Pietro Mascagni

Pietro Mascagni was an Italian opera composer and conductor. He born on 7th December in 1863 in Livorno, Italy and died on 2nd August 1945 in Rome Italy aged 81.

“Cavalleria Rusticana” (1890)
“L’Amico Fritz” (1891)
“I Rantzau” (1892)

1863: Pietro Mascagni was born on 7th December in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy. His father was Domenico Mascagni a baker and his mother was called Emilia. Pietro was their second son.

1876: He begins learning music with Alfredo Soffredini who has just finished studying in Milan.

1879: He begins composing several works including “Sinfonia in do Minore”, “Prima Sinfonia in fa Maggiore”, “Elegia” and an “Ave Maria”.

1881: The premiere is held of his cantata “In Filanda” on 9th February at the Istituto Cherubini. It wins first prize in the competition.

1882: He composes “Cantata alla Gioia” (Cantata of Joy) with words by Friedrich Schiller and “La Stella di Garibaldi” (The Star of Garibaldi) for voice and piano. On 12th October he passes the admission exams for the Milan Conservatory, however he finds the main tutor Amilcare Ponchielli a disciplinarian.

1883: On 9th January his sister dies. He tries to enter the “In Finlanda” cantata (renamed “Pinotta” ) for a competition at the Conservatory but misses the deadline.

1884: He composes “Ballata” (Ballad) for tenor and piano and “M’ama non M’ama” (He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not) for soprano and piano as well as “Messagio d’Amore” and “Alla Luna”.

1885: He composes “Il Re a Napoli in Cremona” (The King of Naples in Cremona) for tenor and orchestra. He leaves the Conservatory without completing his studies and joins several travelling opera companies as a conductor. 

1886: He begins working with the impresario Luigi Maresca and moves to Cerignola where he is appointed master of music and singing at the new philharmonia orchestra. He gives piano lessons to supplement his income.

1888: In February he begins work on the “Messa di Gloria”. 

1889: On 3rd February he marries Lina Carbognani and the next day his son Domenico is born. He wins the first prize with his one-act opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry) in Milan. 

1890: “Cavalleria Rusticana” is first performed at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, on 17th May and is an instant success with the public. It is soon performed throughout Italy. In December Gustav Mahler conducts it in Budapest and it tours to Germany, Russia and even Argentina.

1891: His son Dino is born on 3rd January 1891. The opera “L’amico Fritz” is premiered in October at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome. 

1892: His daughter Emi is born. “I Rantzau” (The Rantzau Family) is premiered on 10th November at the Teatro La Pergola in Florence.

1894: He composes “Silvano” (Of the Woods).

1895: On 16th February “Guglielmo Ratcliff” is first performed at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and on 25th March “Silvano” is also premiered there. He moves his family to Pesaro when he becomes the director of the Liceo Rossini.

1896: On 2nd March he conducts the premiere of “Zanetto” (Kittle John) at the Liceo. 

1898: On 19th June he conducts the first performance of his symphonic poem “A Giacomo Leopardi” for voice and orchestra at the Teatro Persiani in Recanati. The opera “Iris” is first performed on 22nd November at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome. 

1899: His father dies in May.

1900: He tours Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia. 

1901: “Le Maschere” (The Masks) receives its first performance on 17th January at the Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa but is not well received. Nevertheless, it tours to other cities. He conducts Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem in Vienna, Austria. Verdi had died in January.

1902: He composes the incidental music for the play “The Eternal City” and it is performed in London on 2nd October. He then begins a long conducting tour of Canada and the United States. The trip is mainly a failure except in San Francisco where he is well received.

1903: Back in Italy he leaves Pesaro after problems with the town authorities and moves to Rome to become director of the Scuola Musicale Romana. 

1905: He premieres his opera “Amica” in French on 16th March in Monte Carlo. He has disputes with Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini.

1909: He is director of the Costanzi Theatre in Rome in August.

1910: He begins an affair with Anna Lolli on 4th April and in October he is finally reconciled with Puccini.

1911: He leaves the Scuola Musicale Romana and in May leaves for Buenos Aires in Argentina for a seven-month tour of South America. The première of “Isabeau” takes place in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Coliseo on 2nd June. 

1912: In March he begins working on “Parisina” (The Parisian Woman) based on the poem by Lord Byron, whilst living in Paris with his daughter Emi, his mistress Anna Lolli, and the librettist Gabrielle d’Annunzio.

1913: “Parisina” is premiered in Milan on 15th December.

1914: Both Puccini and Mascagni are against the involvement of Italy in the First World War in which Dino his son is later taken as a prisoner.

1915: He writes music for Nino Oxilia’s silent film “Rapsodia Satanica”.

1917: He premieres “Lodoletta” (The Skylark) on 30th April 1917 in Rome. 

1919: His operetta “Si” is performed on 13th December at the Teatro Qurino in Rome.

1921: The first performance of “IL Piccolo Marat” (The Little Marat) is given in Rome on 2nd May at the Teatro Costanzi.

1922: In May he tours South America again.

1923: He composes “Visione Lirica” (Lyrical Vision) and in September appears on the cover of Time Magazine.

