meant in the first line a tenor with a fulminant high C.

I think the name of the theater was Teatro Quirino, near Fontana Trevi. There was always a somewhat tense atmosphere in any of those theaters; there were good singers, a fine conductor, a small but technically excellent orchestra, and the air was filled wiih the arguments of the passionately participating Italians whose divided loyalties would more often than not end in violent cheers and cat-calls, in tears and delirium - just as they might at an American football game.

Enters Mascagni

All of a sudden all the lights were turned up - the hall became completely silent and led by the dignitaries of the opera house the composer of "Iris" took his seat in the first row. After a short interruption the performance was resumed and at the end of the act an enthusiastic ovation was given to the master who accepted it with dignified humility. That was no isolated instance, but it was typical of the popularity which Mascagni enjoyed in Italian music and art circles. Whenever he would enter a theater - as spectator or as conductor - the entire audience would rise spontaneously just as if the King, or later, as if the "Duce" had entered the theater.

Mascagni has frequently been called a tragic or enigmatic figure. It is tragic - indeed even unique in musical history - that a composer reaches the highest point of fame and applause with his very first work - and that no lasting success was achieved with any later operatic work, though the composer himself tried, again and again, his best to overcome the clearly felt indifference of the public.

However, Mascagni did not consider himself a tragic flgure - other than possibly during the last decade of his long life; he was convinced of his cultural mission, of his musical genius. He was no man affecting genius, but he felt himself on the same level with Wagner, and he resented deeply any comparison with Leoncavallo, whose "Pagliacci" was the unalterable twin of the routine opera night with "Cavalleria." He had nothing but shameful contempt for that man who was bathing in the shining rays of the patronage of the German emperor, Wilhelm II, and whom he never considered his equal.

Mascagni was never discouraged by failure. All he said was: "It is a pity I did write 'Cavalleria' first. I was crowned before I became 'King.'" He had no doubt that, in his later years, he became king in the realm of music.

The Tragedy of Poverty

When Mascagni, eighty-one years of age, died on August second, 1945, in the poverty and misery of war-stricken Rome, he had lost all of his earthly posessions. His money gone, he had been permitted by the occupation authorities to live with his wife in a small hotel. He wept when he recalled that, at one time, ninety-six opera houses all over the world were simultaneously performing "Cavalleria Rusticana." Actually he had been forgotten, not his "Cavalleria," but all his later works - and particularly forgotten was the fact of his still being alive. Whoever mentioned his name as that of a living composer, was stared at with unbelieving eyes just as though he had said: "I had lunch today with Meyerbeer."

To give a short sketch of biographical facts: Mascagni was born in 1863 in the Tuscanian seaport town of Livorno (Leghorn), and the inhabitants of that town never failed to claim the composer as one of their greatest sons. His father was a baker who had no understanding for the boy's musical ambition, but his kindhearted uncle Stefano took care of his early musical education. A Leghorn nobleman, Baron de Lardarel who had heard one of his compositions, offered to subsidize Mascagni's further education and sent him to the Conservatory at Milan. There he became one of the famous quartette of whom Puccini was also a member. The young musician did not like the regular studies at the Conservatory, so he decided to leave Milan, and with a traveling opera company he worked his way through the small Italian towns and villages and to early marriage.

The Big Opportunity

Then came the big opportunity, and Mascagni who was just twenty-six years of age, had both the luck to catch the right moment and the genius to synthetize passion into a form which moved the hearts of music lovers all over the world. The whole story of "Cavalleria" actually sounds like a fairy tale, like a made-up Hollywood movie story. By chance the young conductor of the fourth-rate itinerant opera company heard of a competition by the music publishing house of Sonzogno at Milan, for a one act opera. The winner was to be produced in Rome, free of expense to the composer.

In eight hectic days and nights Mascagni wrote "Cavalleria Rusticana," that passion filled tale of love, jealousy, and murder in front of a Sicilian church on Easter Sunday. Mascagni talked things over with his friends Targioni and Manasei, but he was so eager to begin immediately with the composition that they had to send him each newly finished scene of the libretto by mail while he was working on those he had already in hand.

