Trechos de Pietro Mascagni and His Operas (2002), de Alan Mallach.
Mascagni was also supporting his two surviving siblings: his youngest brother, Paolo, whose tuberculosis had diminished his ability to support his family, and his older brother, Francesco, in a nursing home for nearly a decade. With few other immediate sources of income at hand, the forty-five thousand lire from Cines for Rapsodia Satanica, as well as the fifty thousand promised for a second film score, were much on his mind.
Meanwhile, Europe was gradually moving toward war. From the beginning, Mascagni was passionately opposed to Italy's involvement, convinced that only if Italy stayed out of the war could his homeland come through without material or moral disaster. At home, too, he found little solace. His relationship with Lina had become cold and distant; as he wrote, "Yesterday I had lunch with Lina... I ate reading, as usual, my newspaper, without speaking a word."
- - -
On April 26 Italy signed the secret Treaty of London, agreeing to intervene on the side of the Entente. Before the end of May, Italy was at war.
During early 1915 Mascagni was largely unaware, like most of his compatriots, of the political maneuvering taking place. After finishing Rapsodia Satanica in February, he returned to Rome, where he had been engaged to conduct a short opera season dedicating the newly rebuilt Quirino Theater.
- - -
At the fourth performance in Florence, Mascagni collapsed in his dressing room after the first act, with a high fever and acute rectal pains. [...] His condition was soon diagnosed as a rectal fissure, known as a rhagades. [...] He had gone from morphine to heroin injections to dull the pain, but even so, he found it difficult merely to stand on the podium. For a man whose health since childhood - except for episodes more emotional than physical - had been nearly perfect, this condition, which would torment him for the next few years, was painfully demoralizing.
By May preparations for intervention were clearly visible. Arriving in Milan, Mascagni was shocked to see signs of mobilization - troops, long lines of trucks and automobiles - everywhere. Frightened and outraged, he tried hard to convince himself that Italy was not about to enter the war, writing Lolli: "The war will not be! It would be Italy's ruin, total, irreversible, eternal ruin! It is not possible that our land lacks one man, just one, capable of opening the eyes of our rulers ... And if [there is war] I will weep forever over my country, destroyed by ... a band of madmen and criminals." War fever had pushed everything else aside, and the tour was disbanded. The entire city, lying in the shadow of the Austrian lines in the Alps, was preparing for war; as he wrote Lolli, Milan "was in a state of total lunatic delirium."
In nearly constant pain, he withdrew to his Milan villa, taking frequent short hot baths, applying gauze soaked in cocaine rectally, and going back to bed, determined to avoid the operation his doctors were pressing on him. He no longer had any illusions about the course of the war, writing Lolli, "I see with the greatest misery that our leaders are lunatics: to push this country into war is a true crime!"
Italy's musical world shared the nation's ambivalence. Toscanini and Leoncavallo were passionate interventionists. Leoncavallo, who was "determined," in Weaver's words, "to become the bard of the holy war, in conscious imitation of Verdi," quickly composed a patriotic opera, Goffredo Mameli. Luigi Illica, too, was an interventionist. Although fifty-eight years old, he set aside his work and left Castell'Arquato, enlisting as a corporal in the artillery.
Although Mascagni had little fondness for the French, who he felt had manipulated Italy into war, and considerable personal affection for Vienna and the Viennese, these feelings paled in comparison to his horror of Italian intervention. Puccini shared Mascagni's sentiments. Although his emotional sympathies may have been with the Central Powers, his opposition to the war itself went far deeper, as he wrote Tito Ricordi early in 1915: "Much as I may be a Germanophile, I have never wanted to show myself publicly for either side, so much do I deplore the way war spreads its torments in the world."
Once Italy had entered the war, Mascagni dutifully supported his country and his two patriotic sons, both eager to take part in the war. Dino planned to sign up immediately, while Mimi wanted to join as soon as he finished his exams at the University of Urbino, to which his father had sent him in the hopes that in that isolated spot he might finally settle down and earn his law degree. Mascagni, as always the doting father, set about smoothing his sons' path into the war. Although still in intense pain, he left Milan immediately for Turin, where Dino, who had opened a motorcycle workshop, sought his help to obtain a coveted spot in an aviation battalion. A week later, after Mimi had finished his exams, he joined them in Turin, seeking to be accepted in an equally competitive automotive battalion. Mascagni went to work lobbying for his sons appointments, offering the army the use of the family sedan and even trying to arrange for Teresio, the Mascagni family chauffeur, to be assigned to the same unit as Mimi.
