Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana changed the landscape of Italian opera with its première in May of 1890, ushering in the age of operatic verismo. Winning the first prize in the second of the Sonzogno competitions, the opera was received with high enthusiasm and led to Mascagni’s overnight status as a celebrity.Footnote ¹ Speaking of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, Giuseppe Verdi said, ‘he has a very great talent, and has invented a most effective genre: short operas without pointless longueurs’.Footnote ²

Before Cavalleria rusticana, Mascagni had worked in relative obscurity and emerged on the scene at a time when Italian opera was in an apparent crisis, as Andreas Giger writes in the preface to his critical edition of the opera.Footnote ³ Although Verdi had one later success remaining with Falstaff (1893), his star was fading, and he was reluctant to compose anything new following the success of Aida (1871). Giacomo Puccini had begun to find success in the Italian operatic world with Le Villi (1884) and Edgar (1889) but had not yet reached the fame he would achieve by 1896 with La Bohème.

As Mascagni was little known at the time, it was highly unlikely he should have succeeded in winning the prize in the Sonzogno competition. He dropped out of his training at the Milan Conservatory due to a dispute with Antonio Bazzini, the director, and taught music lessons in the town of Cerignola in relative obscurity. By chance, he purchased a copy of the periodical Il secolo on 22 June 1888, and discovered the competition announcement seeking submissions of brand new, unperformed, one act operas.

Mascagni turned to Giovanni Targioni-Tozetti, a childhood friend, to provide the libretto and suggested, first, Nicola Misasi’s Marito e Sacerdote (1883). By mid-December, the two had settled upon Giovanni Verga’s play Cavalleria rusticana, which Mascagni had seen in 1884 and had longed to set ever since.Footnote ⁴ As the deadline for the competition was fast approaching, and Mascagni pleaded for expediency from his collaborator, Targioni-Tozetti selected the poet and lawyer Guido Menasci as his collaborator, with the former writing to the latter, ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to do it in time: and then he badgers me, suffocates me, makes me a martyr.’Footnote ⁵

In Verga’s play, the collaborators chose something that was not just a popular story at the time, but rather an iconic verismo work in Italian literature.Footnote ⁶ There was not much tightening of the plot that had to be accomplished by the librettists, as Verga had completed much of that in the creation of such a tight one act play. Targioni-Tozetti and Menasci sourced much of their libretto directly from Verga’s play, replacing many of the supporting characters with a chorus of villagers. This allowed the librettists to capture much of the same drama present within the source material and for a large amount of choral music to be interwoven throughout the opera.

In Cavalleria rusticana, set in a Sicilian village on Easter morning, the drama unfolds through an intricately woven love triangle that turns tragic: Santuzza, a peasant woman disgraced by her seduction, pleads with her faithless lover Turiddu to return to her, but he has resumed an affair with Lola, now married to the carter Alfio; when Santuzza, in anguish and desperation, reveals the betrayal to Alfio after being rejected by Turiddu, the code of honor demands vengeance, and despite Turiddu’s fleeting repentance – marked by his farewell to his mother Lucia and request for her blessing – the inevitable duel takes place offstage, ending with Turiddu’s death and the shattering cry that closes the opera.

Although Cavalleria rusticana is considered the first verismo opera, Alan Mallach argues that the term was first haphazardly applied due to its source material, but Mascagni’s music enhances the immediacy of the opera, making it feel more direct and unmediated, rather than extending or distancing its event in traditional operatic fashion.Footnote ⁷ In this recording, Thomas Hengelbrock and the Balthasar Neumann Orchestra begin to achieve this feat from the onset of what may be one of the most outstanding recordings of the prelude ever captured. There is a delicate sensitivity from the very first downbow of the first violins that ever so gently expands and contracts before exploding into a jubilant tutti fortissimo, all pulsating and pushing the listener forward into a serene and pastoral Siciliana performed impeccably by Giorgio Berrugi, whose voice blossoms with exquisite longing. Before the Introduzione e Coro, the listener has already been transported into another world, the world Mascagni must have envisioned when setting the libretto of Cavalleria rusticana.

Mascagni’s original vision for the opera that is brought to life through this recording was not as originally performed in 1890. Every number excepting the ‘Preludio’ and the ‘Intermezzo’ suffered alterations by Mascagni prior to the première. There were transpositions, granted at the last-minute request of Gemma Bellincioni and Roberto Stagno, the star performers in the competition’s première. There were also significant cuts. In the liner notes to the recording, Giger notes that Mascagni cut ‘a lot: a total of 247 measures, more than 11% of the entire opera’ (p. 6). These served to quicken the pace of the action and reduce the parts of the ill-prepared chorus. The inadequacy of the chorus plagued Mascagni through the rehearsal process and delayed the première several times. In a letter to his wife on 6 May 1890, he wrote ‘The parts are ready, even the orchestra can be ready by Monday. But it is the chorus that leaves something to be desired’.Footnote ⁸ In a letter two days later he wrote to his wife that he had taken over as the chorus master, holding four rehearsals a day, and that progress had begun to be made. When the opera finally opened, one critic for the Gazetta musicale di Milano wrote that ‘the performance was commendable in every way, except for the chorus, which is the sore point of the Teatro Costanzi’.Footnote ⁹

This altered version of the opera has become part of the standard repertoire, and despite the cuts to the chorus parts, commentators on the work still reference Mascagni and his librettist’s use of the chorus in the action, something we are aware of from the moment the curtain rises until the very end. Much of the action of the opera is propelled through that of the chorus, as it is the dominant feature which is ‘essential to the construction of the intense dramatic tension that … defines Cavalleria’.Footnote ¹⁰ Audiences at the time were not used to the chorus taking such a prominent role in an opera, with one commentator describing it as ‘an almost orgiastic festival, an almost religious rite’.Footnote ¹¹ Had choral parts not been eliminated due to the prevailing inadequacies experienced by the composer and production staff, it may have produced an even greater response.

