GNECCHI: Cassandra.(Review)

GNECCHI: Cassandra [] Mazzola-Gavazzeni, Demurishvili; Cupido, Kocharyan, Mijailovic, Lebon; Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, Lawian Radio Chorus, Diemecke. Notes and Italian libretto. Agora AG 260.2 (2) (Qualiton, dist.)

Vittorio Gnecchi (1876-1954) came from a wealthy family, had all the advantages of study with the finest teachers and, to some, seemed to be a dilettante. His first work, a pastorale entitled Virtu d'Amore, was performed at his family villa when he was nineteen. Present were some of the most influential Milanese music critics, whose attendance was certainly guaranteed by the enthusiasm of Giulio Ricordi, who had just published a piano-vocal version of the piece. Prophetically, Ricordi wrote in the Gazzetta Musicale that the young composer's principal defects were "occasional excesses of form, some complications of ideas ... proper to the vigor of the young, the fruit of a wealth, not a lack, of ideas." And he praised the composition as wholly original. In the years immediately following, Gnecchi began work on an opera inspired by, and intended to embody, the power of Greek tragedy. He used a section of the Oresteia, concentrating on Agamemnon's arrival home from his victory in Troy, and his ensuing murder by Clytemnestra (Clitennestra), fueled by her adulterous affair with Aegisthus (Egisto) and revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia. The tension of the situation is heightened by the presence of the Trojan princess Cassandra, Agamemnon's captive, whose visionary powers allow her to grasp what is about to happen, but not to stop it. This is operatic material on both a grand and an intimate scale, and it makes for a potentially powerful libretto, especially as the honors were entrusted to no less than Luigi Illica, who already had the successes of Manon Lescaut, La Boheme and Tosca behind him. After two years of work on composition and a certain amount of collaboration with Illica, the twenty-seven-year-old composer presented the completed score for Cassandra to Ricordi, who was surprisingly discouraging, referring to the work as an "amateur essay" suitable for private performance and declining, for the time being, to publish it.

Undeterred, Gnecchi approached his friend Tullio Serafin, who showed the score to a more enthusiastic Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini led the opera's 1905 premiere, at the Teatro Communale in Bologna, with Elisa Bruno as Cassandra and Salomea Krusceniski (the first Salome at La Scala) as Clitennestra. Although the performance was a success, the stage was set for controversy.

Toscanini seems to have withdrawn from his association with Gnecchi amid rumors (started by the composer's detractors) that the Bologna production of Cassandra had been bought with payment to the maestro. Factions formed in the best Italian tradition, and the criticisms most repeatedly leveled against the opera were that it was pretentious, Teutonic in style, obstinately polyphonic, exaggeratedly dramatic in its attempt to ape ancient Greek drama and ostentatious in its use of genuine Hellenic musical scales. Nonetheless, the opera found subsequent success in Vienna in a German translation, with Maria Jeritza as Klytamnestra; in Milan's Teatro Dal Verme; and in Philadelphia, with Rosa Raisa.

But there was more trouble ahead. Shortly after Richard Strauss produced his Elektra, in 1909, an Italian musical review published an article entitled "Telepatia musicale," never mentioning ...