Pietro Mascagni and His Operas (review)

Robert Baxter

The Opera Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 104-109 (Review)

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39190

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Pietro Mascagni and His Operas

Alan Mallach
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002
384 pages, $35.00

The premiere of Cavalleria rusticana in 1890 launched the career of Pietro

Mascagni. Although he composed one stage work after another in the next
forty-five years, Mascagni failed to match the stunning success of his first opera.
That, more or less, is what most opera fans know about Italy’s last important
operatic composer. Alan Mallach fills in the gaps in Pietro Mascagni and His
Operas, the first comprehensive biography of Mascagni published in English.
A composer and pianist, Mallach addresses musical issues in a judicious way.
But he is also a scholar whose meticulous research lays bare the details of
Mascagni’s career. Mallach not only assesses Mascagni’s successes and failures
but also investigates the composer’s private life. He contends that Mascagni
was a manic depressive who bounced between creative outbursts and debili-
tating depressions. He also documents Mascagni’s four-decade relationship
with his mistress, Anna Lolli, and explores his troubling and troubled rela-
tionship with Mussolini.
Mallach fashions a rounded portrait of the composer who was swept to world
fame before he was thirty and then spent the next five decades attempting to
recapture the success that always seemed to elude his grasp. The figure who
emerges from these pages proves fascinating, a man of enormous contradic-
tions, ambitious and talented, yet unable to realize fully his immense goals.
Most important, Mallach reassesses Mascagni’s operas. Carefully balancing crit-
icism with praise, he judges Iris, Isabeau, Parisina, and Il piccolo Marat significant
works worthy of revival. He also charts the evolution of Mascagni’s operas from
Cavalleria to Nerone. Each work, argues Mallach, has its own distinct musical
style. Almost as important, Mallach shows how Mascagni championed Italian
culture throughout his long career. He also shows Mascagni’s impact on music
education in Italy during his significant, if troubled, tenure as director of the
Liceo Musicale Rossini in Pesaro.
Mallach unfolds this story against a fascinating historical backdrop. He cap-
tures the feel of the cities that shaped Mascagni’s life and outlook—from his
birthplace, Livorno, a fishing village transformed in the sixteenth century into
an important mercantile center, to Milan, the industrial and financial center that
served as Italy’s musical capital. He also conveys the rustic charm of Cerignola,
the provincial market town that launched Mascagni’s career. Mallach aptly
describes the cultural and historical tides that swept through Mascagni’s long life.
This book, in short, is a major study of a neglected master, a notable biography
that will win wider respect and understanding for an underrated composer.
Music seized Pietro Mascagni’s life at an early age. At thirteen, Mascagni
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became obsessed with writing an opera to a libretto by Felice Romani that he

had purchased from a pushcart vendor. Standing in the way of Pietro’s obses-
sion was his father, Domenico Mascagni, a baker who had higher aspirations
for his son. But Pietro wanted to be a composer, not a lawyer. His uncle Ste-
fano supported his dream, taking the talented teen into his house—Mascagni’s
mother had died earlier—and paying for his musical education. The budding
composer won local notoriety for his early compositions, some of which were
underwritten for performance by his generous uncle. Even then Mascagni was
known for his “wild mood swings” (p. 15) and recognized as “a troublemaker”
(p. 7). By 1882, the budding composer was ready to make his mark. Urged on
by Ponchielli, Mascagni came to Milan to launch his career. Convinced of his tal-
ent and ability, he refused to study at the conservatory and sought from pub-
lishing houses a contract to write an opera. RebuVed, Mascagni retreated to
Livorno for a few months but returned to Milan in the fall after a benefactor
supplied a monthly stipend for his studies at the conservatory. As a student,
Mascagni achieved little success, but he met Giacomo Puccini, who became his
roommate and lifelong friend. After failing to launch his career by winning a
contest—the score was submitted too late—Mascagni abruptly left the con-
servatory and joined a touring operetta company as assistant conductor. Life
on the road proving so uncertain, he bolted from the company with the lead-
ing soprano, Lina Carbognani, who eventually bore his children and became
his wife.
Mascagni’s career as a wandering musician brought him to Cerignola. He
invigorated the musical life of this dusty market town before escaping several
years later by writing Cavalleria rusticana. Mascagni’s first opera hit Italy like a
bombshell. Mallach shows why. By 1890, Italian opera was in a crisis. Verdi’s
career was all but over. Amilcare Ponchielli and Carlos Gomes, both aging, rep-
resented a dying tradition. Puccini was still proving his talent, and Catalani
would be dead within three years. Into this void boldly stepped Mascagni. Ca-
valleria transformed the operatic landscape and made Mascagni famous around
the world.
Mallach provides an exciting account of the premiere of Cavalleria rusticana,
“one of the sensational nights in the history of opera” (p. 59). The audience at
the Teatro Costanzi exploded into applause after every number and at the end
chanted, “We have a maestro! Hurrah for the new Italian maestro!” (p. 59).
Critical raves greeted the opera, which marked a decisive new beginning for
Italian opera. Cavalleria swept through the operatic world and within three
years received 185 productions in sixty-six Italian cities and sixty-two cities out-
side Italy. Mascagni-itis gripped Italy in an orgy of performances and publicity
not seen since.
Mallach provides a vivid narrative of Mascagni’s triumphant return to Ceri-
gnola: “The town was decked with homemade banners, while thousands of
people had walked or ridden on horseback or in oxcarts to await the composer
at the railroad station, three miles outside town. As the train pulled in, the cry
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of ‘Viva Mascagni’ erupted from thousands of throats. Carrying Mascagni with

