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Roistering Nights
by [unknown], Time Magazine, September 6, 1926
This article was published in the Time Magazine of September
6, 1926. The author is unknown. The article contains its share
of typos and inexactitudes - don't rely on it for facts about
how Mascagni got to write Cavalleria Rusticana!
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Pietro Mascagni - One wow
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Like the brief exciting taps with which a conductor, baton
against score-stand, commands attention for solemn music,
certain items rat-tatted in the press last week as follows:
Pietro Mascagni sailed for the U. S.
...
Roman music lovers saw in a sudden rapid shifting of Italian
orchestra directors the co-ordinating influence of Mussolini
from whose dictation not even Italian artists are
exempt. Arturo Toscanini, for years illustriously inseparable
from La Scala in Milan, will reputedly conduct this winter at
Costanza [sic] Opera in Rome. At La Scala it is whispered that
the baton of Bernardino Molinari will flicker. Neapolitans,
devotees of the famed San Carlos Opera will hail as their
chief conductor, this winter, Tullio Serafin, long a brilliant
conductor for the Metropolitan Opera of Manhattan. Pietro
Mascagni will go to the Augusteo, chief concert hall of
Romans, it is said.
...
The villa, at Torre del Lago, of the late Giacomo Puccini,
composer, will be made into a national museum at the
government's expense: 15,000 lire.
...
Fortune Gallo, manager of the San Carlo Opera Company in the
U. S., postponed the opening of his Manhattan season for a
week so that Pietro Mascagni could attend.
...
Pietro Mascagni will conduct, for the first time in the U. S.,
his opera, Il Piccolo Marat....
Such taps as these awoke echoes; the very names were pregnant
as the curtain of an opera house with musical memories. One
thought of Puccini dying alone in a Brussels hotel while
Bohéme [sic] was being played in Manhattan and a critic
there was writing, "Wherever a fiddle scrapes, his songs are
heard...." Of Maestro Fortune Gallo shouting, "I tell you my
name is Fortune.... I tell you opera will pay...." Of Signor
Serafin imposing his electricity on the wavering scores of
Metropolitan experiments.... Of Toscanini throwing down his
cello in the Opera House in Rio de Janeiro one night in 1886
to conduct Aïda by heart and win fame thereby.... But
most of all, since his name occurred most often, one thought
of Pietro Mascagni, and the curious stories that are told
about this baker's son, whose life has been a wail redeemed by
a wow.
Composer Mascagni once had himself photographed with a
deck of cards in his ringed hands and a large cigar protruding
from a smirk. The waggish, swaggering air of the picture
pleased him immensely, and whenever a lady asked him for a
likeness this was the one he gave her, signed, in all cases,
with love, Pietro Mascagni. It is not difficult to see why he
liked this photograph; in it he saw himself for the first time
as what he had always wanted to be - a gambler.
Short, thick, with a curly nose and an eye like a new
horsechestnut; coarse-mouthed and lyric-handed, a good hater,
a bad lover, a composer who made his reputation as another man
would make his point in a dice game, Pietro Mascagni. It was
in Leghorn, Italy, that his father baked bread, but the rumor
that Pietro helped in the family trade has never been
verified. Indeed, the boy Mascagni refused from the first to
soil his hands with flour; he seemed to have an illimitable
capacity for roistering, in reward for which, when he was
sixteen, his father propelled him into the gutter of Leghorn
and locked the bakery door.
He picked himself up and dusted his breeches, whistling "La
donna e mobile," from Rigoletto. For a long time now he
had been whistling songs and singing them; writing music,
even, on the sly. His father would have none of it - would
lock him into his room - but his uncle, an odd old penny,
liked the tunes he made. To his uncle he went now and
explained matters.
His uncle helped him. And when his uncle died a certain Count
Florestan gave him in charge of Ponchielli, "foster-father,"
as he is called, "of the veritist school." He fought with the
Count, he fought with his teacher, and in two years he found
himself married to a not unusually pretty girl, and very
hungry, sitting in the gutter of the Rue Gilber, Rome.
Macaroni was his meal that day. And for many months thereafter
macaroni was his meal - one dish of it a day. Hunger breeds,
sometimes, a sort of fever in the head, and through the
sputter of his wits Pietro Mascagni could hear drums running
and a cello pleading; the horns swept in, a dying fall. What
was that music? Pietro Mascagni thought and thought about it
while, for five years, he wandered over Italy, conducting in
one cheap opera house after andother. At last he began to
write some of the tunes down; then friends of his persuaded
Torgioni-Tozzetti to write a libretto; a Roman impressario
produced the opera. It was Cavalleria Rusticana. It was
a wow.
Next morning Pietro Mascagni was the hero of Rome. In a week
he was the hero of Italy. Three managers sued each other for
the right to bring out Cavalleria first in the
U. S. For several years it had more performances than all the
operas of Wagner put together. In 1902, Pietro Mascagni took
an opera company to the U. S. to perform his own works
exclusively and a concert manager got him a contract that
called for $4,000 a week. He was appointed director of the
Conservatory of Music at Pesaro. He fought with his concert
mana- ger. He fought with the trustees of the Conservatory. He
wrote Iris, Zanetto. But he had had one wow. He
could not repeat it.
This bloody little opera, dealing with the efforts of a
Sicilian peasant girl to marry her seducer on an Easter Sunday
morning, is as musically naive as the Floradora
Sextette. Hotel orchestras play, endlessly, the
Intermezzo; vaudeville tenors can always get a hand
with the Ave Maria and there is, of course, the
Siciliana. Critics care no longer for Cavalleria
Rusticana. But when Cavalleria Rusticana is given
at the Metropolitan the galleries and every foot of standing
room are filled with the curly noses and glossy eyes of
thousands of thick-set Mascagnis who, employed by day with
razors or napkins or boot-rags, pay down their money to hear
the violins rise like a wave under the arc of a tenor voice;
and then, as the horns burn darkly down, sophisticates feel,
along their spines, a curious and degrading prickle that is
their tribute to what Pietro Mascagni, a baker's son,
remembered of certain roistering nights in Ligarno [sic],
Italy.
Composer Mascagni believes that all his operas are as good, if
not better, than Cavalleria Rusticana. Il Piccolo
Marat, for instance, which has been given in Rome and
Buenos Aires though never in Manhattan, is a far neater piece
of construction; four interweaving orchestral tones, built on
four connected themes, knit the score together; the scene is
Nantes during the Terror, the villain, one Orso [sic], a
guillotining cockaded butcher, the heroine is his daughter,
the hero, a nobleman so pure that he is called "The Little
Marat." What more could one ask? And yet Pietro Mascagni, now
walking a ship's deck, has but one wow.
Comments, additions, corrections are welcome.
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