Riccardo Muti calls ‘Cavalleria rusticana’ an opera of ‘great dignity’

In late January 2020, Riccardo Muti spoke with music critic Dennis Polkow about upcoming concert performances of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana that winter. 

Muti calls Cavalleria rusticana, just released on CSO Resound, “a great opera that the world wants to hear. ... The point is to give back dignity to this opera that generally is sung by actors [who] exaggerate, thinking that the southern Italian society [consists] of the Mafia, violent people. (Released in digital formats earlier this fall, physical discs will be available on Nov. 25 for international markets and Jan. 6 in the United States.)

The following is a transcript of that interview, originally broadcast on WDCB-FM (90.9).

MUTI: Anita Rachvelishvili [who sang Santuzza in the CSO concerts] is the greatest mezzo-soprano of today.

POLKOW: Not just for Verdi. You feel that ...

MUTI:  Oh, no, there are other mezzo-sopranos who I like immensely. For example, Elīna Garanča, I like very much, but Anita is really very special with her voice, and she sings in Cavalleria rusticana. 

POLKOW: Yeah, exactly. That was a good pivot.

MUTI: And for Cavalleria rusticana, she is [perfect] for the kind of timbre and passion and temperament [the role requires]. I’m sure that in working together, she will be a great Santuzza.

But not the usual vulgar Santuzza that is done often, you know, like, because some people think that Sicily [the setting of Cavalleria rusticana] is a land of savage people. And for many people outside of Italy, Italianate means vulgarita, Italianate means vulgarity. To be vulgar, to be excessive, to shout, to have big, high notes. And that has nothing to do with Italianità. [People] have forgotten the lesson of [famed maestro Arturo] Toscanini: never allow a singer to be eccentric or vulgar.

And so our Santuzza will be a real woman,  a victim in love. And that will be interesting for me because one thing about Cavalleria rusticana is that it’s a typical opera, based on the southern Italian culture. And it will be a new experience for the orchestra and for the chorus because I will not ask them to be loud and in quotes “Italian” now, [because] Mascagni was very, very refined. When he wrote Cavalleria rusticana, he was the director of the local band in Cerignola. Cerignola is a little town 30 kilometers far away from Orvieto, where I grew up. So he was in Puglia [a region of southern Italy].

POLKOW: Isn’t that your father’s town?

MUTI: Si, Cerignola is 30 kilometers north. And so it’s known that when the young maestro in the evening was writing his music, the people in the town of Cerignola didn’t make noise in the street because the maestro was writing an opera. The entire town was waiting for this opera, and Mascagni finished the opera and then sent the opera to Roma and had the premiere. It won the prize in Roma. It was performed at the Teatro Costanzi [now known as Teatro dell’Opera di Roma] in Roma, the theater where I did so many works in recent years, and it was conducted by Leopoldo Mugnone, who was a great friend [of Mascagni]. [He was also] a great Verdi and Wagner conductor because all the conductors in Italy at that time conducted Wagner a lot. At that time, they did [the Wagner operas] in the Italian translation, not in [German], and Wagner loved very much to hear his operas in the Italian language because it had beauty ... the language gave it a certain elegance that he appreciated very much.

And there [was the time] when Mugnone, who was Neapolitan, did the Cavalleria in Roma during the rehearsals, Mugnone was rehearsing, and the young Mascagni stood up at a certain point because he wanted to say something to Mugnone, and Mugnone turned and said to the young man, “You wrote the opera, but stay there and sit there and don’t move because I will take care [of it].” [Mugnone] was really tough. You know, the kind of conductor who had a very tough [manner].