1927: He moves to the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome where he remains for the rest of his life.

1929: He succeeds Arturo Toscanini as musical director of La Scala Milan. 

1931: “Le Maschere” (The Masks) is performed at La Scala. 

1932: “Pinnota” is premiered in San Remo on 23rd March. He joins the PNF (Italian Fascist Party) along with many other musicians.

1935: His opera “Nerone” (Nero), written to glorify Benito Mussolini, is premiered in Milan on 16th January.

1936: His son Dino dies in Somalia in June.

1940: Celebrations take place all over Italy for the 50th anniversary of “Cavalleria Rusticana”. He conducts the recording of it for HMV Records (His Master’s Voice) at La Scala.

1943: In April he appears for the last time at La Scala and conducts “L’Amico Fritz” (My Friend Fritz) He is so frail he has to conduct sitting in a chair.

Pietro Mascagni died on 2nd August 1945 at the Grand Hotel Plaza in Rome, Italy. He was buried in Rome on 4th August but in 1951 his remains were transferred to Livorno.

Pietro Mascagni was the most academically able of four children and received a better education than his siblings as his father wanted him to become a lawyer. Amilcare Ponchielli, however, encouraged him to study at the Milan Conservatory where he was a professor of composition. There he shared rooms with an older student called Giacomo Puccini.

He was influenced by the sounds and rhythms of Italian folk music which would later appear in his works and in particular inspired by Richard Wagner’s use of orchestral colour creating deep emotions. The major figure in Italian opera at the time was Giuseppe Verdi and Mascagni was a fan of his late works which told stories through opera and can be seen as the beginning of the Verismo style in music i.e., stories of everyday folk instead of Gods and mythology then prevalent in Wagner’s works. 

He was very impressed by the Verismo school of writing which movement around naturalism in turn was influenced in France by Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. The libretto for his most famous work “Cavalleria Rusticana” (Rustic Chivalry), was based on the 1880 short story (and 1884 stage play) by verismo author Giovanni Verga.

“Cavalleria Rusticana” is seen as a landmark of the verismo style and the first true use of it in Italian dramatic music. Verdi was nearing the end of his career and the public were looking for a new maestro to follow and the younger generation understood the desire to see relatable stories about their own existence. The opera takes place in an ordinary Sicilian village at Easter time and is a tale of love and loss. Its first performance was at The Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 17th May 1890 as one of three obscure works which had made it through to the final round of a competition for a one-act opera organised by Sonzogno, a firm of publishers. Nothing could prepare the performers, and not least the composer himself, for the public’s reaction who went wild in their applause and called for sixty curtain calls at the end. The work was soon in demand throughout Italy and then all the grand opera houses of Europe and spawned a succession of imitations including “Il Pagliacci” by Ruggero Leoncavallo in 1892. In 1891 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky first heard it in Warsaw and was thoroughly impressed. He wrote, “Yesterday I saw for the first time the celebrated “Cavalleria Rusticana”. This opera is indeed very remarkable and especially so thanks to the amazingly felicitous choice of subject”. The following year Tchaikovsky visited Vienna and coincidentally stayed in the next room at the hotel to the composer, but finding him mobbed by a crowd he couldn’t bring himself to be introduced to him.

He was immediately signed up by the publisher Sonzogno and would write fifteen operas in total but none sadly had the appeal of “Cavalleria Rusticana”. “L’amico Fritz”, a romantic comedy had a libretto by the same author and in 1895 he produced “Guglielmo Ratcliff” a melodrama based on the play by Heinrich Heine which was successful at the time but dropped out of production until as late as 2015. In 1898 he tried something entirely new with “Iris” a symbolist drama set in Japan complete with Japanese music. In fact, he claimed that at one point, “Iris” was performed in Italy more often than “Cavalleria Rusticana”. “Le Maschere” (the Masks) in January 1901 flopped at most of its performances and his reputation took a long time to recover. He, however, continued his conducting career.

In later life he was seen as an associate of Benito Mussolini despite the fact that the dictator took a dislike to his opera “Nerone” (Nero) of 1935 which he saw as a thinly veiled attack on him. At his death in 1945 the new Italian government distanced itself from his funeral although 200,000 ordinary people paid their respects. In his lifetime he was immensely successful and rich with medals struck in his honour and even made the cover of Time magazine, however, after that period most of his works, including a symphonic poem, piano music and other vocal works, fell out of fashion. Some were to be revived in the twenty-first century.

He heavily influenced the verismo movement in Italian opera and expanded the use of the chorus, inspiring composers such as Ruggero Leoncavallo and later Umberto Giordano in “Andrea Chénier” and Giacomo Puccini in “Tosca”. The veristic fashion spread to France with Jules Massenet composing “La Navarraise” in 1894 and Germany with Eugen d’Albert writing “Tiefland” (Lowland) a two-act opera set in Catalonia in 1907. Frédéric d’Erlanger composed “Tess” based on the Thomas Hardy novel “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, and Leoš Janáček produced “Jenůfa” in 1904.

List of non operatic compositions by Mascagni.