Umberto Giordano |

Umberto Giordano

Giordano, like many of his contemporaries, remains in history the author of one opera, although he wrote more than ten. The genius of Puccini overshadowed his modest talent. Giordano’s legacy includes different genres. Among his operas there are verist operas, saturated with naturalistic passions, like Mascagni’s Rural Honor and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. There are also lyrical-dramatic ones, similar to Puccini’s operas – with deeper and more subtle feelings, often based on historical plots processed by French authors. At the end of his life, Giordano also turned to comic genres.

Umberto Giordano was born on 28 (according to other sources 27) August 1867 in the small town of Foggia in the province of Apulia. He was preparing to become a doctor, but at the age of fourteen his father sent him to the Naples Conservatory of San Pietro Maiella, where the best teacher of that time, Paolo Serrao, taught. In addition to composition, Giordano studied piano, organ and violin. During his studies, he composed a symphony, an overture and a one-act opera Marina, which he submitted to a competition announced in 1888 by the Roman publisher Edoardo Sonzogno. Mascagni’s Rural Honor won the first prize, the production of which opened a new – veristic – period in Italian musical theater. “Marina” was not awarded any award, it was never staged, but Giordano, the youngest of the participants in the competition, attracted the attention of the jury, who assured Sonzogno that the twenty-one-year-old author would go far. The publisher began to listen to favorable reviews of Giordano when the Ricordi publishing house competing with Sonzogno published his piano Idyll, and the string quartet sounded favorably received by the press at the Naples Conservatory. Sonzogno invited Giordano, who was graduating this year from the conservatory, to Rome, who played Marina for him, and the publisher signed a contract for a new opera. He himself chose the libretto based on the play “The Vow” by the famous contemporary Neapolitan writer di Giacomo, which depicts scenes from the life of the Neapolitan bottom. The model for the opera, called The Lost Life, was The Rural Honor, and the production took place in Rome in 1892, on the same day as the Pagliacci. Then The Lost Life saw the light of the limelight outside Italy, in Vienna, where it was a huge success, and five years later its second edition appeared under the title The Vow.

After graduating from the conservatory with first prize, Giordano became its teacher and in 1893 staged a third opera, Regina Diaz, in Naples. It turned out to be sharply different from the previous one, although the co-authors of Rural Honor acted as librettists. They reworked the old libretto into a historical plot, based on which Donizetti wrote the romantic opera Maria di Rogan half a century ago. “Regina Diaz” did not receive the approval of Sonzogno: he declared the author mediocre and deprived him of material support. The composer even decided to change his profession – to become a military bandmaster or a fencing teacher (he was good with a sword).

Everything changed when Giordano’s friend, the composer A. Franchetti, gave him the libretto “Andre Chenier”, which inspired Giordano to create his best opera, staged at La Scala in Milan in 1896. Two and a half years later, Fedora premiered in Naples. Its success allowed Giordano to build a house near Baveno, called “Villa Fyodor”, where his next operas were written. Among them is another on the Russian plot – “Siberia” (1903). In it, the composer again turned to verismo, drawing a drama of love and jealousy with a bloody denouement in Siberian penal servitude. The same line was continued by The Month of Mariano (1910), again based on the play by di Giacomo. Another turn took place in the mid-1910s: Giordano turned to the comic genre and over the course of a decade (1915-1924) wrote Madame Saint-Gene, Jupiter in Pompeii (in collaboration with A. Franchetti) and The Dinner of Jokes “. His last opera was The King (1929). In the same year, Giordano became a member of the Academy of Italy. For the next two decades, he did not write anything else.

Giordano died on November 12, 1948 in Milan.

A. Koenigsberg

Compositions:

operas (12), including Regina Diaz (1894, Mercadante Theatre, Naples), André Chenier (1896, La Scala Theatre, Milan), Fedora (based on the drama by V. Sardou, 1898, Lyrico Theatre, Milan), Siberia (Siberia, 1903, La Scala Theatre, ibid.), Marcella (1907, Lyrico Theatre, ibid.), Madame Saint-Gene ( based on the comedy Sardou, 1915, the Metropolitan Opera, New York), Jupiter in Pompeii (together with A. Franchetti, 1921, Rome), Dinner of Jokes (La cena della beffe, based on the drama by S. Benelli, 1924, La Scala Theatre, Milan), The King (Il Re, 1929, ibid); ballet – “Magic Star” (L’Astro magiсo, 1928, not staged); for orchestra – Piedigrotta, Hymn to the Decade (Inno al Decennale, 1933), Joy (Delizia, unpublished); piano pieces; romances; music for drama theater performances, etc.