Lodoletta (2 CDs)

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Lodoletta was once part of the usual repertoire; nowadays we can consider this work one of the most interesting creations of Mascagni last style: a Mascagni who partly recycles the atmosphere of the youthful Fritz, but seems to approach also a type of musical dramaturgy reserved to an exploration of the female soul, similar to that of the colleague-friend-rival Puccini. Mascagni's source is the pathetic tale of the novel Two Little Wooden Shoes by the British writer Ouida: the naive protagonist, the Brabant flower girl Bebée hurt in love by the cynical painter Victor Flammen, let's herself be drowned in the placid waters of the lake near her father's house. She is the prototype of the woman victim of the egoism and emptiness of the male, dear to Puccini. Mascagni's approach is quite different: being an authentic realist and an outspoken "popular musician", he focuses on the passion of lacerating love, making Lodoletta a true tragic character, who, instead of killing herself like a "floral" doll, leaves on foot from Holland - the librettist new setting -for the painter's Parisian home, then she dies of starvation in the snow on his doorstep, invoking his name and his love. It is a highly dramatic and mercilessly realistic finale, eloquent embodiment of that "erotic sadness" that a shrewd critic like Giannotto Bastianelli had rightly recognized as the essential poetic core of Mascagni's theater, which through the dry modernity of the musical writing redeems the excessive sentimentalism of the previous acts.