Umberto Giordano

Sixth place among seventy-three entries in the Sonzogno competition did Umberto Giordano no harm: the one-act Marina, submitted by a student of Paolo Serrao at the Naples Conservatory, marked him out even as Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana carried off the prize. Born in Foggia in 1867, he found his subject a few years later in Andrea Chénier, given at La Scala on 28 March 1896 — the French Revolution as public spectacle and private catastrophe, with a poet's walk to the scaffold at its centre. Fedora followed on 17 November 1898 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, with Caruso in the cast and Amor ti vieta, barely two minutes long, outlasting most of what surrounds it. Siberia, Madame Sans-Gêne, La cena delle beffe and Il re came afterwards. His writing keeps close to the rhythm of speech quickened into song, with an orchestra that heats the drama without covering it, and Foggia later named its theatre after him. He died in Milan in 1948. Between Marina and Andrea Chénier came two operas written on Sonzogno's commission: Mala vita, which caused an uproar in Rome in February 1892 and afterwards did well in Vienna, Prague and Berlin, and Regina Diaz of 1894, withdrawn after two nights. From the 1920s he gave most of his time to teaching and to editorial work, among it the Italian complete edition of Beethoven's symphonies.