L'amico Fritz
| Work data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Friend Fritz |
| Original title: | L'amico Fritz |
Title page of the piano reduction |
|
| Original language: | Italian |
| Music: | Pietro Mascagni |
| Libretto : | Daspuro, Targioni-Tozzetti |
| Literary source: | Émile Erckmann, Pierre-Alexandre Chatrian: L'ami Fritz |
| Premiere: | October 31, 1891 |
| Place of premiere: | Teatro Costanzi , Rome |
| Playing time: | approx. 1 ½ hours |
| Place and time of the action: | 19th century, in Alsace |
| people | |
|
|
L'amico Fritz [laˈmiːko ˈfrits] is an opera semiseria in three acts by Pietro Mascagni . The libretto for this second opera by the composer comes mainly from Nicola Daspuro, based on the novella L'ami Fritz by the writers Erckmann-Chatrian . The premiere took place on October 31, 1891 in the Teatro Costanzi in Rome . The most famous scene of the opera is the duetto delle ciliegie (Suzel buon dì), the cherry duet , in the second act.
action
The plot of the opera takes place in the present of the creators, that is, in the late 19th century ; the place is Alsace . The focus is on Fritz, a wealthy landowner and proud bachelor who believes he can evade love and marriage. When he meets the farmer's daughter Suzel and his friend and mentor, Rabbi David, intervenes in a tricky way, however, he learns that he was wrong.
first act
Dining room of Fritz's town house. Fritz is expecting his friends on the morning of his birthday. The first to arrive is David, who not only congratulates but also uses the opportunity to ask his friend to donate the dowry for a poor bridal couple. Two more friends appear, Federico and Hanezò, and toast with Fritz the joys of bachelorhood, while David leaves no doubt that he wants to get all three under the hood.
Suzel, the daughter of a tenant, arrives with flowers that she gives Fritz as a birthday present. Fritz thanks her and invites her to join the party. When the talk turns to her father and his farm, Fritz promises to visit him soon.
The sound of a violin heralds the appearance of the gypsy Beppe. Suzel is moved to tears by the passionate manner. When Beppe finally enters the room, Fritz asks him for a gypsy song. Beppe gladly complies with this request and praises Fritz's charity for the orphans in his song. Fritz had also once saved the life of the orphan Beppe in a snow storm.
Since the carriage is waiting, Suzel has to leave the happy group. The friends found her delightful and Beppe also noticed that Suzel's love for Fritz is written on Suzel's face. When David persuades Fritz to consider her as a bride, a dispute arises: the three bachelors do not want to know anything about the marriage, while David rebukes their carelessness and is more determined than ever to marry them all off. Fritz proposes a bet to David: he never wants to get married and uses his vineyard in Claire-Fontaine as a pledge.
The villagers appear with music and children to congratulate Fritz on his birthday.
Second act
Villa and farm in Mesànges. At dawn, Suzel discovers with delight that the cherries are ripe. In the distance, farm workers sing a song of unrequited love, which makes them sad and in turn inspires a song; it is about a simple girl who gives flowers to a knight. Fritz is woken up by her singing, steps out of the house and sings together with Suzel about the joys of cherry ripening and spring.
The friends arrive and Fritz shows them the farm. David is pleased to see that Fritz obviously feels very comfortable in Suzel's company. When Suzel brings him a jug of water, this picture reminds him of the biblical story of Rebekah , who reveals herself to be Isaac's true bride when she not only watered Abraham's servant Eleazar, but also the camels. Suzel is more than embarrassed about this comparison, and when Fritz and his friends return from their expedition, she flees into the house.
David again points out Suzel to Fritz as a possible bride; he doesn't want to know anything about it, the friends argue. Suzel actually made a great impression on him, and in order to regain control of his feelings, Fritz returns to town immediately. Suzel, of course, knows nothing of any of this and is crushed by his departure, which she must take to be a sign of indifference.
Third act
Dining room of Fritz's town house. Fritz is deeply at odds with himself. The townspeople are preparing for a wedding celebration, love seems to be something there is nowhere to escape. Suzel himself can't get out of his mind either. Beppe appears, sees what's going on with Fritz, and uses a song to tell of his own sad love experience. Fritz sends him away, but struggles to understand that he will not be able to escape love.
Just at this critical moment, David comes in and casually reports that Suzel is about to get married. He observes with satisfaction how much this news affects Fritz. Fritz leaves the stage. Suzel appears. Since she believes that Fritz will not return her affection, her heart is heavy. Fritz returns, however, the lovers speak out and can clear up any misunderstandings. They declare their love for each other and sink into each other's arms.
