Pietro Mascagni: A Bio-Bibliography.(Review)

 
Roger Flury Pietro Mascagni: 
A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood 
Publishing Group, 440 pages, $90 

To be a one-hit wonder is painful enough; to have posterity forever yoke one's hit with the hit of another one-hit wonder suggests a torment straight out of Dante. Such, in brief, was the fate of Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945). Not only did his Cavalleria Rusticana (1888, premiered 1890) make him world-famous before he had turned twenty-eight, it also proved--after two misleading years of independent existence--unthinkable in the public mind save as part of a double-bill with Pagliacci (1892) by Mascagni's rival Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857-1919). Known to opera-lovers as "Cav and Pag" (or, more archly, "the heavenly twins"), both masterpieces found their way into Ogden Nash's verse as an emblem for the umbilically conjoined:

 
   Mr. Powers began to shave only once a week because no one cared whether his 
   chin was scratchy. 
 
   He felt as lonely as Cavalleria without Pagliacci. 

Mascagni's future was five decades of frustrating efforts to convince the world that he had not shot his bolt after one great commercial triumph. Only with the comedic (rather than comic) opera L'Amico Fritz did he again come close to international success, and even this approval eventually acquired a bitter taste at home, since the opera's sympathetic treatment of a rabbi caused it to be proscribed when Mussolini imposed anti-Jewish laws on Italy in 1938. This embarrassment failed to prevent the composer from vilification--by contemporaries and, still more, by later generalist historians--as Fascism's toadying composer-laureate. That he accepted sinecures and a pension from the regime is true. It is also true that when his last opera Nerone received a star-studded premiere despite the government's vocal opposition to any premiere whatsoever, he gloated: "I shoved Nerone up the Duce's arse!" No wonder that the mixture of a career diminuendo and political bet-hedging has put off Anglophone musicologists, who are for the most part simple souls, auto-lobotomized by the puerile Darwinian dogma of artistic "evolution," and consequently baffled by the sheer hopelessness of trying to shoehorn Mascagni into the approved modernist canon.

Mascagni's muse could breathe only when behind the proscenium arch (and not always there); it is incomprehensible without--in the happy wording of a 1960s British musical--"the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd." Stagestruck from adolescence (most of his few non-stage compositions are in manuscript still), he attained a style so intensely theatrical that it sometimes makes Verdi and even Puccini resemble oratorio-writers manques. For a score-reader, his idiom is almost uniquely unsatisfying, since on the printed page it can look gauche, indeed positively trite, yet in performance--even in the recordings on which we non-Italians must usually depend for our appreciation of his post-Cavalleria output--the gaucherie often, somehow, becomes eloquence, the triteness a sublime concision. Witness his late and defective Il Piccolo Marat (1921), where after hours of the most uniformly forgettable vamping (aggravated by what is a prime contender for operatic history's most incoherent storyline), the second and penultimate act finishes with a blazing love duet that almost melts one's stereo. Not, on the whole, prone to self-criticism, Mascagni seldom knew when his inspiration was merely on autopilot and when it ...