Let’s speak about the Cavalleria rusticana that I recorded. I did the opera many times. I recorded it in London with [Spanish soprano] Montserrat Caballe [on EMI, 1978]. There is an [anecdote] that I would like the public [to hear]. I needed to find my Mama Lucia. But I couldn’t find a Mama Lucia [who had] a certain authority. And then one evening, I was in Munich, and I went to hear [the Strauss opera] Elektra, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, who was a wonderful conductor, especially for this repertoire. And the three ladies of Elektra were Birgit Nilsson, Ingrid Bjöner and Astrid Varnay. [Casting] that really is impossible today. My friend who was the producer of Cavalleria, said he would like to ask Astrid Varnay to do Mama Lucia. I said, “You are crazy. I don’t have the courage to go to ask Astrid Varnay, who has been a great Santuzza in her time when she was young, and ask her to do Mama Lucia now. If you have the courage, you ask.” And he asked Astrid Varnay, and Astrid Varnay said yes, she accepted. I was very shocked but also very enthusiastic to have as Mama Lucia Astrid Varnay, who had been a great Santuzza in Italy many years before.

So we were one day rehearsing the singers and getting ready for the recording, and there is a phrase that Mama Lucia sings when Turiddu announces he is in trouble and says very strange [things]. And the mother says, “Perchè parli così, figliuolo mio?” (Why are you talking this way?) And he says in turn, “E nulla, el vino che ma sugerite.” (It is nothing, it is the wine that makes me say these stupid things.)

We were recording and she didn’t sing a phrase properly. The voice had some problems because she was old. And so I tried the second time with great respect. But it was already clear to me that it would not work. So then I stopped. And I said to Varnay, “Why don’t we go up to the control room to hear what we recorded?”

Varnay said to me “giovane Maestro,” because I was a young maestro, and she said, “You have seen now that at my age with the condition of my voice, I can still sing Wagner and Strauss, but not even a phrase in the Italian repertoire.” I will never forget [that].

That doesn’t mean that Wagner is [easy] but somehow with the orchestra, you can make it. But Dennis, [to sing] “Perchè parli così, figliuolo mio?” You need the voice in good condition to make the legato and to go there. And that’s why I say this story many times to young singers, etc., to tell them how humbled I was that Astrid Varnay accepted the role but also that she knew how difficult it was for her to sing that one phrase. 

POLKOW: Yeah and then she also had the sense to recognize she could still be doing this other repertoire. Like you say, it’s not a judgment on the works.

MUTI: Then I did my first Cavalleria in Florence in 1970. Then I recall I did it in Ravenna with the production of [director] Liliana Cavani, who did “The Night Porter” [1974], a very famous film many years ago, and she did a wonderful production of Cavalleria rusticana.

And we had a wonderful, wonderful group of singers. And so it’s an opera that I knew since I was a kid because my father was a medical doctor but had the beautiful voice of a tenor, used to singing all these arias from Cavalleria at home when he had nothing to do, when he didn’t have the patients in front of him.

POLKOW: Do you remember the first production that you saw of it? Or the first time you —

MUTI: Si, the first time I conducted it was Cavalleria and Pagliacci; for the Cavalleria, the production was made by the Italian film director Bolognini, who is very famous, he did many important films in the meliorism [style], and the tenor was Gianfranco Cecchele and the Pagliacci was [Richard] Tucker.

POLKOW: This is the recording that just was re-released, from Florence.

MUTI: From Florence, bravo, sí, and I think that the soprano was Elena Souliotis and also on the recording was Montserrat Caballé, it was a beautiful production. And I remember that when I did Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, it had not been performed in Florence for many, many, many, many years. There was a period in the ’50s and the ’60s with Mascagni and Puccini where they were considered like Tchaikovsky to be second-class, too easy, too superficial. Nowadays, the approach to Puccini must be theological. We have gone in the opposite direction.

You know, the world is crazy. One time they used to do Puccini, etc., in an easy way. And Mascagni was considered sort of trivial. Respighi as well. These composers remained in Italy during the Mussolini period. But they were not fascist at all, but received recognition from the Minister of Culture, and so they became academic members of the [Fascist] Party. So they paid for that in a way after the war, but this was unjust. Because artists like [cellist-conductor Mstislav] Rostropovich, they received recognition from the Soviet Union. They were made an artist of the people. 