Fritz lost the bet. David, a true friend, does not enjoy his triumph, however, but leaves the vineyard to Suzel as a dowry. The opera ends in a song of praise to love, sung by everyone involved and friends.
music
As the composer and musicologist Alan Mallach pointed out, the most characteristic moment of the opera L'amico Fritz is its inexhaustible wealth of singable melodies. Although Mascagni's immense interest in complex rhythms and unusual harmonic relationships could not be overlooked here, the songs are in the foreground and everything else is subordinate to them. Even in Cavalleria Rusticana , it often appeared as if the entire work unfolded from a single continuous melody line; In L'amico Fritz , Massagni took the same to extremes. Mallach judges that Mascagni has reached the climax of his work here, as far as the inexhaustible invention of exquisite melodies is concerned.
The opera is not strictly “ composed through ”; however, the individual arias, duets, ensembles, choirs and orchestral pieces are smoothly and imaginatively linked. The work includes a number of remote choirs singing backstage. Two of these choral pieces are inspired by Alsatian folk music. In L'amico Fritz there is no choir singing on stage. Another specialty is Beppe's virtuoso violin piece, which is played backstage in the first act. Regardless of the Alsatian and gypsy music echoes, the characteristic color and mood of the score, as the Rossini biographer Richard Osborne noted, can be described in its entirety with the catchphrase of mestizia toscana ("Tuscan sadness"), which also applies to the Factory Puccini and Catalani is typical. Critics have praised the skilful use of excessive chords , dissonances , cross-stands , chromatic and enharmonic twists within a primarily diatonic style. Technically, Mascagni went beyond Cavalleria Rusticana . The mood of the opera is predominantly pastoral with an orchestral setting that creates a mostly clear, bright sound pattern in which the wind instruments lead. Gustav Mahler , among others, has criticized the orchestra conductors' tendency to conduct the Preludietto and the Intermezzo in an exaggeratedly melodramatic manner, both of which, however, were written by Mascagni cautiously and have to be interpreted subtly.
history
Emergence
After the sensational success of Cavalleria rusticana , Mascagni was presented with several libretto sketches, including a subject from the French Revolution ( Charlotte Corday ) and two ancient Roman subjects ( Beatrice Cenci , Vistilia ), which he either rejected or paid only half-hearted attention to. Pietro Cossa's drama Nerone (1877) aroused Mascagni's interest, but he did not complete his opera of the same name based on the play until decades later. Also to his half-finished stranded opera Guglielmo Ratcliff he might not return the same.
Mascagni began to work on a setting of Emile Erckmann and Charles Chatrian's play I Rantzau , but abandoned this work again when the music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno , who had already looked after Cavalleria Rusticana , urged him to work on a project L'amico Fritz . Erckmann-Chatrian's novel L'ami Fritz had enjoyed great success when it was first published in 1863. The plot of the novel is the same as in the opera, but the two works differ in some details; so the plot of the novel is set in Bavaria . The authors' real intention was to entertain the reader with picturesque scenes from both Bavarian country life and Jewish customs. The characters are more complex than in the operatic libretto. So Fritz is a thoroughly restless ghost whose eulogies for bachelor life do not really get to the heart of his state of mind; Suzel is less romantic in the novel than in the opera, and the reader rightly wonders whether her affection for Fritz has something to do with his wealth.
After Alsace fell to Germany in 1871 as a result of the Franco-Prussian War , which Erckmann-Chatrian was very moved, they adapted their novel in 1876 as a play. The scene of the action was now Alsace, which was still French in the time before the German occupation. The genre scenes were omitted, the more the figure of Rabbi David emerged, from whom the French patriot now spoke. Fritz's calmness and aimlessness is no longer portrayed in the play as a pure character problem, but as an expression of his lack of patriotic sense. As a true son of France, according to Rabbi David, he would have to marry and father children in order to strengthen his motherland.
