Pietro Mascagni News
Italian composer known for operas (1863–1945)
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Pietro Mascagni)
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- Kingdom of Italy
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2024-03-16
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2024-03-15 12:00:00
Mike Wheeler reviews Opera North's Mascagni/Rachmaninov double bill
2024-02-18 15:34:10
Grand theatre, LeedsSetting Mascagni’s one-act opera amid the unease of 70s communist Poland, and moving Rachmaninoff’s to a colourful 90s surfing commune, the company does them both delectable justiceOpera North’s Cavalleria Rusticana was designed to be detachable: it premiered as part of the company’s 2017 Little Greats season, appearing alongside a variety of fellow one-act operas rather than just the customary Pagliacci. For this season’s outing, however, director Karolina Sofulak has coupled it only with Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, in which another insular society (this time a bohemian commune) is fractured by a love triangle turned fatal. Sofulak goes further still, explicitly linking the two operas by conceiving Aleko and Cavalleria’s Alfio as the same man, 20 years apart, and haunted – in every sense – by a crime he is doomed to repeat.Both stagings shift the action of their operas significantly: Cavalleria Rusticana trades sun-kissed Sicily for 1970s communist Poland, and Aleko’s […]
2024-02-13 08:15:00
Pierre Loti's writings inspired Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé and a whole genre of Orientalist operas
Loti (right) with Chrysanthème and Pierre le Cor in Japan, 1885.Pierre Loti has a lot to answer for. Whilst he certainly did not invent Orientalisme, his exotic novels and short stories, inspired by his travels as a French naval office, fed into the Western European fascinating for the perceived exoticism of life in the East, and gave rise to a whole operatic genre. His 1880 book, Le Mariage de Loti (about his romantic liaison with an exotic Tahitian girl), inspired both the 1883 opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes, and an 1898 opera by Reynaldo Hahn, L'île du rêve.His 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème (about a naval officer temporarily married to a Japanese woman while he was stationed in Nagasaki, Japan) would be one of the inspirations behind André Messager's 1893 opera of the same name, Mascagni's Iris (1898) and Puccini's Madama Butterfly (1904). The fashion for things Japanese, Japonisme, had developed from the mid-1850s with opening up of Japan, […]
2024-01-12 11:00:06
On this day in 1912 Pietro Mascagni and Giovacchino Forzano’s Lodoletta had its United States premiere at the Metropolitan.
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