il Fogklio

Alessandro Scarlatti’s oratorio is an exciting drama of life, love and death, set in the 4th century Roman Empire. Preferring to devote her life to God, Teodosia rejects the love of Arsenio, the son of the Roman governor, and welcomes death. St. Theodosia of Tyre died at the age of 18, in the year 308. One cannot help but be struck by the dramatic strength and the vocal beauty of this work, performed here by a very talented cast, including Emmanuelle de Negri, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Anthea Pichanick, Renato Dolcini and the fiery orchestra, Les Accents, led by Thibault Noally.

Following the phenomenal success of Cavalleria Rusticana (1889) operas flowed rapidly from Mascagni’s pen for about a decade: L’Amico Fritz (1891), I Rantzau (1892), Guglielmo Ratcliff (1895), Silvano (1895), Zanetto (1896), and Iris (1898). With the arrival of the 20th Century the pace began to slow down: Le Maschere (1901), Amica (1905), Isabeau (1911), Parisina (1913), Lodoletta (1917), Il Piccolo Marat (1921), Pinotta (1932) and finally Nerone (1935), largely a reworking of a much earlier piece. Mascagni himself was convinced that the public’s obstinacy in preferring Cavalleria Rusticana was an injustice. Criticism of the earlier works has tended to centre on clumsy libretti and patches of weaker inspiration, while real controversy has surrounded the later pieces. Here, we are told, Mascagni tried to dress up as a modern, flirting with dissonance and ungainly vocal declamation, at the expense of his natural melodic gifts.