Utilisateur:Mazeppa/Brouillons

Zanetto

Zanetto is an opera in one act by Pietro Mascagni to an italian libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci based on the one act comedy in verse Le passant by François Coppée. Its first performance was at the Liceo musicale Rossini of Pesaro on 2 March 1896. Zanetto is often performed - or recorded in cd - together with an other opera in one act by Mascagni, Cavalleria Rusticana. The atmosphere of the Florentine Renaissance in which the work is located is suggested by the composer by reminiscences of madrigals, villotta and stornelli.

Zanetto is not considered as one of the best work of Mascagni who, reduced by a decade of intense activity, was attract by a subject - the comedy of Coppée, brought on the stage for the first time in Paris in 1869 with Sarah Bernhardt and translated three years later in verse martelliani by Emilio Praga - certainly not among the most malleable.

At the first, Zanetto puzzles the official criticism and only the writer Ugo Ojetti come down in favour of the opera arguing that it is the most personnal work ever composed by Mascagni. A benefit of which lay, in any case, the desire to get closer, with Zanetto, to a subject near of a culture and literature very popular at the time, an expectation probably not compatible with a booklet which does not contain, by all accounts, potentially high inspiration for the Tuscan composer.

A beneficio del quale depone, in ogni caso, il desiderio di avvicinarsi, appunto con Zanetto, a temi vicini ad una cultura e ad una letteratura al tempo assai in auge, una aspettativa probabilmente non premiata dal testo restituito in lingua italiana che - a parere di molti - non contiene elementi che potessero suscitare nel compositore toscano elevate punte ispirative.

Une attente probablement pas compatible avec un livret, qui aux dire de beaucoup, ne contient pas d'éléments pouvant susciter une inspiration élevée de la part du compositeur toscan.

Chatterton

Chatterton a dramma lirico or opera in 3 acts (4 acts in its original 1876 version) by Ruggiero Leoncavallo. The libretto was written by the composer himself and is freely adapted of the life of the young English poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770). Considered by the romantics as the perfect archetype of the accursed poet, Chatterton became famous for his brillant pastiches of medieval poetry that he attributed to a imaginary 15th century monk, Thomas Rowley. At the age of 18, to escape misery, he commits suicide. The plot of the opera is based on the Alfred de Vigny's Chatterton (1835), a succesful drama in 3 acts derived from the second of the three short stories of his philosophical novel Stello (1832). Chatterton, composed in 1876, is the first opera of a young Leoncavallo freshly graduated from the Naples conservatory. However, the composer fails in his attempt to make his work represented when the planned performance's promoter disappered with Leoncavallo's money shorty before the premiere. Leoncavallo will have to wait the success of his Pagliacci (1892) to gain the opportunity of seeing Chatterton produced. The opera was finally created on March 10, 1896 at the Teatro Drammatico Nazionale, Rome in a revised version of the original 4 acts opera. The work was not succesful even after another revision (1905). Today, Chatterton is rarely performed.

The central character of the opera is the English genius Thomas Chatterton, author of poems published under the name of Thomas Rowley, an who eventually commits suicide.

Roles

Role	Voice type	Premiere Cast, March 10 1896 (Conductor: Vittorio Podesti)
Chatterton	tenor	Benedetto Lucignani
Caterina Bell	soprano	Adalgisa Gabbi
Giovanni Bell	bass	Raffaele Terzi
Giorgio	baritone	Giuseppe Cremona
Skirner	baritone	Aristide Anceschi
Lord Beckford	bass
Lord Talbot	alto	Cremona

Synopsis

Vigny transpose les faits historiques en plaçant son héros comme pensionnaire dans un milieu fortuné, et en le mettant dans la situation, ne pouvant vivre de sa plume, de rechercher un emploi pour assurer sa subsistance. C'est un emploi de domestique qui lui est offert... L'autre aspect de la situation est son amour contrarié, dissimulé, pour Kitty Bell, l'épouse de l'industriel chez qui il est locataire. Dans la meilleure tradition du drame romantique, Chatterton se suicide par dépit, cet amour impossible s'ajoutant à cette offre d'emploi considérée comme méprisante. L'ami de Chatterton est un quaker.