them, the crowd marched and danced along the dusty road into town and down
the city streets to his home, while others threw flowers and confetti from their
balconies” (p. 72). This reception was repeated when the composer returned to
his birthplace in July to attend the second production of his opera. A battalion
of soldiers and hundreds of policemen were required to protect Mascagni from
the tumultuous populace.
The ecstatic receptions in Cerignola and Livorno were repeated on Ma-
scagni’s foreign tours. He was feted in Vienna, London, and every foreign cap-
ital he visited. When he arrived in New York in 1902, Mascagni was greeted by
thousands of Italian-Americans. Accompanied by blaring bands, they marched
up Broadway with the composer to the Savoy Hotel. Mascagni’s reception in
Buenos Aires in 1911 was even more exciting. The composer was greeted by fifty
thousand cheering fans as his boat docked in the harbor. He was swept to his
hotel in a swirling sea of admirers, and the crowd would not disperse until
Mascagni appeared on a balcony.
Cavalleria made Mascagni a wealthy man. In 1892, he purchased a carriage
and a twenty-eight-room mansion in Livorno. The rings on his fingers and fash-
ionable attire reflected his new wealth, as did the lavishly appointed home and
the collections of musical instruments, medals, batons, and other memorabilia
that crowded the rooms. Despite his fame and fortune, Mascagni remained a
manic depressive throughout his life. He alternated between deep depressions
when he could not focus his energies and manic outbursts when he engaged in
intense creative activity. These conflicting moods aVected Mascagni’s personal
as well as professional life. Unable to function in a routine, ordered way, he
careened from one project to another without the time to bring many of his
scores to polished state.
After he achieved success, Mascagni was beset by obligations that forced him
to earn a huge salary to support his lavish lifestyle. Mallach says the cost of
maintaining his wife and three children amounted to more than 200,000 lire a
year. In addition to his mansion in Livorno, Mascagni maintained large houses
in Rome and Milan. While on tour, he lived in palatial hotel suites. Mallach
estimates that by the 1920s Mascagni had to earn 700,000 lire every year to
maintain his lifestyle. He was forced to conduct long tours that took him from
his family and encroached on the time he needed to compose. In addition to
his family, he also supported his mistress, a member of the chorus at the Teatro
Costanzi. The aVair began in 1910 and, until the end of his life, Lolli remained
his great passion. Mallach documents this long love aVair by drawing on the
4,200 letters Mascagni wrote to his mistress. The correspondence is maintained,
along with other material Lolli collected, in a museum in the parish church in
her birthplace, Bagnara di Romagna. Mallach uses this treasure trove to docu-
ment Mascagni’s career as well as his relationship with Lolli.
Mallach refers to Mascagni’s “combative, restless temperament” in his pref-
ace (p. xiii) and throughout the book portrays the composer’s “emotional tur-
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bulence.” Mascagni was often able to conceal what the composer called the
“intense emotional turmoil” that at times overwhelmed him (p. 15). As Mallach
describes him, Mascagni was a man of great vitality who captivated and some-
times infuriated his friends and colleagues. He neatly sums up the composer’s
appeal: “He was strikingly handsome. Clean shaven in an age of beards and side
whiskers, he personified vigorous youth wedded to poetic intensity. Articulate
and witty, his youthful sweetness tempering a self-confidence falling just short
of conceit, Mascagni charmed everyone. His appearance, his manner, and the
many anecdotes in which he figured fanned what came to be known as the
fenomeno Mascagni” (p. 71).
This appealing but troubled man was also widely known as a one-opera com-
poser. Cavalleria rusticana elicits a detailed discussion in which Mallach reveals
the genesis of the libretto and evaluates the distinctive musical and dramatic qual-
ities of Mascagni’s masterpiece. Mallach has closely studied Mascagni’s scores,
from such youthful works as In Filanda and Alla gioia to each of the stage works
as well as Mascagni’s symphonic and film scores. He resists detailed musical
analysis but provides a careful and probing evaluation of the operas, giving a bal-
anced and almost always convincing discussion of each. Mallach displays a flair
for pithy summations of Mascagni’s operas. He calls Amica “challenging and
problematic” (p. 168) and dismisses Sì as a “frivolous confection” (p. 230). He
pithily characterizes Nerone, a hybrid in which Mascagni combined lushly scored
music from an early unfinished score with rather thin music he wrote later, as
“two operas in an awkward embrace” (p. 275).
Mallach astutely notes the diVerence between Mascagni and Puccini. “Unlike
Puccini,” he writes, “Mascagni would never identify a single theme or subject
matter as being uniquely well suited to his muse” (p. 102). Mascagni, in con-
trast, experimented with new styles and subject matter throughout his career:
“Almost every opera represents a pronounced departure in subject matter and
treatment, and often in musical vocabulary, from its predecessors. Every opera
was a new challenge, a battle to be fought and won” (p. 102).
Mascagni, as Mallach readily admits, lost many of those battles. But his finest
works contain music of great beauty and dramatic power. Mallach admires the
“inexhaustible flow of cantabile melody” in L’amico Fritz (p. 81) and notes the
strengths as well as the weaknesses of Iris. He believes none of Mascagni’s
operas is “more worthy of regular revival than Iris, for the sheer quality of its
music, and, despite its weaknesses, for its strange, compelling power as a work
of musical theater” (p. 128).
Mallach makes a strong case for the “brilliant but problematic” Guglielmo
RatcliV (p. 97) and duly notes the “charm and beauty” of Lodoletta (p. 226). In
a fascinating aside, he reveals that Mascagni identified himself and his mistress
with Flammen and Lodoletta. The ill-fated Le maschere—the subject of seven
simultaneous premieres in 1901, all but one of which failed—proved to be one
of the colossal setbacks of Mascagni’s career. Although a fiasco, Le maschere was,
Mallach notes, “the precursor of a growing genre” of operas in which comme-
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dia dell’arte figures appear, a theme picked up by composers as diverse as Wolf-

