Mala vita (Wretched Life) is an opera in three acts composed by Umberto Giordano to a libretto by Nicola Daspuro adapted from Salvatore Di Giacomo and Goffredo Cognetti's verismo play of the same name. Giordano's first full-length opera, Mala vita premiered on 21 February 1892 at the Teatro Argentina. It was subsequently performed in Naples, Vienna, Berlin and Milan, and various Italian cities over the next two years. In 1897 a considerably re-worked and revised version under the title Il voto (The Vow) premiered in Milan. Within a few years, both versions had disappeared from the repertoire. Amongst its rare modern revivals was the 2002 performance at the Teatro Umberto Giordano in Foggia which was recorded live and released on the Bongiovanni label.
Set in a slum neighborhood of Naples during the early 19th century, the opera's story (and that of the play on which it is based) revolves around a love triangle between Vito, a dyer afflicted with tuberculosis; Cristina, a prostitute whom Vito has vowed to marry in return for God curing him of his disease; and Amalia, Vito's mistress but married to Annetiello, a hard-drinking habitué of the brothel where Cristina worked. The action unfolds amidst the neighborhood's preparations for the Piedigrotta festival.
Background
Mala vita was Giordano's first full-length opera but owes its existence to his earlier Marina, a one-act opera that he had composed while still a student at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples. In July 1888 the Milanese music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno had announced a competition open to all young Italian composers who had not yet had an opera performed on stage. They were invited to submit a one-act opera that would be judged by a jury of five prominent Italian critics and composers. The best three would be staged in Rome at Sonzogno's expense. Giordano submitted Marina. When the winners were announced in March 1890, the three chosen from the 72 entries were Niccola Spinelli's Labilia, Vincenzo Ferroni's Rudello, and Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, with Cavalleria awarded the First Prize. However, Marina received one of the 13 "honourable mentions" and impressed. Amintore Galli, Sonzogno's music advisor, convinced the publisher to offer a commission to the young Giordano for a full-length opera.
The huge success of Cavalleria rusticana (based on the verismo play of the same name by Giovanni Verga) led to the choice of a similar subject for Giordano's commission—Salvatore Di Giacomo and Goffredo Cognetti's successful 1888 play Mala vita. The play, set in the slums of Naples amidst preparations for the Piedigrotta festival, had in turn been based on Di Giacomo's short story Il voto. Sonzogno hired Nicola Daspuro to adapt the work for the opera stage. Daspuro, a giornalist and librettist, was Sonzogno's representative in Naples and had written the libretto for Mascagni's L'amico Fritz which premiered in 1891. His libretto for Mala Vita, which converted the play's Neapolitan dialect prose into Italian verse, nevertheless remained very faithful to the original, including its metaphors and idioms and its three-act structure. Only some material from the play's first act was omitted for the opera in order to compress the action. Despite the three-act structure the opera has a running time of only 74 minutes, less than many performances of Mascagni's one-act Cavalleria rusticana.
Giordano's score makes ample use of the Neapolitan language and the idioms of Neapolitan vernacular music, seen most prominently in three set pieces of the final act: Vito's serenade "Canzon d'amor", a tarantella danced by the women as they are about to depart for the Piedigrotta festival, and Annetiello's proposed new song for the festival, "Ce sta, ce sta nu mutto ca dice accussì". The latter is sung in Neapolitan language to lyrics written by Di Giacomo expressly for the opera.