The Sceneggiata
Little-known abroad, but extremely popular in Naples, is the local
stage musical form called the Sceneggiata. Around the start of the 20th
century, they were performed in the U.S. in areas populated by Italian
immigrants. The form has been called "a musical soap opera" and
generally revolves around domestic grief, the agony of leaving home, personal
deceit and treachery, betrayal in love, and life in the world of petty crime.
It is always sung and spoken in Neapolitan dialect. Action stops every few
minutes for someone to break out in song. As a rule, many of the plots were
flimsy after-the-fact vehicles to promote particular songs. The sceneggiata
started shortly after World War I, was extremely popular in the 1920s, then
faded, but has been enjoying somewhat of a comeback with newer generations of
performers since the 1960s. The most popular performer of the genre is the
Neapolitan, Mario Merola. The most popular sceneggiata ever written is
Zappatore, (meaning, exactly, "clodbuster," one who works the land
and breaks up the soil for farming) written to feature a song of that name in
1929 by Bovio and Albano. It then became a
stage production and was even made into a film on various occasions, the first
one actually from a film company in Little Italy
in New York City.
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