Cavalleria's Crown

Pietro Mascagni had one flash of genius. He was 26, a penniless ex-conductor of a fourth-rate itinerant Italian opera company, when he heard of a prize contest for a new one-act opera. In eight feverish days and nights he wrote Cavalleria Rusticana, a fast-moving, lyric tale of love and murder in a Sicilian square at Eastertide. It won the prize, got its composer 40 curtain calls at its first performance in May 1890, and subsequently the Order of the Crown of Italy. In Manhattan, Oscar Hammerstein produced Cavalleria in English, and the Metropolitan Opera did it in Italian; both were hits. Critics hailed a new Verdi.

Stocky Pietro Mascagni tried 14 times to repeat his success. (Shrewish Signora Mascagni, a peasant girl wrapped in furs on the profits of Cavalleria, jealously selected the casts of all 15). But the audiences that cheered and wept over Cavalleria booed and hissed its pedantic successors.

Tribute & Applause. The Fascists did their best to make a great musician of Pietro Mascagni, and he cooperated. In 1926, he was appointed Arturo Toscanini's successor as director of Milan's La Scala. He obliged by composing a Hymn of Labor. The obedient Fascist press hailed his 1935 opera Nero, a musical tribute to Mussolini's Italy, but it flopped anyway.

U.S. audiences, continuing to applaud the 55-year-old Cavalleria (which has had more than 250 performances at the Met), disregarded the composer's Fascist foolishness. Many had even forgotten that he still lived, that he and Richard Strauss were the only living men among the composers in the Met's 1944-45 season.

Last week, in a Rome hotel room, Cavalleria's Mascagni, 81, died. He had phrased his own epitaph after one of his failures: "It is a pity I did write Cavalleria first. I was crowned before I became King."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.