Music Publishers and Synchronized Scores: Mascagni, Ricordi, and Rapsodia satanica

©2023 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois In 1914, Pietro Mascagni, a composer best known for his opera Cavalleria rusticana, turned his attention to cinema. In so doing, he garnered the distinction of being the first Italian opera composer to write a specially composed film score: Rapsodia satanica. The film was produced by Cines, one of Italy’s most important film companies during the early silent era. Starring the renowned diva Lyda Borelli and directed by Nino Oxilia, the film features a Faustian plot in which an elderly Alba d’Oltrevita makes a pact with the devil Mefisto to reacquire her youth, provided she never falls in love. Long heralded in film studies scholarship, Rapsodia satanica has recently begun to attract musicological attention, in part because of the survival of its synchronized score and most of its film footage.1 Prior to Mascagni’s being contracted to compose the original score for Rapsodia, sixteen scored films are known to have been produced in Italy.2 Rapsodia, however, was the first Italian film to be accompanied throughout by newly composed music written by an internationally renowned composer and was one of the first films to strive for precise synchronization between music and image. Despite Rapsodia’s significance within both film and music history, its creation history remains murky. Although the film itself was completed and screened for a small private audience in 1915, it was only released in 1917, with Mascagni conducting the accompaniment for the July 2 premiere in Rome.3 The history of the film’s production for the intervening years is generally considered lost.4 Yet answers can be found in records from the company that facilitated the film score’s publication—Casa Ricordi, Italy’s leading music publisher in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite Ricordi’s necessarily crucial role, they are rarely mentioned in studies of Rapsodia satanica (perhaps because publishers are often sidelined in aesthetically minded histories). Prior to Rapsodia, Ricordi had been involved with several film projects, but this was their first newly composed film score and their first cinematic collaboration to involve a well-known opera composer. As one of the earliest collaborations between composer, music publisher, and film company, Rapsodia satanica represented something fundamentally new in the history of Italian cinema. I begin with a brief overview of Rapsodia’s production history, then fill in the gaps with new information from Ricordi’s archives, demonstrating the complexities of this inherently collaborative process. I then Music Publishers and Synchronized Scores: Mascagni, Ricordi, and Rapsodia satanica