Cavalleria Rusticana is a canonical work if there ever was such a thing, and has long been in need of the kind of critical edition that Bärenreiter has now published. Partly as a result of the complicated genesis and early performance history of the work, with revisions of different kinds carried out at various stages and numerous discrepancies among sources, Cavalleria Rusticana bristles with anomalies that require an expert editorial hand. It is an obvious choice for inclusion in Bärenreiter’s recently-initiated series Masterpieces of Italian Opera (MIO), first conceived by the late Philip Gossett and now directed by Francesco Izzo and Andreas Giger. A principal (though not exclusive) mission of the series is to produce editions of Italian operas unlikely to receive the complete-works treatment but nevertheless meriting the highest level of scholarly method in view of their historical and artistic significance. The first volume, issued in 2020, was Andreas Giger’s critical edition of Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The term “masterpiece” in the series title may strike some as outmoded, but is a welcome corrective to the condescending attitude which has long attended Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Their early successes with short operas on raw, violent subjects opened a wide rupture in Italy between popular enthusiasm and critical disapproval. They were dismissed by many as vulgar exercises in which unfiltered emotion trounced artistry, and continued to arouse critical contempt during the postwar decades, partly as a result of their popularity during the years of the Fascist regime.Footnote ¹

It is difficult to think of scholars better suited to the task than Andreas Giger and Helen Greenwald, who have produced exemplary critical editions of other Italian operas with complicated histories. Giger here has also been able to draw on his earlier publications that touch on matters directly pertinent to editing Cavalleria, such as the elements of versification and prosody (essential for grasping the creation of the Brindisi and the significance of the lengthy cut section of Alfio’s aria-with-chorus), the interrelations of operatic staging and musical form,Footnote ² and the difficulties that attend the very definition of verismo — the Italian realist literary movement which came to prominence in the last decades of the 19th century — in an operatic context.Footnote ³

The edition is prefaced by detailed observations on the sources, their background, and their limitations. The preface concludes with a wide-ranging section on “problems in editing and performing” the opera, notably the numerous textual discrepancies among the sources. Mascagni’s autograph score is not altogether complete, and for various details the editors must draw on later manuscript and printed sources to arrive at authoritative readings. The alterations that Mascagni made to the score prior to the premiere (several downward transpositions and substantial cuts) are carefully parsed out as to the circumstances which led to them: advice from members of the jury which awarded Cavalleria Rusticana the first prize in the competition in 1889 launched by the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno for a one-act opera, pressure from singers who found the opera vocally demanding, the need to accommodate a substandard chorus, and input from the conductor Leopoldo Mugnone, who directed earliest performances and prepared the first published piano-vocal score. The final item in the appendix is a transcription of the staging manual published by Sonzogno in 1891. The critical commentary is available as a pdf download rather than a published volume.

Several examples will illustrate the careful editorial reasoning behind this edition. Mascagni’s autograph full score indicates that the curtain remains lowered during the entire Preludio, but it doesn’t specify when it should be raised. Other sources differ on this point, with the early printed piano-vocal and orchestral scores indicating bar 10 of the next number (the Introduzione), while both the staging manual and an early manuscript piano-vocal score in Livorno call for the curtain to be raised at bar 1 of the Introduzione. This critical editon, based on compelling evidence that the Livorno manuscript was prepared directly from Mascagni’s autograph piano-vocal score, no longer extant, calls for the curtain to be raised in bar 1. Another detail of the Preludio concerns its most surprising and innovative feature, the harp-accompanied “Siciliana” sung by Turiddu which constitutes its central section. The tenor and the harpist are both invisible to the audience, but where precisely should they be positioned during the Siciliana? The sources are universally in agreement that the tenor should be offstage, but depending on the source, the location of the harpist who accompanies him is either offstage, onstage (but behind the closed curtain), or not indicated to be one way or the other. The editors go with the offstage indication based on an explicit annotation in Mascagni’s autograph score.

