LA SCALA OPERA HOUSE
Where many of Verdi’s works had their first performance.
If his mind was more impetuous in the sixth decade of the last century than in the tenth, it was of infinitely finer fiber at the last. When his creative impulses came to wait upon reflection his music showed much nicer adjustment of the poetical and musical elements than had prevailed in his works thitherto, his harmonies became richer, the blatancy of his orchestration disappeared, and his instruments became more beautiful and truthful associates in expression with the singers of the drama than they had ever been. When he reached “Falstaff” and “Otello” the last bit of slag which had vulgarized his earlier works was cast aside, and he stepped forth as full an exemplar of national art as Wagner. In this last incarnation of the Italian spirit he was helped by his collaborator Boito (bo-ee´-to), a poet as well as a composer, and therefore a type of the true dramatic artist as he existed in ancient Greece, and as Wagner conceived him when he projected his Artwork of the Future. It was Verdi’s association with Boito which was largely responsible for the fact that he became the successor as he had been the predecessor of Mascagni (mahs-kahn´-yee).
After the death of Verdi nobody was readier to concede how much he had meant to Italian art than Mascagni, who had been the first to profit by the revolt against Verdi which came with the advent of Wagner’s art in Italy. When “Lohengrin” (lo´-en-grin) made its way into Florence and other places many pupils at the conservatories forsook Verdi and followed Wagner. The effect may have been a good one. There can scarcely be a doubt but that it was to turn his hotheaded young countrymen back to the path which he knew to be the only correct one for them that Verdi made his supreme effort in his last two works. Under the new influence the young Italians had plunged headforemost into realism of the crassest sort, and that they might follow a vulgar bent for lurid expression they went to the Neapolitan slums for their subjects.
PIETRO MASCAGNI
Composer of Cavalleria Rusticana.
RUGGIERO LEONCAVALLO