Pietro Mascagni and His Operas
Pietro Mascagni and His Operas

Author: Alan Mallach

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9781555535247

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Just twenty-six when the electrifying premiere of his Cavalleria Rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome catapulted the impoverished musician into sudden fame and fortune, Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) went on to write fifteen more operas, including L'Amico Fritz, Guglielmo Ratcliff, Iris, Parisina, and Il Piccolo Marat. With privileged access to extensive primary sources, including Mascagni's 4,200 letters to Anna Lolli, his mistress for more than three decades, author Alan Mallach provides a compelling portrait of a flamboyant, combative, and emotional man who was passionately devoted to the Italian opera tradition and committed to innovation in musical language and dramatic form. Deftly combining serious biography with critical commentary, Mallach begins with the captivating story of Mascagni's rags-to-riches adventure, from his birth in Livorno in Tuscany, to his musical studies first with Alfredo Soffredini and later at the Milan Conservatory, to his years as a vagabond musician, to the worldwide success of his breakthrough opera. He then traces Mascagni's private and professional life after Cavalleria, examining a prolific yet controversial career that was forever overshadowed by the work that unexpectedly thrust him into the limelight. Mallach provides a full analysis of Mascagni's oeuvre and discusses his complex relationships with such Italian cultural and political figures as Edoardo Sonzogno, Giacomo Puccini, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Luigi Illica, and Benito Mussolini. He also thoroughly chronicles Mascagni's bouts with manic depression, his marriage to Lina and devotion to their three children, his grueling schedule of concert and operatic tours, his patriotism and bitter opposition to Italy's involvement in both world wars, and his passionate love affair with Anna Lolli. This richly textured biography will appeal to fans of the still beloved and popular Cavalleria, and it will introduce opera enthusiasts to the power, intensity, and melodic beauty of the brilliant composer's many other significant works.

Rustic Chivalry (Cavalleria Rusticana)
Rustic Chivalry (Cavalleria Rusticana)

Author: Pietro Mascagni

Publisher:

Published: 1891

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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Turiddu, a young villager, is the son of Lucia, and the lover of Lola, (who is the wife of Alfio; having married the latter during Turiddu's prolonged absence in military service). Turiddu wins the affections of Santuzza, whom he wrongs; while, in the meantime, he is intimate with Lola. On Easter morning, (the opening of the opera), Alfio is incidentally informed, by Santuzza, of his wife's unfaithful actions. He challenges Turiddu (biting the ear, as was the rustic Sicilian custom). Turiddu, though regretting his past evil course, accepts the challenge and is killed by Alfio.

The Toughest Show on Earth
The Toughest Show on Earth

Author: Joseph Volpe

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-02-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0307498379

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The Toughest Show on Earth is the ultimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the divas and the dramas of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, by the remarkable man who rose from apprentice carpenter to general manager. Joseph Volpe gives us an anecdote-filled tour of more than four decades at the Met, an institution full of vast egos and complicated politics. With stunning candor, he writes about the general managers he worked under, his embattled rise to the top, the maneuverings of the blue-chip board, and his masterful approach to making a family of such artist-stars as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Teresa Stratas, and Renee Fleming, and such visionary directors as Franco Zeffirelli, Robert Wilson, and Julie Taymor. Intimate and frank, The Toughest Show on Earth is not only essential for music lovers, but for anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of the culture business.

The Autumn of Italian Opera
The Autumn of Italian Opera

Author: Alan Mallach

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2007-11-30

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 9781555536831

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The first full-length study of the last great era of Italian opera

Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci
Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana / Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci

Author: Burton D. Fisher

Publisher: Opera Journeys Publishing

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 0977145557

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A comprehensive guide to CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA and I PAGLIACCI, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto of each opera with Italian/English side-by side, and over 60 music highlight examples.

