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Cavalleria Rusticana

Cavalleria Rusticana

CD

RRP £15.95 historic list price — see live Amazon pricing below

Composer
Pietro Mascagni
Performers
La Scala Orchestra and Chorus, Pietro Mascagni, Giulietta Simionato, Mascagni, Pietro, Maria Marcucci, Lina Bruna Rasa
Label
Naxos Historical
Discs
2
Barcode
0636943171424

Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945): Cavalleria RusticanaThere is no doubt that Pietro Mascagni’s reputation rests primarily on Cavalleria rusticana, a pioneering example of verismo, realism, in Italian opera. Born in 1863 in Livorno, the son of a baker, through the intervention of a rich patron he was able to study at Milan Conservatory as a pupil of Ponchielli, sharing rooms with Puccini, five years his senior, but soon left to embark on a career as a composer and conductor. In 1885 he had his operetta Il re a Napoli (The King in Naples) staged by a provincial touring company, but his great success came with triumph in the 1888 one-act opera competition of the publisher Sonzogno and the staging of his award-winning Cavalleria rusticana in Rome in 1890. He followed this in 1891 with L’amico Fritz, a gentle comedy in a pastoral setting, but in contrast to the preceding work. The Intermezzo is included in the present release, together with the overture to I Rantzau, also set in Alsace and successfully mounted in Florence in 1892. The Intermezzo from Mascagni’s operatic version of Heine’s, Guglielmo Ratcliff, a Scottish tragedy of murder and revenge, is followed by two excerpts from the exotic Iris of 1898, a forerunner, in its Japanese setting, of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. From Iris comes the evocative introductory Hymn to the Sun and dances. Le maschere, staged in simultaneously in seven Italian cities in 1901, was a generally unsuccessful attempt at revival of elements of the comm

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