Pietro Mascagni’s second opera, “L’amico Fritz”, is nowhere as popular as his first, “Cavalleria Rusticana”, and is thought far inferior, a light romantic comedy, whereas the first was the founding work of the “verismo” style. “L’amico Fritz”, though, is in fact much darker. The prior opera was a straightforward revenge story lifted into the permanent international repertoire by the lyricism of long orchestral passages which supply “background music” for the stage evocation of a peasant culture. That foreshadowed a life long operatic style in which Mascagni primarily used music as a way to provide a setting for and comment on dramatic action rather than as a way to provide musical enhancement for dialogue.
The best way to understand what is happening in Mascagni’s operas, however, is to consult the history of both operatic and non-operatic drama. Bourgeois marriage as an ideal had been at the heart of the operatic enterprise since Mozart, at least. The union of two spirits who have freely chosen to give their souls to one another is a relationship that is regarded as superior to aristocratic marriage, where feeling is constrained by social obligations. The change from one form of marriage to the other implies a great deal about the ordering of the castes and classes of the two kinds of societies in which they are found. A truly revolutionary transformation is going on that will replace the world of one with the world of the other, however much our standard history courses place more emphasis on the age of democratic revolution and the industrial revolution than on the family revolution for having ushered in the now recognizable world of cities, factories and nation-states. The nuclear family becomes the basic unit of social organization; it is the place people pool economic, social and emotional ties and interests. That family revolution, traced by sociologists such as William Goode and historians such as Lawrence Stone, can be documented in Eighteenth Century French novels, such as “Liaisons Dangereuse”, which concerns how aristocratic motives turn rancid, and Eighteenth Century English novels, such as “Pamela”, which shows how a servant girl changes from being an object to a person first worthy of lust and then of love.
The emotional privacy that is to be ascribed to the new family unit is most complexly revealed, both as an intellectual matter and an emotional matter, by the Mozart triptych, “Don Giovanni”, “Cosi Fan Tutti” and “The Marriage of Figaro”. Kierkegaard, in his comments on the first of these was more concerned with the emptiness of Don Giovanni’s soul than with his crassness becoming supplanted by a world of finer feeling, as that event is represented by the thunder clap that occurs when the statue comes to life. Mozart knew he was at the start of a new dispensation or at least a new turn on the old one and so it warranted being symbolized by a supernatural event rather than a merely magical action. The abruptness of the tragic unfolding is not too much, given that it was foreshadowed by a long series of escapades whereby Don Giovanni graduates from being perceived as merely a cad to being recognized as a monster. “The Magic Flute” can, of course, be added to the set, in that each of two couples meet, are separated, and unite again after having overcome adversity (nobly, in the one case, comically in the other). The opera contains too much busy work if you take account only of its religious aspects.
By the time one arrives in the late Nineteenth Century, however, the artistic perception of the meaning of love and marriage is different. The issue to find a way to unite love and marriage rather than to treat lust as a strain upon marriages when the marriage is other than one between two perfectly matched, star crossed lovers, that special case, of course, the premise upon which most Nineteenth Century opera rests. If love is perfect, then threats to it are external. So much for Verdi, who seems to have learned little from Shakespeare about love, much less from the Brontes, who always saw love as a tie that bound together people who were disagreeable to one another as well as to the other people in their lives. How else explain the insipid feelings in “Lucia” or so many others of Verdi’s works, the lovers full of passion and very little insight into themselves or those they love? It is as if passion renders people dumb in that their voices crowd out their minds.
Shaw is one of those who take a fresher look at love, trying to puzzle out what makes lovers equal rather than merely individual in that they have defined themselves as a tidy bundle that lives separate from though engaged in the world around them, as is the case with Figaro and Susanna, who have to work assiduously to maintain their private lives amidst a count’s household that serves as an image of society at large. Shaw makes his woman fit companions for men by making them prickly, though I think he goes a bit too far in the other direction, Major Barbara just too overshadowing a figure for her boyfriend who literally holds her coat for her during her various verbal duels with Undershaft, and Professor Higgins, I think, is a bit too fey to be believable as the one who can answer Eliza’s tongue in kind when he confronts her at her mother’s house and tells her that he now knows he has truly transformed her, that she is a grown up person. He could hardly marry her; as a transformed Covent Garden flower girl, she is more daughter or ward then she is marriage material. It would have made more sense for him to have at one of the maids. The new dispensation is clear in a great many places in Wilde, one of the most profound being that Ernest has to become an entirely different person, namely himself, if he is to win his beloved’s hand; a caprice gets to the heart of the matter.
