Mascagni’s award-winning opera “Cavalleria rusticana” is commonly performed with cuts authorized by the composer. Now, opera houses have the opportunity of basing their productions on the original version.
The premiere of Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” in May of 1890 is a landmark in the history of opera. It was an enormous success, ostensibly marking the beginning of operatic verismo, and it was also praised for reenergizing a tradition the Italians felt had been languishing for some time. Mascagni composed the work as an entry for the second competition for a new one-act opera sponsored by the Milanese publisher Edoardo Sonzogno in 1888. It was the favorite of an illustrious jury that deliberated over seventy-three submissions throughout 1889, selected three finalists for fully staged performances in 1890, and ultimately declared Mascagni the winner on the basis of the audience’s response.
This history is well known, as is the fact that Mascagni made substantial cuts to his opera while it was being prepared for performance at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. The matter of cuts was first raised in early March 1890, two and a half months before the premiere. Mascagni was invited to Rome to present his opera at the piano to the jury, and they reacted to the performance with enthusiasm. Amintore Galli, a jury member and Sonzogno associate, immediately asked Mascagni to stay in Rome for a while, probably to allow time for the first steps toward a performance. In light of these positive signals, Mascagni believed he had essentially wrapped up the first prize and thus did not mind that Pietro Platania (another jury member) recommended “in the spirit of friendship” that some cuts be made in the prayer, the opera’s third number. The matter was moved to the front burner toward the end of April, when Mascagni wrote to Galli from his home in Cerignola: “I’ve received a letter from Maestro Mugnone in Rome, who tells me that he has already read my ‘Cavalleria’ with the orchestra and wants me to either let him know what cuts to make or authorize Maestro Mugnone to make the cuts himself.”
Mascagni was back in Rome on May 1, where he encountered Giovanni Sgambati (another jury member) on the way to the opera house. When Sgambati advised him to make no cuts, Mascagni was confused but ended up cutting a total of 247 measures, more than 11% of the entire opera.
The cuts appear in every number except for the Preludio and the Intermezzo and fall into three categories: (1) those tightening the pace; (2) those reducing the taxing part of the ill-pre¬pared chorus; and (3) those accommodating transpositions requested at the last minute by the star performers Gemma Bellincioni and Roberto Stagno. These cuts affected Mascagni’s original conception of the opera.
No other cut was as consequential as the one Mascagni made in Alfio’s “Il cavallo scalpita,” an entrance aria of three stanzas with choral refrain. Here, Mascagni cut an entire refrain and stanza, re¬moving music necessary to understand the formal conception set up in the first two stanzas. The first two stanzas, both in duple meter, are nearly identical, except that the second begins an eighth note too early and sounds metrically unstable due to additional manipulations of the phrase lengths. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for these manipulations, at least not in the version we have come to know. Only with the third stanza restored does the metrically unstable second stanza make any sense. What happened?
We know that Mascagni’s librettists, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, had sent him stanzas of distinct poetic meter, thus inspiring him to do something unusual in this aria. He wrote to his librettists in a letter: “Alfio’s entrance aria […] with that change of accents in the second stanza, has inspired me greatly.” The result of his inspiration becomes clear only in the third stanza, the one Mascagni cut with its complex counterpoint in triple meter. The short-term destabilization of the duple meter in the second stanza marks the mid-point in the trajectory from duple meter of the first stanza to triple meter of the third. It is this “modulation” from duple to triple meter that provides the rationale for the metric instability in the second stanza.
Why did Mascagni cut a stanza necessary for understanding the formal conception? We know that he was full of praise for his soloists but felt that the chorus was not up to the task. On May 8 he wrote to his wife: “Everything is ready: the artists, the orchestra, etc. Only the chorus is still unbelievably behind. […] I hold four rehearsals a day and see that we begin to make progress. All of this is taking everything out of me: I am dealing with ca. eighty choristers, and that’s not a joke! The choruses of my opera are very difficult, but they must be executed to perfection.” Despite Mascagni’s efforts, the performance was not perfect. As a critic of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano saw it, “the performance was commendable in every way, except for the chorus, which is the sore point of the Teatro Costanzi.” Trimming the choral part helped lessen the embarrassment.
The inadequacy of the chorus was not the only reason for cuts: the soloists themselves required changes. When it came to the rehearsals of “Cavalleria”, Gemma Bellincioni (the Santuzza) and Roberto Stagno (the Turiddu) raised the issue of the “cruel tessitura, which required titanic vocal efforts” and requested a transposition downward by a half step in the grand duet. Mascagni confirmed the need for transpositions in a letter to his wife but referred only to those accommodating Stagno: “Since Stagno transposes two of the pieces down a step, I have had to sweat blood to implement these transpositions and then return to the correct key without the audience’s noticing it. But I have succeeded.” In the end, Mascagni made four such transpositions, usually by a half step but in the “Scena e Preghiera” by a whole step.
Mascagni’s transpositions affected the opera’s key structure. There are clear signs of tonal planning in the original design of Cavalleria rusticana where many of the numbers are rooted in the keys of F and A (whether major or minor). The opera begins and ends in F; Santuzza’s Romanza, Lola’s Stornello, and the Intermezzo are in F; the Introduzione, the Preghiera, and the beginning of the Finale are in A; and the long fifth number (from the duet between Santuzza and Turiddu through the duet between Santuzza and Alfio) begins in A and ends in F. The more ostentatious numbers – Alfio’s entrance aria and Turiddu’s drinking song – are located outside this axis, in E and G respectively. With the transpositions, this plan is seriously disturbed: both the “Preghiera” and the “Romanza” are now in the respective keys of G and E (the realm of the ostentatious), and both the second half of the duet between Santuzza and Turiddu and Turiddu’s solo in the Finale are now in A-flat, a key without any significance elsewhere. The transpositions have obviously not prevented the opera’s success, but if we assume that Mascagni selected his keys for musical and dramatic rea¬sons, performance in the original keys would better reflect his original intent and create an effect desirable for both historical and dramatic reasons.
Cuts in opera are as old as the genre itself. The reasons for cutting have ranged widely, from reducing an opera’s length, to tightening its pace, eliminating music of inferior quality or outdated style, and accommodating the ability of singers, preference of conductors, or taste of audiences. All the cuts in Cavalleria rusticana fall, one way or another, into one of these categories and shed important light on the composer’s dramatic intentions and technical aspirations.
All cuts are included in the appendix of “Cavalleria rusticana”, the second volume of Bärenreiter’s series “Masterpieces of Italian Opera.” Bärenreiter makes performing materials available with cuts reinstated and transpositions reversed.
Andreas Giger
(from “[t]akte” 1/2024)