POLKOW: Because they were on the right side.

MUTI: They were not communist. Yeah. But they were the other way. Yeah. But in Italy, you know …

POLKOW: It depends on what side of the Communist Party you were on, the Allied vs. Axis. But that’s very interesting. I’m so glad you brought all this up because it does seem as if particularly Puccini, but these works to your right hand to sort of a negative ...

MUTI: Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Urbano, all [these composers].

POLKOW: And I often wondered if it seemed like at the time living through this, that it was as much that these were people who were perceived as not being of their time, not being contemporary, that they were looking back to the sort of 19th-century romanticism even though they were more chromatic and a little more dissonant, spicy, but still looking back rather than forward. And it seemed like they — and now, you know, we’re into a new millennium, and it seems like any of those concerns are long past so we have the freedom to sort of appreciate these works on their own terms. It’s also interesting that you mentioned Pagliacci, and of course, usually these works are very often are performed together, but not this time.

MUTI: Sí. No, no, [it] is enough to do Cavalleria because [it] is about one hour and 20 minutes. So we’ll be done. 

POLKOW: So for a symphonic evening, that’s enough, but for an opera evening, that would be short.

MUTI: It’s one act. One time [there] was a critic that was speaking about Cavalleria rusticana, a famous critic who met a friend in the lobby, and they had to discuss some things. And the critic said to his friend that now is not the time because the opera is starting. We will discuss about this after the second act. Cavalleria is one act.

POLKOW: Right, exactly, what but it’s interesting that of these two, you chose Cavalleria instead of Pagliacci. Is that because it has more of a tenor [part]?

MUTI: There is no special reason … maybe in the future I will do Pagliacci. [I did] Cavalleria because it’s a one-act opera, and it is the masterpiece of Mascagni. Even if Mascagni was not happy about the fact that every time they saw him, they spoke about Cavalleria, forgetting all his other operas that they appreciated even more. [It became] the croce e delizia — the cross and the delight. When you are condemned to be remembered only for one piece.

POLKOW: And you just had released the Intermezzo on the Italian Masterpieces CD. I remember when that was recorded. Somebody said right away “Raging Bull,” the movie that had used the famous  Intermezzo from Cavalleria. And, OK, well, I can’t ask you, I was going to ask if you thought that was an appropriate use [of the Intermezzo], but if that’s not ... 

MUTI: I didn’t know about it. Yeah, I know. There are some strange things in this country, like when you hear (sings the melody of the William Tell Overture). I mean, that’s it. The music of the revolution is not funny. Yeah, right. The revolution of William Tell.

POLKOW: A-ha. OK. Is there a message or something about Cavalleria that you want to get across? Or is there something in terms of the dramatic message as well as the music?

MUTI: As I said before, it is a great opera, written with very good instrumentation. It’s an opera that the entire operatic world loves and wants to hear. The point is to give back dignity to this opera that generally is sung by actors [who] exaggerate, thinking that the southern Italian society [consists] of the Mafia, violent people. So Cavalleria rusticana comes from a book of [Sicilian author Giovanni] Verga that was one of the greatest writers we had at the end of the 19th century. It’s an opera that requires a certain knowledge of the culture of Sicily, of southern Italy, which is a culture that is a little bit, as you say in English, tribale, tribal. So there are certain elements in the opera that a conductor should know that are full of blood, of violence. But it is never vulgar, there is a dignity always. This sense of honor.

POLKOW: That’s interesting,

MUTI: That [sense] still guides the society in Sicily, in the south of Italy, this question of l’onore, as Verdi says in Falstaff, l’onore — honor. This is the basic element in Cavalleria rusticana. And so it’s not just trash, it’s a dignified opera. Of course, with the laws that existed at that time, when you disturbed honor, [when] honor was killed, then naturally people took up the knife.

POLKOW: Well, it’s our honor, as always, to have you with us. 

MUTI: Grazie, Dennis, ciao, ciao, ciao.