Intermezzo From The Eternal City - Published in the San Francisco Examiner

Mascagni.org presents a new original document: Intermezzo From The Eternal City, a four-page insert published in the San Francisco Examiner on December 7, 1902, Mascagni's birthday.

The Intermezzo presented here is just one and a half page long, the remaining one and a half page featuring a movement from Act IV. This is in fact the central part of a piece called Valley of the Shadow, an intermezzo to Act II, the first bars of which appear on the first page of the document. The actual score has the following commentary:

Nothing can stop Roma's destiny. She has met David Rossi and has fallen in love with him. An overwhelming passion is the result of their intercourse, and her past and her present are forgotten in the hopes she builds for her future with the man of whom she is enamoured.

Mascagni wrote incidental music for Hall Caine's play The Eternal City in the summer of 1902. At the time this document was published, he was in the middle of his troubled North American tour, during which he would regularly perform excerpts from his latest composition.

While the piano score for The Eternal City is still available, the orchestral score remains lost.