Roistering Nights

Like the brief exciting taps with which a conductor, baton against score-stand, commands attention for solemn music, certain items rat-tatted in the press last week as follows:

Pietro Mascagni sailed for the U. S.

Roman music lovers saw in a sudden rapid shifting of Italian orchestra directors the coordinating influence of Mussolini from whose dictation not even Italian artists are exempt. Arturo Toscanini, for years illustriously inseparable from La Scala in Milan, will reputedly conduct this winter at Costanza Opera in Rome. At La Scala it is whispered that the baton of Bernardino Molinari will flicker. Neapolitans, devotees of the famed San Carlos Opera will hail as their chief conductor, this winter, Tullio Serafin, long a brilliant conductor for the Metropolitan Opera of Manhattan. Pietro Mascagni will go to the Augustep, chief concert hall of Romans, it is said.

The villa, at Torre del Lago, of the late Giacomo Puccini, composer, will be made into a national museum at the government's expense: 15,000 lire.

Fortune Gallo, manager of the San Carlo Opera Company in the U. S., postponed the opening of his Manhattan season for a week so that Pietro Mascagni could attend.

Pietro Mascagni will conduct, for the first time in the U. S., his opera, II Piccolo Marat.

Such taps as these awoke echoes; the very names were pregnant as the curtain of an opera house with musical memories. One. thought of Puccini dying alone in a Brussels hotel while Boheme was being played in Manhattan and a critic there was writing, "Wherever a fiddle scrapes, his songs are heard. . . ." Of Maestro Fortune Gallo shouting, "I tell you my name is Fortune. . . . I tell you opera will pay. . . ." Of Signer Serafin imposing his electricity on the wavering scores of Metropolitan experiments. ... Of Toscanini throwing down his cello in the Opera House in Rio de Janeiro one night in 1886 to conduct Aida by heart and win fame thereby. . . . But most of all, since his name occurred most often, one thought of Pietro Mascagni, and the curious stories that are told about this baker's son, whose life has been a wail redeemed by a wow.

Composer Mascagni once had himself photographed with a deck of cards in his ringed hands and a large cigar protruding from a smirk. The waggish, swaggering air of the picture pleased him immensely, and whenever a lady asked him for a likeness this was the one he gave her, signed, in all cases, with love, Pietro Mascagni. It is not difficult to see why he liked this photograph; in it he saw himself for the first time as what he had always wanted to be--a gambler.

Short, thick, with a curly nose and an eye like a new horsechestnut; coarse-mouthed and lyric-handed, a good hater, a bad lover, a composer who made his reputation as another man would make his point in a dice game, Pietro Mascagni. It was in Leghorn, Italy, that his father baked bread, but the rumor that Pietro helped in the family trade has never been verified. Indeed, the boy Mascagni refused from the first to soil his hands with flour; he seemed to have an illimitable capacity for roistering, in reward for which, when he was sixteen, his father propelled him into the gutter of Leghorn and locked the bakery door.

He picked himself up and dusted his breeches, whistling "La donna e mobile," from Rigoletto. For a long time now he had been whistling songs and singing them; writing music, even, on the sly. His father would have none of it--would lock him into his room--but his uncle, an odd old penny, liked the tunes he made. To his uncle he went now and explained matters. His uncle helped him. And when his uncle died a certain Count Florestan gave him in charge of Ponchielli, "foster-father," as he is called, "of the veritist school." He fought with the Count, he fought with his teacher, and in two years he found himself married to a not unusually pretty girl, and very hungry, sitting in the gutter of the Rue Gilber, Rome.

Macaroni was his meal that day. And for many months thereafter macaroni was his meal--one dish of it a day. Hunger breeds, sometimes, a sort of fever in the head, and through the sputter of his wits Pietro Mascagni could hear drums running and a cello pleading; the horns swept in, a dying fall. What was that music? Pietro Mascagni thought and thought about it while, for five years, he wandered over Italy, conducting in one cheap opera house after another. At last he began to write some of the tunes down; then friends of his persuaded Torgioni- Tozzetti to write a libretto; a Roman impressario produced the opera. It was Cavalleria Rusticana. It was a wow.

Next morning Pietro Mascagni was the hero of Rome. In a week he was the hero of Italy. Three managers sued each other for the right to bring out Cavalleria first in the U. S. For several years it had more performances than all the operas of Wagner put together. In 1902, Pietro Mascagni took an opera company to the U. S. to perform his own works exclusively and a concert manager got him a contract that called for $4,000 a week. He was appointed director of the Conservatory of Music at Pesaro. He fought with his concert manager. He fought with the trustees of the Conservatory. He wrote Iris, Zanetto. But he had had one wow. He could not repeat it.

This bloody little opera, dealing with the efforts of a Sicilian peasant girl to marry her seducer on an Easter Sunday morning, is as musically naive as the Floradora Sextette. Hotel orchestras play, endlessly, the Intermezzo; vaudeville tenors can always get a hand with the Ave Maria and there is, of course, the Siciliana. Critics care no longer for Cavalleria Rusticana. But when Cavalleria Rusticana is given at the Metropolitan the galleries and every foot of standing room are filled with the curly noses and glossy eyes of thousands of thick-set Mascagnis who, employed by day with razors or napkins or boot-rags, pay down their money to hear the violins rise like a wave under the arc of a tenor voice; and then, as the horns burn darkly down, sophisticates feel, along their spines, a curious and degrading prickle that is their tribute to what Pietro Mascagni, a baker's son, remembered of certain roistering nights in Ligarno, Italy.

Composer Mascagni believes that all his operas are as good, if not better, than Cavalleria, Rusticana. II Piccolo Marat, for instance, which has been given in Rome and Buenos Aires though never in Manhattan, is a far neater piece of construction; four interweaving orchestral tones, built on four connected themes, knit the score to- gether; the scene is Nantes during the Terror, the villain, one Orso, a guillotining cockaded butcher, the heroine is his daughter, the hero, a nobleman so pure that he is called "The Little Marat." What more could one ask? And yet Pietro Mascagni, now walking a ship's deck, has but one wow.