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Luigi Maresca
Luigi and Elodia Maresca
Luigi Maresca was a singer, author, and impresario who flourished the last decades of the 19th century in Italy. His was among the primary operetta companies of the time, and he and his wife Elodia sang in a dazzling number of them, most of which are no longer heard anywhere outside of Italy.
In 1885 he hired Pietro Mascagni along with a twenty-year old Neapolitan fresh from the Academy of music of San Pietro in Majella named Carlo Lombardo. The two of them conducted a number of light musical works.
While Mascagni left Maresca just as they were about to embark on a tour, Lombardo continued with him and became famous as a conductor and composer. In particular his production of The Gypsy Baron which was premièred in the presence of Johann Strauss, Jr. was an enormous success. In 1891 Maresca wrote the libretto to a new operetta with Lombardo's music titled Un viaggio di piacere, which was performed in Turin. This was followed by I Coscritti, later re-titled and revised by Lombardo as Accade a mezzanotte.
Much later in Mascagni's career Lombardo approached him with the idea of making Silvano into an operetta, but Mascagni refused the offer, inquiring instead whether Lombardo wanted to collaborate on a new work altogether. Not without its own struggles to be created, the operetta finally was titled Sì—the name of the heroine.
The Maresca family included Achille, Pietro, and Amalia, all of whom seemed to have been part of the Maresca company at one time.
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