At times the editors’ readings can yield results for the audience which are not only audible but revelatory. For too many years opera goers have heard the instrumental passage which opens Santuzza’s “Romanza” Voi lo sapete as beginning with a four-bar oboe solo, played piano, followed by a sudden forte outburst featuring violins and violas playing in a three-octave unison. This forte, however, is found only in the Italian-French orchestral score published by Sonzogno and the Italian-German orchestral score published in Berlin by Bote & Bock. It is correctly overruled by the editors in favor of the passage as given in those piano-vocal reductions directly traceable to Mascagni, in which the dynamic gradations are limited to crescendo and decrescendo markings within an overall pianissimo dynamic for the entire instrumental prelude to Santuzza’s Romanza. A similar surprise is found in the passage beginning at bar 33 of the popular Intermezzo, which in many performances and printed scores rises to a loud climax, while here too the crescendos are kept within an overall piano. The louder reading may be traced to a transcription for piano solo of the Intermezzo which, although autograph, is judged on various grounds to be of dubious authenticity with regard to the date of 1888 written at the top. It was almost certainly written down much later, and it is rejected in favor of the softer dynamic found in more trustworthy sources. At the conclusion of the great soprano-tenor duet, after Turiddu has shoved Santuzza to the ground, we are accustomed to hearing Santuzza furiously hurl her curse a te la mala Pasqua (“an accursed Easter upon you”) in unpitched speech, somewhat in keeping with the “quasi parlato” direction included in a number of readily available printed scores. The MIO edition follows the autograph score, which lacks the “quasi parlato” and clearly establishes that Mascagni wanted the indicated pitches to be sung and not spoken. Indeed, when Mascagni wants an unpitched delivery of text he makes it explicit, whether verbally (he writes the word “parlato” for one brief exchange at the beginning of the same duet) or by not notating pitches at all, as he eventually did at the end of the opera for the nameless female character who cries out that Turiddu has been killed. The editors reproduce the relevant page of the autograph score in facsimile to show Mascagni’s change of heart and definitive decision on this point (lxxviii).

By appending the cut passages in the original keys, the editors have made it possible to perform Cavalleria Rusticana in a way that corresponds to the score that was awarded the first prize in the 1889 competition. It has been known for some time that this version differs from the work which circulated beginning with the 1890 premiere in Rome, thanks to the publication of Mascagni’s lettersFootnote ⁴ and to the scholars who contributed to an important collection of essays and documents in 1964.Footnote ⁵ It was not until several years ago that Giger published a detailed description of the changes which Cavalleria underwent between its submission to the competition and the premiere.Footnote ⁶ The new edition amplifies and concretises in full score much of what an earlier article of Giger’s had described in more general terms and with illustrations limited to brief excerpts in piano-vocal reduction.

Nevertheless the editors are circumspect in their claims about the original version. Far from finding that the uncut version is the only authentic one, Giger and Greenwald accept the cut version as the primary source, and for two principal reasons. One is documentary: although Mascagni initially undertook some of the alterations with reluctance, he never indicated a wish to return to the earlier version after the successful premiere. The other, related reason is aesthetic. The brevity of the work and concentration on the Santuzza-Turiddu-Lola-Alfio quadrangle of the drama, as it swiftly moves to the violent conclusion, have been viewed as both emblematic of verista opera and integral to the appeal of the work. The cuts therefore had positive effects beyond anything that Mascagni could have predicted. In particular, the cut to Alfio’s aria, together with the more limited choral interventions of the shortened version, enhanced certain qualities which contributed to the success of the opera. The editors thus persuasively justify their decision to incorporate the cut version as the primary text.

At the same time, they also advance cautious claims for the original version insofar as it clarifies Mascagni’s intentions at several points, like the rhythmic displacement which makes for such a curious feature of no. 2 (Alfio’s ‘Sortita’) or, perhaps on a more unconscious level, the greater consistency of tonal-dramatic associations if the original keys are retained. Since the longer version and higher keys are likely to receive much interest, it will be well to make several observations on their presentation in Appendix 1. Cuts naturally involve more than the mere removal of bars, just as transpositions entail more than the substitution of one tonality for another in a given passage. They require solutions, such as a rapid modulation not part of the original plan, the suturing of passages on either side of an excision, or adjustments in orchestration. Ideally the edition should enable us to make a direct comparison between the two versions, but this would be prohibitively expensive (a complete edition of the original alongside the revision would easily double the price). Take for example the earliest place in the score where Mascagni made a transposition downwards: bar 11 of no. 3 (the ‘Scena e Preghiera’). In the original version a diminished seventh chord over C-sharp moves to a B-flat triad in first inversion, which causes a fleeting harmonic surprise in a passage which has just passed through F-sharp minor. In the revised version, followed in MIO, the downward transposition which begins at bar 11 replaces the B-flat major chord with an A-flat triad, neither more nor less surprising but certainly different. In the corresponding part of the appendix (pp. 257-264) we find only the score of the first cut passage of no. 3 in the original key. The measures leading up to it are omitted, constraining us to figure out on our own the effect of the original version. This and similar examples point to something slightly misleading on the Bärenreiter website page for the MIO, since the vaunted “original version of Pietro Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ with restored cuts and occasional higher keys” must be calculated in readers’ minds. Presumably, the performance materials available for rent live up to what the website promises.