Ferrari, Busoni, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky (p. 142), a list to which Mallach could
have added Strauss and Puccini. Mallach succinctly sums up the weaknesses of
Il piccolo Marat but calls it “a stirring, gripping work” and laments, “Largely
neglected in recent decades, it is well worth more frequent hearing” (p. 246).
Mallach rightly ranks Isabeau and Parisina as “the high point in Mascagni’s
career” (p. 187). Both were influenced by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Mallach
admires the many beauties in Isabeau but candidly identifies “the central flaw”
of this ambitious work as “a composer straining for a musical and dramatic
vision beyond his reach” (p. 187). Parisina, too, was an ambitious work that
showed Mascagni unable to complete the opera he had envisioned. It ranks as
his “grandest and most ambitious conception,” nothing less than an Italian Tris-
tan (p. 206). Mallach unhesitatingly calls Parisina Mascagni’s “masterpiece,”
contending that Mascagni “vastly expanded the musical language that he had
used in Isabeau” (pp. 208 – 9). In his analysis, the author tosses oV bold char-
acterizations—calling the chorus “almost a second orchestra,” for example—
and notes many high points in this important score (p. 209).
“No other Mascagni opera contains the musical and dramatic riches of
Parisina,” points out Mallach before admitting, “And yet Parisina appears
nonetheless to be nearly unperformable,” which he attributes to the opera’s
length (the fourth act was cut after the premiere) and the diVuse nature of its
dramatic conflict. But Mallach argues for the score’s importance: “What is
notable is not that he failed to create the Italian Tristan but how close to suc-
cess he came, and what a remarkable work he was able to create. He would
never again even attempt a work of such ambition, let alone realize such an
achievement” (p. 210). Adding to the documentation of Mascagni’s operatic
career are a list of first performances with casts and a ten-page selective discog-
raphy with a critical evaluation of recorded performances.
More than an opera composer, Mascagni claimed a large role in Italy’s cultural
life. Like many composers, Mascagni developed a career as a conductor, but his
repertory extended from symphonic works to operas by diverse composers.
Mascagni was acclaimed for his symphonic concerts. In Rome, he championed
a broad range of scores, from Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 to Strauss’s Serenade
for Thirteen Wind Instruments, Op. 7. In 1909, he was invited to become the
director of the newly renovated Teatro Costanzi, Rome’s principal opera house.
He devised a repertory that included modern works with masterpieces from the
past—Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Verdi’s Don Carlos. He conducted several
of his own operas but also featured Giordano’s Mese Mariano and Giocondo
Fini’s La festa del grano. In 1915, he led a short series of performances at the rebuilt
Teatro Quirino in Rome. A revival of Rossini’s Mosè, then a rarity, created a sen-
sation in a production featuring Nazzareno De Angelis and Giannina Russ. He
also conducted Thomas’s Mignon and Meyerbeer’s Dinorah. Mallach shows the
rich cultural tradition Mascagni championed in his career. One of the composer’s
finest achievements was turning the provincial Liceo Musicale Rossini in Pesaro
