Pietro Mascagni

This Da Vinci Classics album focuses on the soundtrack of an ancient Italian film, the subject of which is taken from a poem by Fausto M. Martini (1915). The film was made by Nino Oxilia and covered with sounds by Pietro Mascagni. The film revisits the myths of Faust and Dorian Gray, seen from a female perspective. Mascagni, whose fame was based mainly on his operas, sensed the potential of cinema which he considered as the future of opera, or the artistic expression that would replace singing theater as the public's preferred means of entertainment. But, once again, for Mascagni it wasn't about entertainment; he sought artistic perfection and pursued it. All the minute visual details of the film are echoed in the music, which comments on what was seen on the screen with what was performed by the orchestra. In this album Da Vinci Classics it was decided to record in full, without cuts, the piano reduction of the orchestral score created by Mascagni himself. The attached tracklist refers to the captions of the film, in order to allow the listener to follow, or imagine, the unfolding of the film.

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.