Mascagni threw himself into the war effort, spending much of his energy organizing and conducting benefit concerts, even putting aside his feelings to share the podium at La Scala in 1916 with the French composer Andre Messager in a benefit for the Franco-Italian League. For all his willingness to devote his time to benefit concerts, Mascagni steadfastly refused to compose patriotic music, prompting criticism both from colleagues and the public. [...] Mascagni did contribute a short work, however, to an album assembled by the Italian Red Cross to benefit the victims of the war.
- - -
Although Mascagni was ready to do his duty as an Italian, he never wavered in his conviction that the war was a tragedy, for humanity in general and for Italy in particular. He voiced his position with unusual clarity in an article entitled "To the Sources of Melody," which he wrote for the weekly Il Mondo in November 1915, explaining his feelings about patriotic music, and the war itself, in thoughtful, even prescient words:
Those who set about writing operas on patriotic subjects are making a mistake ... when the war is over, our disgust over this terrible slaughter will be so overwhelming that no one will want in the least either to hear or speak about those works ... The war is dragging us back centuries. It is making us walk backward on the path of civilization ... When will the most daring social ideas, the achievements of internationalism and socialism, end up? All is drowned, lost.
He then set forth what was to be his artistic credo for the war years, his definition of the music demanded by such terrible times. "The war must carry us back to the music of feeling, to the sources of melody," he wrote. "We have all seen the evolution that has taken place in music during the last years of universal peace. Let us hope that [the war] will lead us back to the simplicity and purity of melody." This credo stands behind Lodoletta, the one opera Mascagni composed during the war years.
- - -
During the first half of 1915, Mascagni's work at the Quirino in Rome, his chronic pain, and the gathering war clouds had occupied his mind and prevented him from thinking about operatic projects.
- - -
While Mascagni may sincerely have felt that he was writing a work that would serve as a corrective to the horrors of the war, he was unable to graft his sincerity onto a libretto in which true feeling and passion - as he accurately divined - were so largely lacking.
[...] the creative integrity of the work remains questionable. There is a quality of recycled goods about Lodoletta, of a willed attempt to capture the faraway spirit of L'Amico Fritz, or even of Iris, another story of an innocent girl lost in the big city.
- - -
With both of his sons at the front, Mascagni lived for weeks in a state of anxiety, not knowing if they were alive or dead. On November 16, 1917 he learned that Mimi was alive but still had no word from Dino, who had been in the heart of the fighting. Finally, on November 29 he learned that Dino was a prisoner of war, in a camp in western Hungary. His son's telegram, in which he begged for clothes and money, sent Mascagni into a frenzy of activity, appealing to the Vatican and sending packets of money everywhere in the hope that one might reach the camp.
Mascagni's concern for his son's fate made his financial worries even more urgent. Offered a lucrative opportunity in Turin, he took it despite the shame he felt. "It’s at a movie theater," he wrote Lolli "it is a beautiful one, grand and elegant, and I know that they are organizing everything very nicely, but is a movie theater just the same. You see how far I have sunk?" For one thousand lire a day, Mascagni conducted Rapsodia Satanica twice daily, the film playing above his head.
- - -
The end of August [1918] found Mascagni in Milan, directing the fall season at the Teatro Lirico, where he remained through October. Rain fell constantly, and the influenza epidemic swept through Milan. Emy fell ill, and at one point ten of the fourteen sopranos in his chorus were out with the disease. To amuse himself, he set Anna Lolli's poem "Bimba Bionda" to music, sitting down at the piano at 3 A.M. on the night of September 19, after his return from the Lirico and a late dinner, writing the song in one sitting, finishing at precisely 7:15 A.M.
Meanwhile, after months of stalemate, the momentum at the front had finally turned in favor of the Italian army. In an offensive that began on October 24, 1918, the army swept the now disorganized Austrian troops before them, crossing the Piave, taking Vittorio Veneto on the thirtieth, and entering Trent and Trieste on November 3. The next day the Austrians and Italians signed an armistice. For Mascagni, Italy's victory meant that Dino would soon be back. Between performances, he rushed to Turin to prepare Dino's apartment for his return, buying him a new Gillette safety razor and putting a score of Lodoletta on his son's piano.
Two weeks later, the bedridden Dino reached Trieste, from which he was taken to a military hospital in Teramo, in the foothills of the Abruzzi mountains. As soon as he had lowered his baton on the last performance of the season, Mascagni rushed to his son's bedside, where Dino threw himself into his father's arms, kissing him and sobbing. After a week with his son, Mascagni was back in Milan, responding to an urgent summons from Renzo Sonzogno.