In April 1891, Daspuro and Mascagni met in Cerignola , where Daspuro wrote the libretto while Mascagni wrote the music at the same time. The libretto largely followed the drama. To create more space for the main characters to appear, some small scenes have been deleted. The patriotic theme, which would have had little resonance in Italy at that time, was also omitted; David's plea for marriage and procreation is no longer political in the libretto, but purely moral. The characters of Fritz and Suzel are more sympathetic, although Fritz has left enough viciousness to make this tenor part stand out from the ordinary and make it interesting. The gypsy Joseph - an insignificant secondary character in the play - was given the more popular name Beppe , more weight and two arias of his own. Osborne has argued that Beppe is by no means a pure Comprimario figure who only appears as a living embodiment of Fritz's generosity, but rather gives the drama “a touch of calamity”. As is the case with many characters in Verismo operas, David is a relatively complex character who acts partly as a scholar, partly as a matchmaker and partly as a friend. In the late 1930s, under pressure from Italian fascism , Mascagni gave in to the anti-Semitic zeitgeist and turned the Jewish rabbi into an Alsatian doctor.
The first act with the frolicking bachelors can, as Osborne has also shown, be read as a reminiscence of Mascagni's own adolescence. During his time as a student at the Conservatory in Milan, Mascagni had shared quarters with Giacomo Puccini , who was five years older and at the time completely unknown, for several months . The latter has these memories a few years after Mascagni in La Bohème processed.
The libretto for Cavalleria Rusticana had been overflowing with dramatic external action, with Santuzza's jealous accusations, her love for Turrido turning into hatred, the confrontation between rivals Turrido and Alfio, and finally the killing of Turrido. L'amico Fritz has nothing to show for, the action takes place for the most part inside the characters. Mallach pointed out two elements that make up for this deficiency: the powerful personality of Rabbi David and the sensitive portrayal of the inner change that takes place in Fritz to the extent that love takes hold of him. Mascagni is also said to have welcomed the challenge of proving his versatility with a delicate romance.
While Daspuro was able to finish the work quickly, Mascagni struggled with the completion of the music, was dissatisfied with Daspuro’s text and did not finish the work until the end of September, just a few weeks before the planned premiere. After a suitcase containing the libretto was stolen at the Naples train station, Mascagni had to rewrite almost the entire third act himself.
performance
The first performance took place on October 31, 1891 in the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, where Cavalleria Rusticana was first performed. L'amico Fritz was able to meet the high expectations and the audience responded enthusiastically. Emma Calvé received particularly high recognition as Suzel. Other singers were Fernando de Lucia (Fritz) and Paul Lhérie (David). The reaction of Giuseppe Verdi , who found the libretto “idiotic”, has been handed down. The critic Eugenio Checchi also found the work weaker than Cavalleria Rusticana as a drama , but considered the music to be more mature and better. George Bernard Shaw described the opera as "fresh, generous, powerful, quite rebellious".
The German premiere took place on January 16, 1892 in Hamburg and was conducted by Gustav Mahler . In the same year performances followed in Frankfurt am Main .
L'amico Fritz proved that Mascagni was not a one-opera composer who, as an artist, would have had trouble following his successful debut work with something of equal value. Nevertheless, L'amico Fritz did not achieve the lasting effect that Cavalleria Rusticana was granted. After the beginning of the 20th century, the piece was hardly performed outside of Italy. Rodolfo Celletti explained this with the poor literary quality of the piece, which neither really amuses nor moves his audience. Mallach said that to this day the opera is actually only performed because of the beauty of the music.
In 1923 the Met took up the work again and cast the main roles with Lucrezia Bori , Miguel Fleta and Giuseppe Danise; Roberto Moranzoni conducted. A production at the Teatro alla Scala with Mafalda Favero and Tito Schipa had great success in 1937 ; in the same year, these two singers also published an influential record recording of excerpts from the opera.
In Italy L'amico Fritz was also sung by Gilda dalla Rizza, Giuseppina Baldassare-Tedeschi, Adelaide Saraceni, Licia Albanese and Beniamino Gigli . In 1942, the unabridged work was recorded for the first time on phonogram by Rai Turino . Pia Tarrinari , Ferruccio Tagliavini and Armando Giannotti played the leading roles . Mascagni conducted. Further complete recordings followed in 1951 and 1953.
In a complete recording at the Teatro alla Scala in 1963 sang Mirella Freni the role of Suzel, next to Gianni Raimondi as Fritz. Freni was also involved in the next complete recording made by EMI in 1968 with the Royal Opera House choir and orchestra . At this point in time, the opera was so forgotten that the company was able to record it as part of its rarity program. This time the part of Fritz was sung by Luciano Pavarotti , whose career took off much later than that of Freni due to his very careful training. At 33 he was still relatively unknown; it was not until 1966 that he sang a record for the first time ( Beatrice di Tenda ).
