Rapsodia Satanica / Cavalleria Rusticana | Comunale Nouveau

From Saturday 21 to Sunday 29 March, at the Teatro Comunale Nouveau in Bologna, Rapsodia Satanica / Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni will be staged.

Mascagni was a curious man. After drawing inspiration from contemporary literature for his debut opera (Cavalleria rusticana, based on Verga), he never ceased to explore new paths in his later works, even though he would never again achieve the extraordinary and enduring success of that 1890 premiere. He became interested in cinema, and in 1917—among the pioneers of the genre—composed the score for Rapsodia satanica by Nino Oxilia.
Within the nineteenth-century operatic tradition, the essential ingredients of the drama in Cavalleria Rusticana are hardly uncommon: two women (Santuzza and Lola) love the same man (Turiddu), and the jealousy of the betrayed (Santuzza and Alfio, Lola’s husband) leads to a fatal outcome. What changes—as in Verga—is the manner of narration, the language: recognizable, expansive, ardent melodies; primal, visceral emotions entrusted to characters from the people.
The film starring diva Lyda Borelli is of an entirely different nature: D’Annunzian poetics, a Faustian subject, eros and thanatos, and a highly sophisticated Art Nouveau aesthetic. In short, we are at the opposite pole of the positivism from which the verismo movement emerged; here truth, popular culture, and rationality are rejected with aristocratic disdain. Yet Mascagni’s curious and versatile spirit successfully embraced this challenge, placing at the service of the camera not only his gift for immediate and communicative thematic invention, not only the decadent flourishes already explored in his operas, but also his ability to transform operatic language into cinematic language—and vice versa.