Mascagni was a curious man. After drawing inspiration from contemporary literature for his debut opera(Cavalleria rusticana, from Verga) he would never cease to probe new avenues in his future works, though without again encountering the resounding and undying success of that 1890 debut. He would take an interest in cinema, composing in 1917, among the pioneers of the genre, the score for Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia satanica .

In the 19th-century operatic tradition, the essential ingredients of the drama of Cavalleria rusticana are certainly not uncommon: two women (Santuzza and Lola) love the same man (Turiddu), the jealousy of the two betrayed (Santuzza and compar Alfio, Lola’s husband) triggers the deadly outcome. What changes – as in Verga – is the way this is told, the language: recognizable, broad, ardent melodies, primary, visceral feelings entrusted to characters of the people.

The film with diva Lyda Borelli is of a completely different sign: D’Annunzian poetics, Faustian subject matter, eros and thanatos, sophisticated Art Nouveau aesthetics. We are, in short, at the antipodes of positivism and from which the verist current was born; here the real, the popular, the rational are disdained with aristocratic contempt. And, nevertheless, Mascagni’s curious and versatile vein successfully throws itself into the venture, placing at the service of the camera not only the fundamental dowry of thematic invention of immediate grasp and communication, not only the decadent volutes already experimented also at the opera, but also the aptitude for making operatic language a cinematic language, and vice versa.