Arias, duets and ensembles
Preludietto
first act
- Ma questa è and piazza! (Fritz, David, Hanezò, Caterina)
- Son pochi fiori (Suzel, Fritz)
- Orsù, vieni tra noi, al fianco mio (Fritz, Suzel, Hanezò, Federico, David)
- Chi mai sarà? (Hanezò, Fritz, David, Suzel, Federico, Beppe)
- Laceri, miseri, tanti bambini (Beppe, Fritz, Hanezò, David, Federico)
- Vivo lo zingaro! (David, Hanezò, Federico, Fritz, Caterina, Suzel, Beppe)
- Per voi, ghiottoni inutili (David)
- Il suo sermone è splendido (Beppe, Federico, Fritz, David, Hanezò)
- Son gli orfanelli (Hanezò, Beppe, Federico, Fritz, David, choir)
Second act
- Ah! le belle ciliege! (Suzel, choir)
- Bel cavalier, che vai per la foresta (Suzel)
- Suzel, buon dì! (Fritz, Suzel) - Duetto delle ciliege ("Cherry Duet")
- Tutto tace (Fritz, Suzel)
- Oh! chi è che giunge? (Fritz, Suzel, Beppe, David, Hanezò, Federico)
- Vediamo un po '! (David, Suzel)
- Faceasi vecchio Abramo (Suzel, David, Fritz)
- Come va? (Fritz, David)
- Quale strano turbamento (Fritz)
- Fritz, non partiamo. Addio! (Federico, Fritz, Hanezò, Beppe)
- Che più s'aspetta? (Federico, Fritz, David, Suzel, choir)
intermezzo
Third act
- Tutto ho tentato (Fritz, choir)
- Buon giorno, Fritz (Beppe, Fritz, choir)
- O pallida, che un giorni mi guardasti (Beppe, Fritz)
- O amore, o bella lucel del core (Fritz)
- L'amico Fritz fantastica d'amore! (David, Fritz)
- Povero Fritz, l'amore in te si desta (David, Suzel)
- Non mi resta che il pianto ed il dolore (Suzel, Fritz)
- Come s'è fatta pallida! (Fritz, Suzel)
- Ah! ditela per me quella parola (Suzel, Fritz)
- Amici, ho vinto, ho vinto! (David, Fritz, Beppe, Caterina)
- Tu sposi, Fritz? (Federico, Hanezò, David, Fritz, all)
Discography (selection)
- 1942; Pietro Mascagni (cond.); Ferruccio Tagliavini , Pia Tassinari, Amalia Pini, Saturno Meletti; Cetra (LP)
- 1968; Gianandrea Gavazzeni ; Luciano Pavarotti , Mirella Freni , Laura Didier Gambardella, Vicente Sardinero; EMI
- 2009; Alberto Veronesi; Roberto Alagna , Angela Gheorghiu , Laura Polverelli, George Petean ; Deutsche Grammophon
Web links
- Libretto for Opera Glass , a Stanford University project
- L'amico Fritz (Pietro Mascagni) in the Corago information system of the University of Bologna
- L'amico Fritz on the Mascagni.org website
- L'amico Fritz on the Frankfurt Opera website
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conduct L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 19 .
- ↑ a b c Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conducts L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 20 .
- ^ A b c Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 81 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b c d Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conducts L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 21 .
- ^ Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 72 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ^ A b Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 76 f . ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ^ A b c d Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 80 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ a b c Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conducts L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 22 .
- ↑ a b c d L'Amico Fritz (1891) . In: Paul Gruber (Ed.): The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera . The Metropolitan Opera Guild, WW Norton, New York, London 1993, ISBN 0-393-03444-5 , pp. 231 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ^ Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 78 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conduct L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 19th f .
- ^ A b Alan Mallach: Pietro Mascagni and His Operas . Northeastern University Press, Boston 2002, ISBN 1-55553-524-0 , pp. 79 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ^ Frankfurt / Alte Oper: L'amico Fritz by Pietro Mascagni - concert version. Retrieved February 7, 2020 .
- ^ L'Amico Fritz - Metropolitan Opera House: 11/15/1923. Retrieved February 7, 2020 .
- ↑ a b L 'amico Fritz by Pietro Mascagni performed in Italian. Retrieved February 7, 2020 .
- ↑ Richard Osborne: Gavazzzeni conduct L'amico Fritz . In: Supplement to Mascagni: L'amico Fritz (Audio CD) . EMI Classics, 2000, p. 23 .