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• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘Rustic Chivalry’ Composed: 1888 Premiered: 1890, Rome Libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci after Giovanni Verga’s play Early on Easter Day, Turiddu is heard offstage serenading Lola. The villagers start arriving for church. Santuzza stops Mamma Lucia, Turiddu’s mother, and asks where she may find him. He is supposed to have gone to another village to ...

• Opera
• Turn of the Century

The schools of naturalism and realism had an immediate effect in Italy. With scant literary tradition to draw on from this period, Italian writers in the second half of the nineteenth century seized upon Zola’s beliefs as a potent dramatic source. The style they developed came to be known as verismo and was exemplified by writers such as Giovanni Verga ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Triptych’ In constructing an operatic triple-bill, Puccini followed no precedent. He had nursed the idea for some time, to the despair of Giulio Ricordi, who felt it would be a box-office disaster. With the publisher’s death in 1912, Puccini soon felt able to work on the project. His librettist for La rondine, Giuseppe Adami, ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘The Bohemian Life’ Puccini’s first work following the overwhelming triumph of Manon Lescaut was immediately beset by problems. Leoncavallo had already begun preparations on the same scenario and, on hearing of Puccini’s choice of subject, publicly berated his rival and friend and claimed priority over the project. Puccini responded calmly by declaring that both composers should go to work ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1878–1933, Czech Born in Prague as Ema Kittl, Destinn studied with Marie Loewe-Destinn, whose name she adopted out of gratitude. She made her debut at the Hofoper in Berlin with the role of Santuzza from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. Her most famous performances are those of Minnie in the premiere of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1858–1924, Italian Puccini’s unerring instinct for strong melody and evocative harmony, coupled with his ability to bring to life passionate and sensual relationships, has made him one the most popular of opera composers. Puccini brought Italian opera into the twentieth century, synthesizing music and drama in a symphonic idiom, but retaining the voice as the focal ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1840–1922, Italian Librettist Verga came relatively late to serious writing but his contribution, when it came, was forceful. In 1884, he had a volume of short stories published of which one was entitled Cavalleria rusticana. The story was expanded into a play shortly afterwards and it was this version that was adapted for Mascagni’s eponymous opera. Verga’s ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1929–2005, Italian With a warm, expressive baritone voice ideal for Verdi, Cappuccilli had a superb technique that was still evident when he performed Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in his last performance at Covent Garden, aged 60. Studying at the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi before graduating to the main stage, he made his professional debut in 1957 as ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Pe-a’-tro Mas-kan’-ye) 1863–1945 Italian composer The son of a baker, Mascagni studied law before becoming a conductor and piano teacher. In 1890, while a conductor in Cerignola, he shot into the limelight with his prize-winning one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana which, at its legendary premiere at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, received an unprecedented 60 curtain calls. Based ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1863–1945, Italian Mascagni was a precocious talent and surprised nobody by disobeying his father’s wishes and pursuing musical studies at the Milan Conservatory. There he shared a room with Puccini, to whom he would remain close throughout his life, but he was not inclined to study and soon left to tour Italy as a conductor with various companies. ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Rood-jâ’-ro La-on-ka-val’-lo) 1858–1919 Italian composer Leoncavallo’s masterpiece was the one-act opera Pagliacci (‘Clowns’, 1892), for which he wrote the libretto, based on an incident in the Italian town where his father was a judge. In its realistic subject and passionately expressive style, it embodies the verismo movement pioneered by Mascagni, with whose Cavalleria rusticana (‘Rustic Chivalry’, 1890) it is ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1857–1919, Italian Leoncavallo was born and studied in Naples. His first opera, Chatterton (1876), written to a libretto by himself, did not initially procure any performances and, in spite of encouragement from his family, Leoncavallo did not appear to be going far in the world of opera. However, with the support of the baritone Victor ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1867–1948, Italian Having successfully avoided the career of fencing master intended for him by his father, Giordano studied at the Naples Conservatory and entered a one-act opera, Marina, in the Sonzogno competition in 1889. This was the year in which Mascagni blew away the competition with Cavalleria rusticana and Giordano came a respectable sixth. Even so, ...

• Styles & Forms
• High Romantic
• Opera

The Italian Giuseppe Verdi and the German Richard Wagner, the dominant composers of the High Romantic period, were very different personalities who shared the same operatic aim. Both saw opera as Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art in which all elements – singing, acting, orchestration, drama, poetry, stage design – merged into a ...

• Techniques
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

The term has been liberally applied to a range of musical styles but, properly, it refers to a movement in Italian literature of which the main exponent was Giovanni Verga. The major influence on the veristic writers was Émile Zola who believed that reality could be best understood by objective observation. For instance, a character would be placed ...