"I often accompanied the Maestro to his hotel after the performance at La Scala, or if he wasn't at the theater I went to greet him, after the performance just the same. Thus it was that one night I surprised him searching in his room. On seeing me he said: "Look what I've found! Do you recognize this music?" I gave the sheets a glance and exclaimed, "Maestro, this is the orchestral score of the Intermezzo from Ratcliff!" And he: "Exactly. But it was not originally written for that opera." And he told me a little story about this piece.
It had been composed at the time he was studying at the Conservatory in Milan. One day, when he didn't have even a penny in his pocket, he had an idea, a strange idea. As is well known, he and Giacomo Puccini were fellow students at the Conservatory. Mascagni went to him with the courage of desperation. He said to him, "Giacomo, lend me fifteen lire and take this score in exchange; you can do with it what you want, it's yours." Puccini, with the intent of helping his friend, gave him the money, accepting his colleague's score perhaps, indeed surely, more for curiosity than to have some security in his hand.
Many months passed and Mascagni was intent on writing Ratcliff. Working further on the composition, he thought to insert the piece which he had given to Puccini. He went back to his friend with the fifteen lire asking him to return the score. Giacomo Puccini, after searching through his piles of music, found it and gave it back to him.
Back at his apartment, Mascagni immediately played over the piece, but coming to the last page, he realized that the score bore the marks of light retouching [by Puccini] in the orchestration. Mascagni showed them to me. [Mascagni] retouched, adjusted and corrected the piece, added the chorus and made a fair copy of it, but did not change the variants that Puccini had made in the orchestration, and the piece has remained thus in Ratcliff, with the small modifications of Puccini."
While this story is charming—and perhaps entirely true—I find it a little difficult to believe. Since Ricci was indisputably Mascagni's assistant for many years, there must be a grain of truth in it, but the idea that Puccini would have had corrected any orchestration of Mascagni's is a divided opinion of peers. Even though Puccini was five years his senior, at the time Puccini had written operatically no more than Le Villi in its first incarnation—which wasn't performed until May, 1884, with the revised version not performed until December of that year; his next opera, Edgar wasn't written until 1889. Lastly, Puccini's orchestration was never his most defining attribute— one might say he learned too well from Ponchielli—until later in his career. For me, Puccini's best orchestrations begin at La Fanciulla Del West; Mascagni's increases in beauty from Iris on to the end of his career with Nerone (1935).
In Alan Mallach's biography of Mascagni, the story of the forgotten box is quite different, and has more of the ring of truth to it, where the Maschere team actually goes out searching for the box, and ends up finding it with the descendant of Mascagni's former landlady. Among the works in the box was In Filanda, the reading of which caused Mascagni great joy, and it reminded him of the work he did on Pinotta. So presumably he didn't have to find what was in the box to write the 1932 version (as he said, he 'had Pinotta in his library'), but the earlier cantata jogged his memory. Remember he and Vichi wanted to perform the original version of Pinotta many years before.
So far as Ricci's version of the story goes, somehow this seems like a joke for which Ricci may have been too serious a person to have truly appreciated the subtleties.—JM
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