Jubilee concert: Mascagni's epic Il piccolo Marat

The sixtieth Matine season opens with Mascagni. Pietro Rizzo will conduct not his famous Cavalleria rusticana, but the much later Il piccolo Marat.

Success for Il piccolo Marat

We know him mainly for Cavalleria rusticana, but Pietro Mascagni wrote a large number of operas, which met with varying degrees of success. Il piccolo Marat premiered on May 2, 1921, with great success at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, after which numerous performances immediately followed elsewhere. Central to the story is little Marat, who is actually an aristocrat, but who during the French Revolution - under the guise of being a revolutionary - frees his imprisoned mother and also finds a lover in the process.

Darker and more expansive than Cavalleria rusticana

Whereas Cavalleria was still a key work for Italian verismo, Il piccolo Marat is much darker in color and slower and more expansive in character, more epic than lyrical. Yet it is also an opera with gripping vocal elements, such as the demanding tenor part of the little Marat and the great love duet between him and Mariella. The Groot Omroepkoor performed this opera once before in 1992 (then with the Radio Symphony Orchestra) under the direction of conductor Kees Bakels, which contributed to a reappraisal at the time. Almost thirty years later, we can once again witness this rarely performed masterpiece of the pre-war Italian avant-garde.