After a week in Milan, where between stockholders' meetings and sessions with attorneys Mascagni managed to write two more numbers for Si, he rushed back south, this time to Naples, to take charge of the San Carlo opera company for the 1919 carnival season.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDAkIlZyWfw
Enrico Caruso (págs. 101-127)
Meanwhile, Europe was gradually moving toward war. From the beginning, Mascagni was passionately opposed to Italy's involvement, convinced that only if Italy stayed out of the war could his homeland come through without material or moral disaster. At home, too, he found little solace. His relationship with Lina had become cold and distant; as he wrote, "Yesterday I had lunch with Lina... I ate reading, as usual, my newspaper, without speaking a word."
- - -
On April 26 Italy signed the secret Treaty of London, agreeing to intervene on the side of the Entente. Before the end of May, Italy was at war.
During early 1915 Mascagni was largely unaware, like most of his compatriots, of the political maneuvering taking place. After finishing Rapsodia Satanica in February, he returned to Rome, where he had been engaged to conduct a short opera season dedicating the newly rebuilt Quirino Theater.
- - -
At the fourth performance in Florence, Mascagni collapsed in his dressing room after the first act, with a high fever and acute rectal pains. [...] His condition was soon diagnosed as a rectal fissure, known as a rhagades. [...] He had gone from morphine to heroin injections to dull the pain, but even so, he found it difficult merely to stand on the podium. For a man whose health since childhood - except for episodes more emotional than physical - had been nearly perfect, this condition, which would torment him for the next few years, was painfully demoralizing.
By May preparations for intervention were clearly visible. Arriving in Milan, Mascagni was shocked to see signs of mobilization - troops, long lines of trucks and automobiles - everywhere. Frightened and outraged, he tried hard to convince himself that Italy was not about to enter the war, writing Lolli: "The war will not be! It would be Italy's ruin, total, irreversible, eternal ruin! It is not possible that our land lacks one man, just one, capable of opening the eyes of our rulers ... And if [there is war] I will weep forever over my country, destroyed by ... a band of madmen and criminals." War fever had pushed everything else aside, and the tour was disbanded. The entire city, lying in the shadow of the Austrian lines in the Alps, was preparing for war; as he wrote Lolli, Milan "was in a state of total lunatic delirium."
In nearly constant pain, he withdrew to his Milan villa, taking frequent short hot baths, applying gauze soaked in cocaine rectally, and going back to bed, determined to avoid the operation his doctors were pressing on him. He no longer had any illusions about the course of the war, writing Lolli, "I see with the greatest misery that our leaders are lunatics: to push this country into war is a true crime!"
Italy's musical world shared the nation's ambivalence. Toscanini and Leoncavallo were passionate interventionists. Leoncavallo, who was "determined," in Weaver's words, "to become the bard of the holy war, in conscious imitation of Verdi," quickly composed a patriotic opera, Goffredo Mameli. Luigi Illica, too, was an interventionist. Although fifty-eight years old, he set aside his work and left Castell'Arquato, enlisting as a corporal in the artillery.
Although Mascagni had little fondness for the French, who he felt had manipulated Italy into war, and considerable personal affection for Vienna and the Viennese, these feelings paled in comparison to his horror of Italian intervention. Puccini shared Mascagni's sentiments. Although his emotional sympathies may have been with the Central Powers, his opposition to the war itself went far deeper, as he wrote Tito Ricordi early in 1915: "Much as I may be a Germanophile, I have never wanted to show myself publicly for either side, so much do I deplore the way war spreads its torments in the world."
Once Italy had entered the war, Mascagni dutifully supported his country and his two patriotic sons, both eager to take part in the war. Dino planned to sign up immediately, while Mimi wanted to join as soon as he finished his exams at the University of Urbino, to which his father had sent him in the hopes that in that isolated spot he might finally settle down and earn his law degree. Mascagni, as always the doting father, set about smoothing his sons' path into the war. Although still in intense pain, he left Milan immediately for Turin, where Dino, who had opened a motorcycle workshop, sought his help to obtain a coveted spot in an aviation battalion. A week later, after Mimi had finished his exams, he joined them in Turin, seeking to be accepted in an equally competitive automotive battalion. Mascagni went to work lobbying for his sons appointments, offering the army the use of the family sedan and even trying to arrange for Teresio, the Mascagni family chauffeur, to be assigned to the same unit as Mimi.
Mascagni threw himself into the war effort, spending much of his energy organizing and conducting benefit concerts, even putting aside his feelings to share the podium at La Scala in 1916 with the French composer Andre Messager in a benefit for the Franco-Italian League. For all his willingness to devote his time to benefit concerts, Mascagni steadfastly refused to compose patriotic music, prompting criticism both from colleagues and the public. [...] Mascagni did contribute a short work, however, to an album assembled by the Italian Red Cross to benefit the victims of the war.