The detailed reconstruction of the genesis of the libretto and the score, the musical composition, the workings of the Sonzogno competition, and the interventions of singers, members of the jury, and the conductor Leopoldo Mugnone, are admirably sorted out. But one important detail calls for comment. We are told that the two official librettists for the opera, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, ‘worked from the play’, i. e. Giovanni Verga’s theatrical adaptation, first staged in Turin in 1884 with Eleonora Duse as Santuzza, of his 1880 short story Cavalleria Rusticana. It is explained in a footnote that ‘the structure of the libretto and often even the wording follow the play’ (xv)’. That the play served as a source for the libretto is confirmed after a fashion by a phrase on the title page of the autograph score and reproduced without comment in the MIO edition: ‘tratto dalle ‘Scene Popolari’ di Giovanni Verga’ (Verga used the phrase “scene popolari” for the 1884 play but not for either of the two 1880 publications of the short story). But this hardly rules out the possibility that the librettists also consulted Verga’s story. The same footnote cites an article by Targioni-Tozzetti which describes how his collaboration with Menasci proceeded: “For Cavalleria Rusticana we would read together a page of Verga’s drama, although at the same time we also kept an eye on the short story of the same title [my emphasis] […].”Footnote ⁷ Apart from this external evidence, in two important respects the operatic text itself points more decisively to the story than to the play as a source. In adapting his story for the stage Verga added four minor characters, none of which appears in the opera. It is likely that the librettists opted for a shorter list of dramatis personae out of a definite preference for the more modest dimensions of the story. Also pointing to a closer resemblance to the story than to the play is the silence of the opera on the question of Santuzza’s pregnancy. Her conviction that she is banned from attending the Easter service and unworthy of entering Mamma Lucia’s home suggests a desperate urgency to her situation which pregnancy might explain. Verga’s play, by contrast, strongly hints at pregnancy when Santuzza says to Turiddu’s mother “Now that I am in this state…. when my brothers find out they’ll kill me with their own hands!”.

A few other lingering issues of the edition call for comment. The Italian translation of Turiddu’s Siciliana in the Preludio could easily have been included among the numerous variants of the text in Sicilian dialect which are included in the critical commentary. This is not only because the translation was given (along with the Sicilian text) in one of the earliest published libretti, but also because it was sung in performances and recordings by esteemed tenors such as Jussi Björling, and served as the source for early translators incapable of handling the dialect. It thus played a role in the early diffusion of Mascagni’s opera outside of Italy.

The editors take note of tempos and other details as heard in the two recorded performances conducted by Mascagni in 1938 and 1940 respectively. While taking these recorded performances seriously, they also treat them, quite correctly, with a measure of skepticism (the composer was in his mid-seventies at the time). There is one tempo-related oddity, however, that could have used more critical focus. In bar 147 of no. 7 (the refrain of Turiddu’s brindisi, p. 198 of the new edition), the word “viva” is syllabically distributed among two quarter notes [crochets] which are marked “rit.” (for either ritardando or, more likely here, ritenuto), but in Mascagni’s recorded performances, as with nearly all live and recorded performances I have heard, the “rit.” is taken to such an extreme degree as to produce an effect of doubled note values: the single bar of two crochets is perceived as two bars with one minim each — with each of the two perceived minims sung ritenuto. In performance this virtual doubling of durations gives rise to two 4-bar phrases rather than the notated three-bar phrases. This raises the possibility that Mascagni simply notated the durations incorrectly, writing crotchets where he should have written minims. Naturally there are good reasons to hesitate before carrying out re-notation of the passage, but the issue deserves airing in any case.

The preface touches only briefly on the traditional pairing of Cavalleria Rusticana with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, done for the first time in Trieste in 1893. In eschewing further consideration of this lamentable custom, the editors may have strong justification for feeling that their charge was limited to Cavalleria itself, it being beyond their responsibility to explore how or whether it should share the bill with another short opera. But a preface that includes a section headed “Problems in Editing and Performing Cavalleria Rusticana” might have had just a bit more to say about this. Performing the two operas together has become such an entrenched custom that many are unaware of their ever having been done differently. The occasional exceptions — performing Cavalleria Rusticana on its own, as was done for the first three years of its life, or presenting it with Puccini’s Giovanni Schicchi or some other non-Pagliacci work — barely move the needle. The constant repetition of these distinct operas as two halves of the same show does a disservice to both. The MIO edition of Cavalleria permits a solution which its editors do not mention: the uncut version, with its extra ten minutes or so of music, would obviate the need to combine it with another work in order to fill out a program. Then again, Giger’s superlative critical edition of Pagliacci also makes it possible to perform Leoncavallo’s original shorter, one-act version of that opera, and if this were to be paired with the uncut Cavalleria we would still be stuck in the same place. In the meantime, Mascagni’s opera has reached a notably higher platform from which to put forth its already powerful claim on our attention and admiration.