Pietro Mascagni: Le Maschere
O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford
★★☆☆☆
Who knew? Pietro Mascagni’s Le Maschere (The Masks) was scheduled to premiere in seven theatres in Italy on Thursday, January 17th, 1901. It was staged in only six, as the indisposition of a tenor in Naples caused a two-day delay there. Still an unbeaten record, I think.
The public was not impressed by the work, and the record-breaking failure was damaging for the composer. Mascagni would later write about the extensive negative feedback he received through the post. This included personal abuse, attacks on his family and children, “ferociously destructive” comments and epithets, and expressions of hope that “not one more note of music be written by me”. Plus ca change.
Mascagni was burdened by the fame of his 1890 verismo classic, Cavalleria Rusticana, the success of which he never managed to equal. While the public wanted more of the same, his interest was much more wide-ranging.
He saw Le Maschere as a revisiting of earlier approaches to comic opera, through the specific lens of commedia dell’arte. Opera had become too serious, he felt, and he intended to rectify the situation.
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Stefano Ricci’s Wexford Festival Opera production (he is both director and designer), the first of this year’s operas celebrating the theme of “theatre within theatre”, opens with all of the commedia dell’arte characters standing in costume in rows on either side of the stalls, being introduced from the stage by Giocadio, a spoken role taken by an officious, white-uniformed Peter McCamley.
The high-windowed, austerely handsome set represents a wellness clinic, a place where non-commedia dell’arte masks can be put on and taken off. And when the cast arrive on stage to change their clothes, there are further identifications, this time through large cards held aloft identifying them by name as they sing. I’ve spelled this out, because the odd thing is that, at the end of it all, there is very little sense of who is really who.
It’s the old opera plot problem, the one that finds us all at times reading synopses of the action and still feeling clueless about what’s going on. Michael Frayn has beautifully satirised the issue in his Pocket Playhouse.
Le Maschere is textually and musically verbose without showing any real grip of character or plot. People sing, prance and parade to no great effect. Wexford’s production has some eye-catching choreography by Stellario Di Blasi for four dancers – Andrea Carozzi, Andrea Carlotta Pelaia, Miryam Tomè and Charles Riddiford – and some of the singers get to strut their high notes, but almost none of it is engaging.
A lot of the music is neoclassical in an offbeat kind of way, very busy, very clever, but mostly creating an impression of empty chatter. Its alternative mode is off-the-shelf late-romantic emotionalism.
The best singing and most relatable characterisation come from two sopranos, the alert, bright-toned Colombina of Ioana Constantin Pipilea and the fuller, richer and warmer Rosaura of Lavinia Bini. The nicely burnished baritone Giorgio Caoduro has fun with the stuttering part of Tartaglia; Mascagni ignores the reality that stutterers don’t stutter when they sing, and removes Tartaglia’s stutter as side effect of the mysteriously discombobulating powder on which the whole evening so flakily hinges.
Francesco Cilluffo conducts the Wexford Festival Orchestra with brio and tact, though not without rough patches when the sheer busyness of the writing introduces moments of instability.
Wexford hit gold with Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff in 2015. But this brave effort to animate the hugely problematic Le Maschere doesn’t really come off.
Le Maschere is at Wexford Festival Opera on Wednesday, October 23rd, Saturday, October 26th, and Thursday, October 31st
