January 7, 2001

For some days now at the Teatro Filarmonico, they've already begun the preparations for L'Amico Fritz, the opera of Pietro Mascagni, which will be performed onstage beginning January 19. Since January 2 it's already to work for the song company, with principal interpreters Cecilia Gasdia, Tiziana Carraro, Andrea Bocelli and Alberto Mastromarino, under the direction of Italian-American conductor Steven Mercurio, who will debut in Verona after spending the holidays in Spoleto with the Menotti family, promoters of the famous Festival of Two Worlds. The preparation of the scenery, for the most part mounted by now, was completed yesterday. In the meantime, in order to definitively begin the rehearsals, the director Marco Gandini and scenic designer Edoardo Sanchi (who have recently brought Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Il Tabarro to the Filarmonico), have also arrived in Verona. Gandini is also completing, with the help of Franco Zeffirelli, the preparatory phase of the mini Aida in Bussetto, the native city of Giuseppe Verdi, which in a short while will open the celebrations for the centennial of the death of the great musician. The actual preparations of L'Amico Fritz at the Filarmonico, originate from the Teatro Bellini of Catania. The opera, which debuted at the Costanzi in Rome at the end of October, 1891, remains, along with Cavalleria Rusticana, the only true success of the Livornese composer (...). The beautiful melody, the emotions, pursued with an inspiring authentic vein, but also the libretto on which Mascagni made a kind of personal wager, even succeeded in making people forget the "suspects" that struck them in the preceding Cavalleria, whose success seemed only an accessory to the text of Verga. The circumstances of L'Amico Fritz are completely antithetical to that of Cavalleria, for everything follows little pictures that pursue events without intricacies, whose conclusion is explicit from the first wisecracks, as in all the love stories with happy endings. (g.v.)