Cavalleria rusticana (review)

Cavalleria rusticana was the opera that catapulted Pietro Mascagni to world fame in one bold stroke. Mascagni wrote the libretto and music at a fever pitch in an attempt to launch his operatic career by winning the Sonzogno Competition. Fifteen years later, Domenico Monleone no doubt hoped to reduplicate Mascagni's success when he entered the Sonzogno Competition. By that act, which in retrospect seems both daring and risky, Monleone submitted another version of Cavalleria rusticana to the publisher of the Mascagni score. Although Monleone's opera did not make the cut in the competition, a Dutch impresario arranged for its premiere—paired with Mascagni's original—in Amsterdam in 1907. The new operatic version of Giovanni Verga's play achieved instant success and, joined with Mascagni's, began a tour of European capitals.

After the double Cavalleria tour reached Turin, Sonzogno filed a lawsuit that banned Monleone's opera from public performance. Monleone and his brother, Giovanni (who wrote the libretto), had secured Verga's permission to use his plot and characters for their opera, but the court ruled that Verga had previously signed away the rights to Mascagni and his librettists, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci. The judgment effectively took Monleone's Cavalleria off the boards. The composer later used some of its music in another opera, La giostra dei falchi (1914), and continued to write for the stage. Il mistero, premiered in Venice in 1924 with Aureliano Pertile, achieved a modest success, but Monleone ultimately claimed no more than a supporting role in Italy's musical life. Born in 1875, he made a minor career as conductor and also served as an administrator of the Teatro Carlo Felice in his hometown, Genoa. Before his death in 1942, he composed a dozen operas, eleven of which reached the stage without winning a place in the repertory.

During the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Mascagni's opera at the Carlo Felice in 1940, a board member toasted the composer and referred to Monleone's long unperformed opera. Mascagni rose to say he had no ill feelings toward Monleone and declared that he wanted Sonzogno to lift the ban on performances of his younger rival's version. Now, six decades later, Monleone's opera is beginning to reach a new audience. His Cavalleria rusticana, paired inevitably with Mascagni's, was the centerpiece in Radio France's festival in Montpellier in the summer of 2001. That revival, led by Friedemann Layer with a cast headed by Denia Mazzola-Gavazzeni, Janez Lotric, and Jean-Philippe Lafont, is a candidate for CD release in Actes Sud's growing list of verismo opera recordings. Meanwhile, this estimable radio performance from Albania is introducing Monleone's opera to a new generation of record collectors.

Monleone's Cavalleria is even more succinct than Mascagni's. At forty-two minutes, it lasts about half as long. There are no arias. The few duets feature rapid exchanges between two singers, punctuated sometimes with fervid unison singing in the climaxes. The pace is feverish. Monleone repeats the basic dramatic structure of the Mascagni work: offstage serenade for Turiddu, scene for Santuzza and Turiddu's mother, cut short by the arrival of Alfio and followed by a duet for the two lovers, interrupted by Lola. As in Mascagni's Cavalleria, the action charges to a violent conclusion after Santuzza reveals Turiddu's perfidy to Alfio. But Monleone wrote no drinking song for Turiddu, whose death, as in Mascagni's opera, is announced by a woman's scream—the blunt "Turiddu accoltellato!" in place of "Hanno ammazzato compare Turiddu!"

The Monleone version makes a few minor alterations and additions to the story. It introduces a secondary character, Uncle Brasi, and turns Nunzia (Mamma Lucia) into...