into an important music conservatory. Appointed director in 1895, Mascagni
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attempted nothing less than the “reform of Italian conservatory education” (p.
107). He aimed to replace a system based on memorization by rote with one that
valued practical experience. Mascagni taught composition, created a student
orchestra, and founded La Cronaca Musicale, the first conservatory-based music
journal in Italy. He also strengthened the faculty and redesigned the curriculum.
The experience enriched Mascagni the musician as much as it enhanced the
Liceo’s reputation. Inevitably, Mascagni came under attack for his extended
absences. His dismissal in 1902 precipitated a national scandal.
Like Richard Strauss, Mascagni has been tainted by his connection with Fas-
cism. And, like Strauss’s relationship with the Nazis, Mascagni’s association
with Mussolini and the Fascists was complicated and uneasy. Mallach provides
all the nuances, from the Fascists’ denunciation of the composer for his social-
ist leanings to Mascagni’s insolent boast after the premiere of his last opera, the
politically ambiguous Nerone, that he had “stuck [his opera] up Mussolini’s ass”
(p. 275). Before Mussolini took charge of Italy, Puccini supported the Fascists,
but Mascagni sided with the opposition. The Fascists considered Mascagni “an
enemy” and turned against him (p. 239). A year before Mussolini marched on
Rome, Fascist goons attacked Mascagni verbally and organized hostile demon-
strations outside a banquet in his honor. After a period of quasi-exile, he was
forced to accommodate Mussolini to continue his career in his homeland. In a
meeting in 1925, Mascagni convinced Mussolini he was a loyal Italian. That
meeting began what Mallach calls “a process of accommodation on the one
hand and seduction on the other that led to the composer’s becoming an artis-
tic ornament of the Fascist regime” (p. 257).
After the Fascists inducted Mascagni into the Royal Italian Academy, he duti-
fully wore his uniform with gold braid and sword and attended the time-con-
suming functions demanded by membership. By then, Mascagni was approach-
ing the age of seventy and his powers were waning. The Fascists tolerated the
aging composer but held him at arm’s length. They prevented the premiere of
Nerone from taking place in the capital. “Trapped in an endless round of con-
ducting appearances in provincial cities, bedeviled by fears and fantasies, encir-
cled by real or imaginary enemies, his life was not an easy one,” sums up Mal-
lach (pp. 264 – 65).
Through his careful research, Mallach fashions a sympathetic and appealing
portrait of a complicated man. In spite of his faults and shortcomings, the
Mascagni who emerges from these pages proves a compelling figure. Mallach
charts Mascagni’s final years with sensitivity and insight. At the end of World
War II, separated from his family, friends, and mistress, Mascagni became a vir-
tual recluse in his hotel suite as his health declined and his fortune dwindled.
When Mascagni died after the end of the war, Italy’s new rulers boycotted his
funeral. But two hundred thousand mourners filled the streets of Rome.
Mascagni remained a cultural star to the end. This handsome biography makes
that star shine brightly.
Robert Baxter