In this recording, based upon the critical edition prepared by Andreas Giger and Helen M. Greenwald, the choral parts have been restored to their pre-première state, bolstering the composite dramatic character of the townspeople. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Scena, Coro e Brindisi, which has been expanded by almost one hundred bars, from 114 to 203. The entire scene is handled superbly by the Balthasar Neumann Choir and Orchestra, Giorgio Berrugia, Carolina López Moreno, and Eva Zaïcik, under the baton of Thomas Hengelbrock. The control that Hengelbrock exerts over the ensemble is demonstrated clearly in Turiddu’s arietta as the fluctuations of tempo are held exactly in time. The Balthasar Neumann Choir executes this, along with the other choral movements in the opera, with exquisite beauty. Another scene involving the Chorus worth mentioning is the Introduzione e Coro. The high skill of each of the singers in this ensemble is obvious from the onset to navigate these challenging vocal lines with ease. The Balthasar Neumann Choir is not a traditional opera chorus, but rather a chorus whose prowess lies in presenting choral masterworks. The cohesion and balance of each section of voices, as each vocal line is musically feathered, brings a touch of musicality that one is not used to hearing from a run-of-the-mill opera chorus.

While the deficiencies of the chorus forced many cuts in the music of the opera before opening, the ‘cruel tessitura, which required titanic vocal efforts’ of Santuzza and Turiddu, originally sung by Gemma Bellincioni and Roberto Stagno, also forced changes in the music by Mascagni as referenced by Andreas Giger in his liner notes for the recording (p. 7). This led to the transposition of the grand duet down by a half step. In this recording, it has been restored to its original key. Stagno required other movements in the opera to be transposed down by either a half step or a whole step. Mascagni wrote to his wife on May 5, ‘Tonight I’m still up working on the score. Since Stagno transposes two of the pieces down a step, I have had to sweat blood to make these transpositions and then return to the correct key without noticing it. But I have succeeded’.Footnote ¹²

The orchestra acts as its own character throughout the opera and is brought to the forefront, excellently, by the nuanced touches of conductor Hengelbrock. Using original period instruments with gut strings, the Balthasar Neumann Orchestra brings an elegance to this verismo score (p. 39). Their importance is not just relegated to large self-contained passages such as the Intermezzo; their sensitivity to the nuanced delivery of the vocal lines is crucial to the overall musical impact, especially as can be seen in the material that has been restored to the Regina cœli chorus and the intervening solo passages. In the following track, Romanza e Scena, there is such delightful play between the orchestral lines and the almost recitative style passages sung by both Carolina López Moreno and Elisabetta Fiorillo. Fiorillo lends a depth to Lucia that has not been heard in recent years.

Recording a critical edition of an opera is no easy feat and must come with its own challenges, especially a work that is so beloved and ingrained within the psyche of the Italian opera lover as Cavalleria rusticana is. What purpose, then, does a recording of a critical edition serve? It serves to demonstrate the work as the composer had originally intended it to be presented, and in this case, was unable to present, mainly due to the issues of the ill-prepared chorus and the tessitura of the original lead tenor. After the première, no more alterations were made, even though he had agreed to expand Lola’s part in one number. Opera composers throughout history have used key centers in their compositional techniques when laying out schemes for operas, and Cavalleria can be seen in such the same way. The opera begins and ends in F and as Giger concludes in the liner notes, ‘There are clear signs of tonal planning in the original design of Cavalleria rusticana where many of the numbers are rooted in the keys of F or A (whether major or minor.)’ (p. 8). In restoring many of these original keys, Thomas Hengelbrock and Andreas Giger have revived Mascagni’s tonal plan, which to the trained listener is understood more fully with the original key structure of the work.

Preserving works on recording that can be listened to again and again allows us the opportunity to return to them anew and experience them in new ways, and such is the case with this recording. Recorded live over 7–13 November 2022 at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, this recording has a total runtime of just over an hour. Part of the magic in recording a CD lies in the hands of the recording, editing, and sound engineers. In this case, they have all done a splendid job capturing and mixing the audio in such a pristine manner.

In sum, Maestro Hengelbrock has led this impeccable and unrivaled team of artists to a true gem of a recording that should not suffer the fate of just another reference recording but should instead rise to become a pillar in the recordings of Mascagni’s works. Above all, the reinstatement of original key structures and additions of formerly removed measures of orchestral, choral, and soloistic music give the listener a picture of the Cavalleria rusticana which Mascagni initially envisioned and the Sonzogno competition judges had in mind when they selected his work to be a finalist. The Balthasar Neumann Choir and Orchestra with soloists have recorded a true operatic gem which would serve well as the basis for a fully staged production of Giger’s and. Greenwald’s critical edition.