Stamp of the month: August 2020

Pietro Mascagni
The Italian composer Pietro Mascagni was born in Livorno on December 7, 1863. He died in Rome on August 2, 1945. August 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of his death.

Mascagni broke off his music studies with Amilcare Ponchielli because it was too dry for him. Instead he initially joined a traveling opera company and in 1885 he became conductor

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of the municipal orchestra in Cerignola. This engagement left him enough time to compose. For his first major opera “Guglielmo Ratcliff” (1888) he did not find an opera house that wanted to perform the work. In 1889 he took part in an one-act opera competition by the Italian music publisher Sonzogno with “Cavalleria rusticana”. The opera received first prize and when it premiered was one of the greatest successes in music history. Overnight Mascagni became the star of the Italian opera scene and with the royalties for “Cavalleria rusticana” he had no financial worries until the end of his life. He composed several other operas that were highly valued by connoisseurs and he also was able to premiere “Guglielmo Ratcliff” with great success in 1895, but for the general public and posterity “Cavalleria rusticana” remained the composer’s unreached stroke of a genius.
Alongside Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni is one of the most important representatives of verismo.

The video shows the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Valery Gergiev with the intermezzo from the opera “Cavalleria rusticana”, recorded at a concert during the Wiener Festwochen in the garden of Schönbrunn Palace.