Now turn to “L’amico Fritz”. The path to marriage seems insurmountable to the title character, even though there are many charming and available girls all around. That is just the opposite of the situation in Jane Austen, where few suitable mates cross the path of somewhat sheltered girls. What is the flaw in this premised situation? It takes a while--indeed, the whole opera--for that to unravel. The amiable friends sitting with Fritz at the beginning of the opera accept him as a lifelong bachelor who refuses the entanglements of marriage. That is itself suspicious. They are like the friends of the widower in Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tangueray”, first staged in London in 1893, who will disappear once they find that their friend has not only taken up with but married a woman of bad reputation. The title character kills herself at the end of the play so as to spare Tangueray’s daughter her coarsening influence. That reveals the melodramatic theme that she is not such a bad sort after all and that maybe her husband should have not been so critical of her. It also reveals the theme that love can not overcome a bad reputation, which is a tragic theme because there is in any time some form of bad reputation. Otherwise why is Marilyn Monroe now limned as a tragic figure? It was not just that she had many men; it was that life was too difficult to manage for someone so open to men.
Pinero exhibited Victorian concerns, however much he was reflecting on those concerns. Mascagni, whose “L’amico Fritz” was first produced in that same year, 1893, wants to twist things differently, and come out in favor of sexual liberation, for there is no other way but sexual repression to explain why making a marriage is so difficult. Marriage requires sexual congress with an equal, rather than with a peasant or prostitute used for the occasion. Mascagni is ushering in the age of Freud and “La Ronde”. The problem of the uniting of two equal who are individuals is complicated by having to deal with the fact that they are male and female, and not just buddies, that the union is physical not just spiritual. Women are everywhere, but the question is what to make of them, and that gives a pause to the transformation of good manners and amiability into love.
We are re-fighting the Mozartean struggle in a way Mozart would fully understand. There is something wrong in being a bachelor; it cuts you off from the normal range of feelings. So he is advised by his friend Rabbi David who plays matchmaker, trying to induce Fritz to consider the young peasant girl who has come to share the spring harvest, an image if there ever was one of natural fecundity. Fritz’ rejection of David’s counsel is so overheated and, as the psychologists would say, so inappropriate, that it suggests there is something amiss with Fritz’ emotions. He is not so settled in his bachelor life that he can meet with good humor being teased about it.
That David is a rabbi is usually taken to be the result of Mascagni having placed his pastoral in a remote Alsacean village, sort of like one of Shakespeare’s comedies that are set in an Italian city, which simply means somewhere else that is far and strange. A better explanation is that David had to be a rabbi who could counsel his friend to be fruitful and multiply as a biblical injunction and so having the full authority of religion. A modern Catholic priest might say that chastity was a singular but not the only way to be sexually virtuous, the rest of humanity serving God by having children, but a less than modern priest could not but help stand as an image of the greatest gift to God being the control of human desire. Fritz would therefore not stand out as being so abnormal if his shortcoming were pointed out by a priest rather than a rabbi.
There is a climatic scene in the second act when Fritz declares his love for Suzel, the peasant girl. The music is charming and touching and yet far more than the background for a long delayed declaration of love, the punctuation supplied for a courtship scene. Rather, whether Fritz, so long repressed, will be able to declare his love remains problematic. He is led up to it by the business of eating cherries out of her lap, another rather obvious sexual image. The music dramatizes the way he is torn between his uprightness (after all, she is younger and of a different class) and a love that is conjoined with an awakening lust, the two not couched as in apposition. The notes and certainly the melody suggest his being uncertain, going through conflicting emotions that are very different from the ones dramatized by Wagner when he has his characters poise between and eventually chose to commingle feelings of love with a yearning for death. No heaviness for Mascagni, only the lightness of charm winning out over rigidity. Now this might seem to us today a not very urgent or difficult theme, but so it would seem at the turn of the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century, one not easily accepted by a still Victorian audience. Moreover, it is worked out so delicately, the music and the business and the words working so well to move along the scene, that I, for one, would very much like to see the scene staged, it available to me now only in a recording. That combination of all its resources at once is, after all, what opera is supposed to be about, not just an occasion to listen to great singing, never mind the plot or anything else.
In his “Opera as Drama”, Joseph Kerman regarded music as a way to fulfill drama, rather than the drama a pretext for the music. Kerman thought it did this in a number of ways. It establishes or subverts a character; it generates or nullifies an action; it establishes a world. Mascagni is notable for using music primarily for the second and third of these. A decision to declare love is forged out of the give and take of possibilities available to Fritz as those are represented and resolved by the music, just as the warmth of a pre-Protestant, Nietzchean culture is captured in the music as an object to contemplate. Opera captures a moment, freezes it, contemplates it, elongates it, elaborates it, time stopped this way at any number of places as an opera goes static, which is a negative way to say that it raises a moment to an ever extendable duration so that one can appreciate the dynamics of that moment, the complex intersection of forces present at that moment, through the tone and the dynamics of the music that accompanies it, the layers of meaning laid out in the harmonies heard and those about to be established while the dramatic moment continues.