The Metropolitan Opera Presents: Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana/Leoncavallo's Pagliacci
The Metropolitan Opera Presents: Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana/Leoncavallo's Pagliacci

Author: Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1574674781

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(Amadeus). Opera's most enduring tragic double bill of verismo masterpieces, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci share many common features, most noticeably their direct language, plot simplicity, common-folk characters, and themes of adultery, betrayal, revenge, and murder. Written within two years of each other, and both set in villages in southern Italy, they feature dramatic confrontations, turbulent emotions, and gritty realism. Cavalleria rusticana takes place on Easter in a Sicilian village, where Turiddu, after returning from the army to find his beloved Lola married to the carter Alfio, found solace with the peasant girl Santuzza but ultimately betrayed her and ruined her reputation. When Turiddu goes back to Lola, Santuzza seeks revenge, with tragic results. In Pagliacci , a troupe of traveling commedia dell'arte players is torn apart when its leader, Canio, discovers that his wife, Nedda, has taken a lover. In the ensuing "play within a play," the actors struggle to go on with their performance as the line between theater and reality collapses, leading to an explosive climax.

The Leonard Bernstein Letters
The Leonard Bernstein Letters

Author: Leonard Bernstein

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2013-10-29

Total Pages: 903

ISBN-13: 0300186541

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“With their intellectual brilliance, humor and wonderful eye for detail, Leonard Bernstein’s letters blow all biographies out of the water.”—The Economist (2013 Book of the Year) Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic and versatile musician—a brilliant conductor who attained international superstar status, and a gifted composer of Broadway musicals (West Side Story), symphonies (Age of Anxiety), choral works (Chichester Psalms), film scores (On the Waterfront), and much more. Bernstein was also an enthusiastic letter writer, and this book is the first to present a wide-ranging selection of his correspondence. The letters have been selected for the insights they offer into the passions of his life—musical and personal—and the extravagant scope of his musical and extra-musical activities. Bernstein’s letters tell much about this complex man, his collaborators, his mentors, and others close to him. His galaxy of correspondents encompassed, among others, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, Thornton Wilder, Boris Pasternak, Bette Davis, Adolph Green, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and family members including his wife Felicia and his sister Shirley. The majority of these letters have never been published before. They have been carefully chosen to demonstrate the breadth of Bernstein’s musical interests, his constant struggle to find the time to compose, his turbulent and complex sexuality, his political activities, and his endless capacity for hard work. Beyond all this, these writings provide a glimpse of the man behind the legends: his humanity, warmth, volatility, intellectual brilliance, wonderful eye for descriptive detail, and humor. “The correspondence from and to the remarkable conductor is full of pleasure and insights.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “Exhaustive, thrilling [and] indispensable.”—USA Today (starred review)

Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart
Music and the Exotic from the Renaissance to Mozart

Author: Ralph P. Locke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1316298205

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During the years 1500–1800, European performing arts reveled in a kaleidoscope of Otherness: Middle-Eastern harem women, fortune-telling Spanish 'Gypsies', Incan priests, Barbary pirates, moresca dancers, and more. In this prequel to his 2009 book Musical Exoticism, Ralph P. Locke explores how exotic locales and their inhabitants were characterized in musical genres ranging from instrumental pieces and popular songs to oratorios, ballets, and operas. Locke's study offers new insights into much-loved masterworks by composers such as Cavalli, Lully, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Vivaldi, Gluck, and Mozart. In these works, evocations of ethnic and cultural Otherness often mingle attraction with envy or fear, and some pieces were understood at the time as commenting on conditions in Europe itself. Locke's accessible study, which includes numerous musical examples and rare illustrations, will be of interest to anyone who is intrigued by the relationship between music and cultural history, and by the challenges of cross-cultural (mis)understanding.

Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective
Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective

Author: Axel Körner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1108843867

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This volume of essays discusses the European and global expansion of Italian opera and the significance of this process for debates on opera at home in Italy. Covering different parts of Europe, the Americas, Southeast and East Asia, it investigates the impact of transnational musical exchanges on notions of national identity associated with the production and reception of Italian opera across the world. As a consequence of these exchanges between composers, impresarios, musicians and audiences, ideas of operatic Italianness (italianit...) constantly changed and had to be reconfigured, reflecting the radically transformative experience of time and space that throughout the nineteenth century turned opera into a global aesthetic commodity. The book opens with a substantial introduction discussing key concepts in cross-disciplinary perspective and concludes with an epilogue relating its findings to different historiographical trends in transnational opera studies.