Opera Scotland

Amico Fritz 1893Carl Rosa Opera Company

Read more about the opera Amico Fritz

On its first outing in 1892, L'amico Fritz made a full evening's entertainment. For these seven performances, it was given as a curtain-raiser for the massively popular Cavalleria. Many more people must therefore have seen this charming pastoral comedy, but it was still not enough to encourage further exposure, and the opera subsequently disappeared from common view.

At the end of the spring tour, Pauline Joran left to join Covent Garden. Her skills as soprano and violinist were particularly useful for the role of Beppe, but the management succeeded in recruiting a replacement.

The pairing of these two operas sounds interesting, giving in one evening a display of Mascagni's range as a dramatic composer. But the combination proved to be too long, with no encores permitted by the conductor - something audiences were unaccustomed to in those days. A further experiment involved the ordering. In Edinburgh on Wednesday 17 May the evening started with the comedy. Two nights later, perhaps with a less wholly serious audience in the house, the comedy came second.