WORKS
THE STRAUSS CASE
DISCOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHOTOGALLERY
NEWS
WHO WE ARE
EVENTS
CONTACTS
PRESS RELEASE
ACT THREE - From Cassandra to Judith: a live spent to emerge again
Ricordi Publisher
Ricordi Publishing House was for Vittorio Gnecchi always a source of illusion and subsequent delusions.
Gnecchi Family was always a shareholder of the Publishing House (and it remained such until the end of the ninetieth century , when Ricordi was sold to the German company Bertelsmann; and moreover, recent directors were Vittorio’s nephew, Piero and then the grandnephew Stefano Gnecchi Ruscone).
Nevertheless the publishers, first Giulio then Tito, showed themselves always indifferent, if not hostile, towards Gnecchi’s art. If one thinks of the nice words written by Giulio Ricordi on the occasion of the first night of “Virtù d’Amore” , it is surprising to learn about the little enthusiasm shown in liquidating Cassandra at its first piano audition : “Dear Vittorio, you understand very well that it will never be possible to stage in any big theatre this dilettante essay of yours. At the most you can stage it in your Verederio little Theatre, inviting your friends”. Afterwards, though, he changed his mind and published Cassandra score, probably upon learning that Toscanini was going to conduct the Opera in Bologna.
On this point it is necessary to make a short note on Cassandra edition.
It happened that a very influent friend managed to make Ricordi Publishing House accept the “gift” of the opera score , of the libretto and of all the material necessary for its performance in six theatres.
Luckily Gnecchi added the clause that if the Opera was not going to be performed within five years in a certain number of theatres, the property of the same would have returned to him.
And he had made the right forecast, since in those five years Cassandra slept “a deep sleep”, and therefore the author had back his property “very dusted”: Ricordi will publish also other Gnecchi operas, although the relations between the composer and the publisher remained always so stormy to compel the composer to terminate every contract.
The middle opera: La Rosiera
Gnecchi answered to such hostility with a totally new opera, both for intents and for artistic results.
Actually, he put aside the dramatic austerity of the Greeks tragedies to turn to those “subjects of sentimental easiness “ and those “effects of dramatic force ( quand meme)” that his friend Illica had advised him to avoid. And so, already in 1909, the year of the fatidic article of Tebaldini , Vittorio Gnecchi had completed, after more than two years of work, the composition of “La Rosiera”, tragic romance in three acts on libretto of Carlo Zangarini (with many interventions of Gnecchi same) taken from the theatrical opera “On ne badine pas avec l’amour” of Alfred de Musset.
The case was that in that same period, Gabriel Pierné composed another small opera based on the same text, presented for the first time at the Opera Comique in the month of May 1910, encountering more fortune than Gnecchi.
In 1910, as a matter of fact, the opera had already been published , but Rosiera would have been silent for almost twenty years, suffering the same ostracism that prevented Gnecchi to perform his music in his homeland. Rosiera, although anticipated by some staccato pieces performed by Hildebrand in Berlin in 1923 and by Schneevoigt in Paris in January 1927, will be staged for the first time only on the 16th of February 1927 at the ReuBisches Theatre of Gera, conducted by Richard Meyer.
It was a triumph with twenty - two curtain calls and the offering of many laurel wreaths.
It was Trieste Municipal Theatre “Giuseppe Verdi” (the most Middle-European city of Italy) the first to open the doors to Gnecchi’s “La Rosiera” , including it in the playbill of the season 1930-31 and granting a real national artistic event.
On the pages of the review “ Musicisti d’Italia” (Italian Musicians) , already in November 1930, it was possible to read: “La Rosiera first night , for which the intervention of the critics of the most important Italian newspapers is expected, is destined to become a fact of primary artistic importance not only for Trieste but for the whole Italian music world , since the verdict of the public and the critics will establish if the Italian ostracism towards this opera, that lasted for twenty years was right and justified and if the report on the success overseas are a bluff , as it seems up to now” .
As a matter of fact, the news aroused a wide an renewed interest in the Italian– and not only – music world, persuading many critics to reopen the “Gnecchi case” .
Innumerable newspapers gave wide space to the case, culminating in a conference titled “Rosiera and the Gnecchi case”, held at the hall of the Tarantini Conservatoire on the 23rd of January 1931 by Mario Nordio, who was then editor-in-chief of Trieste’s newspaper “Il Piccolo”; later on the conference was published in the pages of the “Nuova Italia Musicale”, where there was a summary of all the unfortunate vicissitudes of Milan composer.
With enormous success, the Rosiera was staged on the 25th of January 1931, conducted by Giuseppe Baroni and interpreted by C. Togliani (Salency). P.Menescaldi (Perdicano) , A.Clinova (Camilla), A. Oltrabella (Rosetta). “Since the first staging, dated 1919, of “Francesca da Rimini” the public of the Verdi Theatre had never cheered with such clamour as last night”, it was possible to read in the “Piccolo della Sera”.