Music: A New Jest

Maestro Giordano, composer of Andrea Chenier and Fedora, now very popular throughout Italy, has completed a new opera which is to be produced sometime in the indefinitely near future at Milan. He has written music for Bellini’s play La Cena della Beffe which the two male Barrymores played in this country as The Jest.

The play has been in existence for some 15 years. Giordano did not see the play until 1919, although it was a favorite in Italy. He at once asked Bellini for the operatic rights and was refused on the grounds that they had been granted to another composer much earlier. Giordano applied to the other composer, and was denied the rights. Thereupon he set out for his villa on beautiful Lake Maggiore, set to work composing. When he completed it, he managed to secure the operatic rights which the other composer had kept, unused for 15 years.

In preparing the play for the opera stage, Giordano was obliged to delete parts of the libretto. The motif appears in the first act and is elaborated into an octette in the third act when Gianetto’s plot is perfected. In this way a passage which occupied 15 minutes in the drama is reduced to four minutes in the opera, because all the characters speak at once. The result must be striking if not effective. As yet no one is said to have heard the music except Giordano’s wife. But the combined popularity of La Cena della Beffe and of Giordano in Italy should make a local success of the opera if its score is anything but excessively inferior.