Mascagni’s opera “Iris”, which is set in Japan, is even less well known than is “L’amico Fritz”. “Iris” uses its music, for the most part, in those two ways. “Iris” is the story of a well brought up but simple girl who is kidnapped so that she can become the mistress of a man from the city. She will not submit to her circumstances and so dies trying to escape. This simple, legendary sort of tale, reminiscent of Chaucer’s exemplary tales of people far too rigid in their goodness, is elaborated by music that speaks of a culture very different from those found in the West. Japanese culture mixes legend and fact and a preoccupation with the physical properties of things, whether stones or sky or weather, and so fixes that culture as an object for contemplation. The opera also uses the music to propel and elongate the action in a particularly Japanese way. Iris, the title character, is attracted by a puppet show and the dance that follows that has been set for her as a trap. She becomes enmeshed with those, caught between screens or silks, depending on which a stage designer would choose to use, and so becomes part of the puppet show and dance, thereby available to be kidnapped by those who contrived this plot. So, again, the opera cries out for production because what it has to offer cannot be caught by a recording—or, indeed, by a movie, in that the use of screens or their equivalent is a device of dramatic stagecraft that is here used as a symbol as well as the actual mechanism for accomplishing Iris’ departure from one world to another.
There are many touching bits of poetry sung by Iris. In the second act, her kidnapper having revealed himself to her, she falls into a long aria that includes:
A little girl lay sprawled upon the and,
Her limbs no more than skin and bone,
Her hair no more than scattered, dirty clumps,
And on her lips there was a smile,
A spasm.
Upon this endless, trackless, lifeless sea,
An eight-armed monster reared its awful head…
And opening wide her peering eyes,
The little girl was overwhelmed
To witness such a terrifying sight
And stared, transfixed ahead!
The monster is a symbol of what her kidnapper has identified as his nature, “Pleasure”. The importance of the aria is that it illustrates that Japanese culture is insular in that it does not have to make use of Western images or notions to express its feelings, however much modesty and shame are found in every culture. Universal emotions become both fresh and plausible when they are seen through a Japanese mentality as that is represented to a Western audience through Mascagni’s poetic and musical styles. Mascagni is working an Eastern rather than a Western theme, this time, even if “L’amico Fritz” had been expressly devoted to cutting edge issues about the Western family. Mascagni’s operas are different from one another.
“Iris” is therefore far more interesting than “Madame Butterfly”. Puccini simply borrowed his idea of opera from Verdi. Both of them tell stories of romantic betrayal whose emotions are always the same, whether set in Japan or ancient Egypt or medieval Italy or some other exotic setting with music that is fully that of Italian opera, while Mascagni allows for different emotions, a different sense of the world, even a different metaphysic, while adopting to his music the devices and the instruments of that other place.
Later versions of Japanois are no more successful than Puccini, at least if one looks to the artistic scope of the project rather than to whether a narrow design has been successfully accomplished. Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures”, for example, sounds like Sondheim, while Mascagni sounds in “Iris” differently than he does in the two other of the three operas that are available in America on recordings. “Pacific Overtures” also has the political cynicism typical of the American musical. All the characters have their self-interested motives and the overall theme, after all, is how the Japanese perceive the arrival of the Americans and how they cope with it out of their own cultural resources. Mascagni does not make use of a hook story, like those of explorers moving either East or West, that leads us into some strange other culture. He tells the story from the inside of the insular culture, allowing it to manifest itself in its own concerns, how a woman is turned bad and gains her own sort of triumph, through its own forms of expression, such as a pagan appreciation of nature, a psychology based on moods found in nature, and the dumb play whereby both fears and temptations turn into reality.
The reason, then, for the reluctance to produce Mascagni’s operas lies not in his deficient taste in librettos, nor in his supposed Fascist leaning, The reason, I think, is that his librettos were too complex. That is a difficult charge to sustain because, after all, Strauss was working with difficult libretti, even if Puccini wasn’t. The difference, I think, is that you can read most Nineteenth opera texts more simply. “Tosca” can be simplified into the story of a woman from whom sex is extorted, rather than the story of a woman who is like Hedda Gabler in that she cannot distinguish her stage presence from her own feelings. Certainly Verdi plots are almost always a version of Dryden’s “All For Love”. That is not true of Mascagni; he has to be well understood to be understood or appreciated at all. And since music critics do not have an ear for drama, they find him appalling rather than deep and delightful both at the same time.