- - -
Although Mascagni was ready to do his duty as an Italian, he never wavered in his conviction that the war was a tragedy, for humanity in general and for Italy in particular. He voiced his position with unusual clarity in an article entitled "To the Sources of Melody," which he wrote for the weekly Il Mondo in November 1915, explaining his feelings about patriotic music, and the war itself, in thoughtful, even prescient words:
Those who set about writing operas on patriotic subjects are making a mistake ... when the war is over, our disgust over this terrible slaughter will be so overwhelming that no one will want in the least either to hear or speak about those works ... The war is dragging us back centuries. It is making us walk backward on the path of civilization ... When will the most daring social ideas, the achievements of internationalism and socialism, end up? All is drowned, lost.
He then set forth what was to be his artistic credo for the war years, his definition of the music demanded by such terrible times. "The war must carry us back to the music of feeling, to the sources of melody," he wrote. "We have all seen the evolution that has taken place in music during the last years of universal peace. Let us hope that [the war] will lead us back to the simplicity and purity of melody." This credo stands behind Lodoletta, the one opera Mascagni composed during the war years.
- - -
During the first half of 1915, Mascagni's work at the Quirino in Rome, his chronic pain, and the gathering war clouds had occupied his mind and prevented him from thinking about operatic projects.
- - -
While Mascagni may sincerely have felt that he was writing a work that would serve as a corrective to the horrors of the war, he was unable to graft his sincerity onto a libretto in which true feeling and passion - as he accurately divined - were so largely lacking.
[...] the creative integrity of the work remains questionable. There is a quality of recycled goods about Lodoletta, of a willed attempt to capture the faraway spirit of L'Amico Fritz, or even of Iris, another story of an innocent girl lost in the big city.
- - -
With both of his sons at the front, Mascagni lived for weeks in a state of anxiety, not knowing if they were alive or dead. On November 16, 1917 he learned that Mimi was alive but still had no word from Dino, who had been in the heart of the fighting. Finally, on November 29 he learned that Dino was a prisoner of war, in a camp in western Hungary. His son's telegram, in which he begged for clothes and money, sent Mascagni into a frenzy of activity, appealing to the Vatican and sending packets of money everywhere in the hope that one might reach the camp.
Mascagni's concern for his son's fate made his financial worries even more urgent. Offered a lucrative opportunity in Turin, he took it despite the shame he felt. "It’s at a movie theater," he wrote Lolli "it is a beautiful one, grand and elegant, and I know that they are organizing everything very nicely, but is a movie theater just the same. You see how far I have sunk?" For one thousand lire a day, Mascagni conducted Rapsodia Satanica twice daily, the film playing above his head.
- - -
The end of August [1918] found Mascagni in Milan, directing the fall season at the Teatro Lirico, where he remained through October. Rain fell constantly, and the influenza epidemic swept through Milan. Emy fell ill, and at one point ten of the fourteen sopranos in his chorus were out with the disease. To amuse himself, he set Anna Lolli's poem "Bimba Bionda" to music, sitting down at the piano at 3 A.M. on the night of September 19, after his return from the Lirico and a late dinner, writing the song in one sitting, finishing at precisely 7:15 A.M.
Meanwhile, after months of stalemate, the momentum at the front had finally turned in favor of the Italian army. In an offensive that began on October 24, 1918, the army swept the now disorganized Austrian troops before them, crossing the Piave, taking Vittorio Veneto on the thirtieth, and entering Trent and Trieste on November 3. The next day the Austrians and Italians signed an armistice. For Mascagni, Italy's victory meant that Dino would soon be back. Between performances, he rushed to Turin to prepare Dino's apartment for his return, buying him a new Gillette safety razor and putting a score of Lodoletta on his son's piano.
Two weeks later, the bedridden Dino reached Trieste, from which he was taken to a military hospital in Teramo, in the foothills of the Abruzzi mountains. As soon as he had lowered his baton on the last performance of the season, Mascagni rushed to his son's bedside, where Dino threw himself into his father's arms, kissing him and sobbing. After a week with his son, Mascagni was back in Milan, responding to an urgent summons from Renzo Sonzogno.
After a week in Milan, where between stockholders' meetings and sessions with attorneys Mascagni managed to write two more numbers for Si, he rushed back south, this time to Naples, to take charge of the San Carlo opera company for the 1919 carnival season.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDAkIlZyWfw
Enrico Caruso (págs. 101-127)
