Umberto Giordano

Umberto Giordano (1896)

Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano (* Foggia August 28, 1867 , † Milan November 12, 1948 ) was an Italian composer .

Live and act

Giordano initially failed the entrance exam at the conservatory in his hometown; then he was a private student with Paolo Serrao , a teacher at the Conservatory of Naples . In 1882 he entered this school and studied piano , composition , instrumentation and conducting until 1890 ; with Paolo Serrao he was also instructed in scenic composition. He wrote his first opera Marina for an upscale competition of the Sonzogno publishing house in 1888. Giordano was the youngest of 73 candidates and came in 6th place in the competition. Pietro Mascagni later incorporated an act of this work into his opera Cavalleria rusticana . In the course of this competition, Giordano aroused the interest of the aforementioned publishing house in commissioning an opera for the 1891/92 season. This was followed by the opera Mala vita ( libretto : Nicola Daspuro 1889, inspired by the folk scenes from Naples in three acts by Salvatore Di Giacomo and Goffredo Cognetti). This drama revolves around a worker who vows to save a prostitute if he makes a recovery from his tuberculosis . When the opera was performed in Rome in 1892 , it caused a scandal because of its overly realistic portrayal of Neapolitan grievances and was withdrawn until it was reworked in 1897. After all, this opera drew attention to the novel expression of the beginning style of verism . In the same year it was performed at the Vienna State Opera , the Berlin Kroll Opera and in Prague with great approval.

With his next opera Regina Diaz (1894, libretto: Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, an adaptation of the subject matter of the opera Maria di Rohan by Gaetano Donizetti ) Giordano tried a more romantic direction. However, it had little success and was only performed twice. After this failure, the composer moved to Milan because of the close collaboration with his librettist Luigi Illica and returned to the veristic style. He lived alternately in Milan (he married Olga Spatz in 1896) and in his villa in Baveno on Lake Maggiore . His later best-known work, Andrea Chénier (1896, libretto: Luigi Illica), was based on the life of the French poet André Chénier (1762–1794). Also Fedora has been successful and is still performed frequently today. Further successes were the operas Siberia ( Milan Scala 1903) and Mese mariano (Teatro Massimo in Palermo 1910). In 1924 the opera Madame Sans-Gêne (composition 1915) was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York under Arturo Toscanini . Later works had only moderate success, for example La cena delle beffe (The Mockers' Meal, 1924) or Il Ré (The King, 1929); both were also conducted by Arturo Toscanini.

Giordano has written other lyrical operas as well as a number of piano pieces, vocal works and motets, and a symphonic poem . Although he had various other plans for stage works, he did not implement any more compositionally after 1929, probably because of the knowledge that the cinema had meanwhile replaced opera as a popular genre.

meaning

Alongside Pietro Mascagni and Ruggiero Leoncavallo , Umberto Giordano is considered to be the most important representative of verism with his impressive operas. He is above all a playwright; his other works are overshadowed by his operas. The most important of these , Andrea Chénier , can still be found on the international repertoire, while Fedora has only met with increased interest since the 1980s. All other works were not able to assert themselves in the long term, despite their initial great success. In Andrea Chénier and Fedora , Giordano succeeds with great skill in making use of his melodic talent for veristic dramaturgy: a singing style that alternates between parlando and arioso passages, but which does not demand as much tension from the singers as in Mascagni, is given by a colored orchestral support, which never comes to the fore, but the numerous theater effective expressions of the partially trashy stick accompanied act. In his last full-length opera La cena delle beffe , Giordano succeeds in refining the orchestral technique with largely declamatory treatment of the vocal parts. Of the rest of his compositional work, Piedigrotta is an orchestral poem full of bold naturalistic sound combinations.

The Music Conservatory and the Municipal Theater are named after him in his native Foggia . In addition, a square bears his name: the Memorial to the Fallen there was previously moved to Piazza Italia , and in its place has been Giordano's statue since 1961, surrounded by a wreath of figures from his most important operas. In connection with Foggia, the following incident is reported from the life of Giordano: When Mala vita was performed in 1892, Giordano was invited to play a few pieces on the piano at Club Dauno in Foggia. But when he looked up from the piano in the middle of the performance while playing, the composer noticed that some people were sitting at the tables to play cards instead of listening. This incident led to a long break between Giordano and his native city, with which he was reconciled only in 1928.

More recently, an aria from Andrea Chénier , "La mamma morta", sung by Maria Callas , has become known to a wider public through its use in the film Philadelphia (directed by Jonathan Demme 1993).

Works (selection)

• Stage works
  • Mariana (1888, not listed)
  • Mala vita (1892), revised as Il voto (1897)
  • Regina Diaz (1894)
  • Andrea Chénier (1896)
  • Fedora (1898)
  • Siberia (1903), revised version 1927
  • Marcella (1907)
  • Mese mariano (1910)
  • Madame Sans-Gêne (1915, German premiere in Breslau 1930)
  • Giove a Pompei (1921)
  • La cena delle beffe (1924)
  • L'astro magico , ballet (1928)
  • Il Ré (1929)
  • La festa del Nilo (unfinished)
• Vocal music
  • Come farfalla , romanza (around 1891)
  • Amor di madre , romanza (1901)
  • Crepuscolo triste , romanza (1904)
  • Per non soffire , romanza (1917)
  • Be liriche (1919)
  • E 'l'april che torna a me (1932)
  • Tre vocalizzi nello stile moderno (1932)
  • Inno del decennale (hymn to mark the tenth anniversary of Benito Mussolini's seizure of power ) for choir and orchestra (1933)
  • Mensa regalis , Lauda for choir and organ (published Bergamo 1951)
  • Songs
• Instrumental music
  • Piedigrotta , symphonic poem
  • Gerbes du feu , Scherzo for piano (1890)
  • Idillio for piano (1890)
  • Cocktail , Danza for piano (1906)
  • Largo e Fuga for strings, harp and organ or harmonium (published in Milan 1949)

literature

• D. Cellamare: Umberto Giordano. La vita e le opere. Milan 1949, Rome 1967
• PD Wright: The Musico-Dramatic Techniques of the Italian Verists. Dissertation at the University of Rochester , New York 1965
• M. Morini (Editor): Umberto Giordano , Rome 1968
• Report of the Congress Umberto Giordano e il verismo , Verona 1986
• J.-H. Lederer: Verismo on the German-speaking opera stage 1891–1926. Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 1992 (Viennese musicological contributions 19)
• H.-J. Wagner: Foreign worlds. The opera of Italian verismo. Stuttgart / Weimar 1999

Web links

• Sheet music and audio files by Umberto Giordano in the International Music Score Library Project
• List of the stage works by Umberto Giordano in Operone
• Article by Raoul Meloncelli about Umberto Giordano in “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, Volume 55 (2001)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Honegger / Massenkeil: The great lexicon of music. Volume 3, Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-451-18053-7
2. ^ The music in past and present (MGG), Volume 7, Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel / Basel 2002, ISBN 3-7618-1117-9