Mascagni - Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo - Pagliacci (selection) - Elisabetta Maschio

Mascagni - Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo - Pagliacci (selection) - Elisabetta Maschio

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The DVD is featured by original recording of the opera and NOT digitally re-mastered

Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)
CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA
Melodramma in un atto
Libretto by G. Targioni-Tozzetti E G. Menasci
Edlzioni Casa Musicale Sonzogno di Piero Ostali, Milano
CITTA' DI FOGGIA
aTEATRO COMUNALE UMBERTO GIORDANO 1828
Artistic Director ANTONIO DE PALMA
Stagione Lirica 2003
Live recorded December 2003
Santuzza - MADELYN MONTI
Turiddu - ANTONIO DE PALMA
Alfio - MAURO BUDA
Lola - ANGELA BONFITTO
Lucia - AMBRA VESPASIANI

Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919)
PAGLIACCI (SELECTION)
Dramma in un prologo e due atti Libretto by Ruggero Leoncavallo Edlzioni Casa Musicale Sonzogno di Piero Ostali, Milano

Canio - GIUSEPPE GIACOMINI
Nedda - ELISABETTA MARTORANA
Tonio - MAURO BUDA
Peppe - SILVANO PAOLILLO
Silvio - MASSIMILIANO VALEGGI

Conductor ELISABETTA MASCHIO
Director GIOVANNA NOCETTI
Orchestra della Capitanata
Harp on stage Rita Beneventi
Coro Lirico Umberto Giordano
Chorus Master Agostino Pio Ruscillo
Musical Consultant Giovanna Nocetti
Substitute Conductor Felice Iafisco
Assistant Director Andrea Fabeni
Stage Manager Micaela Tiozzo
Stenographer Nicola Delli Carri
Costumes Giovanna Nocetti by Sartoria Arrigo - Milano
Giovanni Balduini - Atelier Le Dive - Carrara Choreography Lucia Fiore - Spazio Danza, Foggia Falconer Masters Guido Greganti - Lucio Saracino

THE VERISM OF MASCAGNI AND LEONCAVALLO

For some time now the extraordinary success of Cavalleria Rusticana has found a satisfactory explanation: it is a revolutionary opera. Not even the author could immagine he was creating the opera which would surpercede romanticism and open the door to the verist period when he started to compose his Cavalleria for the Concorso Sonsogno. Mascagni was still thinking of romanticism which, for him, meant Guglielmo Ratdiff, the opera of his heart, the enduring passion of his whole life.

In 1888, however, the young Livornese composer had accepted the advice of Giacomo Puccini who directed him toward a dramatically more effective work as Mascagni revealed in a letter of March 7, 1889 to his friend Gianfranceschi: "Last year I went to Naples to meet Puccini who was giving Le Villi at the San Carlo. He said: and you, do you always have the idea of Ratdiff? Listen. This Guglielmo can never be a first work for you: first make yourself a name by sacrificing your ideals and afterwards you will be able to impose yourself (...) Thus the idea of attempting another work, bit by bit took root in me." He settled, then, on the novella of Giovanni Verga who, in the theatrical adaptation, had triumphed at the Teatro Carignano in Turin on January 14, 1884 thanks, without a doubt, to the interpretation of the divine Eleonora Duse, but also to the new taste of the audience. Mascagni, too, was impressed a month later, the 11 th of February at the Teatro Manzoni in Milano, and he confessed it to the librettist Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti to whom belongs the paternity of the choice of the subject, on December 14, 1888. From Cerignola he wrote: "Cavalleria Rusticana was already in my plans ever since it was performed for the first time in Milano by the Compagnia Pasta. In fact, Giovanni Salvestri absolutely wanted me to put it to music then." Thus occurred the genesis of the masterpiece which changed, at the end of the 19th century, the history of opera, achievement of the trio from Livorno, Mascagni, Targioni-Tozzetti and Menasci; on May 17, 1890 Cavalleria debuted at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome and, from that date on, the world spoke of musical verism, a term coined in Italy, claimed by the literary world, but quite distinct from it. Beyond the Alps the term in use was naturalism or realism.

Immediately following his triumph, the exultant young composer telegraphed to the librettists: "Insuperable success of Cavalleria. Verga was in the audience. Congratulated me on music and libretto. Deplored your absence." The satisfaction of Verga derived also from the consideration that the opera of Mascagni would have earned significant royalties for him, to be added to those from Mala Pasqua by Stanislao Gastaldon, which played at the Costanzi on April 9, 1890, also inspired by his work. A third version of Cavalleria, by Damiano Monleone, appeared in 1907 and further filled the pockets of Verga. Following Cavalleria Rusticana, the so-called esthetic of the knife infected many other composers and, just two years later, in 1892, Pagliacci, by the Neapolitan, Ruggero Leoncavallo (Tilda, by Cilea, and Mala Vita, by Giordano appeared in the same year) who, at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milano, on May 21, had a great success. The nasty story of Nedda and Canio appears in a musical context quite different from that of Mascagni, softening into a literary dimension which introduces theater in the theater. If Cavalleria is the genuine product of the instinctive melody of Mascagni, inimmitable for its dramatic continuity, Pagliacci represents a more refined vein of verism for a bourgeois audience to which Mascagni, once again preceding Leoncavallo, had proposed L'Amico Fritz, in 1891.

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