The opera won the prize in March, 1890. At the publisher's request Mascagni journeyed from Sicily to Rome, on money borrowed from a friend. Two months later "Cavalleria" was produced at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, and the vigor and volcano-like force of the opera, its spontaneity and sincerity, carried away the public of the first night. It was a phenomenal success, never equaled by any other opera in history. The Italian music lovers made an uproar such as that famous opera house had never seen before. Over night Mascagni was an Italian celebrity, and in a few days "Cavalleria" started its triumphal procession over the opera theaters of the world - a procession which still continues. Since 1890 the opera has been performed in Italy alone more than fourteen thousand times.

"Cavalleria" gives the opera goers and music listeners of our time the same thrill and the same happiness through its beautiful melodies as it did to its admirers more than half a century ago. There is a sardonic word of Gounod about Richard Wagner's operas: "I agree - certainly there are delightful moments in Wagner's operas, but awful quarters of an hour" (Il y a des délicieux moments, mais des fichus quarts d'heure). This surely cannot be said of that short but inspired music drama, for each second of it is instilled with tension.

"Verdi's Successor"

With this one first night Mascagni became a world figure; he was the acknowledged leader of Italian music and was acclaimed as Verdi's successor. The Italian King made him a Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Sibelius in later years acclaimed Mascagni "a splendid composer, the musical embodiment of passion." True, Verdi did not recognize immediately the value of "Cavalleria." When Boito was playing "Cavalleria" to Verdi, the old maestro impatiently interrupted Boito with the disdainful words: "Enough, dear friend, enough! I have already understood." But five years later Verdi praised the music of "Guglielmo Ratcliff."

Mascagni was Director of the Liceo Rossini of Pesaro - a position he liked very much. His tour of the United States in 1903 was badly managed, a disappointment to composer, orchestra, singers, and public.

"Cavalleria" was the first realistic, common-life music drama; it started the Verismo - a form of short opera that wanted to show human passions in the true ( vero) light of everyday life, not in the over-idealistic shine of heroic opera. A long series of operas, including fourteen at least, was produced by Mascagni who felt deeply the obligation which went with combining his name with that of Verdi. Few people outside of Italy will have had an opportunity of having heard all or most of them - and none of those operas had lasting success. Quite a few of Mascagni's later operas have reached the American stage.

After "Cavalleria" Mascagni wrote "L'Amico Fritz" which was based on a novel of Erckmann-Chatrian. Then came in quick succession "I Rantzau," the gloomy "Guglielmo Ratcliff," "Silvano," a failure from the beginning, and "Zanetto." There was "Iris," a three-act opera on a Japanese theme and produced twice (1906 and 1928) at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, with the famous Inno del Sole (Hymn to the Sun). "Le Maschere" was produced simultaneously in seven of the chief opera theaters of Italy, this fact being in itself a record, but the opera was a total fiasco. "Il Piccolo Marat" (Rome 1921) was called a "democratic opera" probably because its content described scenes of the French Revolution in a rather stormy manner. At the age of seventy, he composed "Nerone" which had a loud external success, engineered by his Fascist friends, but sinking down quickly like a straw-fire.

Mascagni wrote very little important music other than opera although he was always flirting with the idea of writing a symphony - "when my inspiration gives out." He may have remembered that his first composition, long before "Cavalleria" was a Symphony in C minor.

Mascagni actually was not more interested in politics than any other Italian. He was made artificially a prominent spectacle of Fascist Italy, though he never seems to have invited these particular honors. In 1926, he was appointed Maestro Toscanini's successor as director of Italy's most famous opera house, Milan's La Scala ¹. Though this was probably a political appointment, his conductorship was widely acclaimed, and he was considered second only to Toscanini as conductor of Italian opera. Even in his later years he never tired of wielding the baton. He liked to conduct his own operas, and he had plenty of opportunity to do that, but he was very much against conducting "Cavalleria," which he simply could not endure any longer. Even during the eighth decade of his life, he continued to conduct wherever he was called upon, until the breakdown of Fascist Italy and finally his own death imposed silence on the composer of the immortal Intermezzo.

1. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that this was the case. This appears to be a myth.