Mala vita (Wretched Life) is an opera in three acts composed by Umberto Giordano to a libretto by Nicola Daspuro adapted from Salvatore Di Giacomo's and Goffredo Cognetti's verismo play of the same name.

Amongst its rare modern revivals was the 2002 performance at the Teatro Umberto Giordano in Foggia which was recorded live and released on the Bongiovanni label.

In July 1888 the Milanese music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno had announced a competition open to all young Italian composers who had not yet had an opera performed on stage.

Amintore Galli, Sonzogno's music advisor, convinced the publisher to offer a commission to the young Giordano for a full-length opera.

The play, set in the slums of Naples amidst preparations for the Piedigrotta festival, had in turn been based on Di Giacomo's short story Il voto.

Daspuro, a giornalist and librettist, was Sonzogno's representative in Naples and had written the libretto for Mascagni's L'amico Fritz which premiered in 1891.

His libretto for Mala Vita, which converted the play's Neapolitan dialect prose into Italian verse, nevertheless remained very faithful to the original, including its metaphors and idioms and its three-act structure.

[2][3][4] Giordano's score makes ample use of the Neapolitan language and the idioms of Neapolitan vernacular music, seen most prominently in three set pieces of the final act: Vito's serenade "Canzon d'amor", a tarantella danced by the women as they are about to depart for the Piedigrotta festival, and Annetiello's proposed new song for the festival, "Ce sta, ce sta nu mutto ca dice accussì".

[2][3] Mala vita premiered to great success on 21 February 1892 at the Teatro Argentina with Roberto Stagno as Vito and Gemma Bellincioni as Cristina.

The journalist Eugenio Sacerdoti lamented that he could barely hear the music because "from the beginning, the San Carlo was like a kennel of barking dogs.

"[5] The reaction stemmed partly from outrage that such a sordid story set entirely in a slum was appearing on the hallowed stage of the city's most important opera house.

Roberto Bracco wrote in the Corriere di Napoli that he regretted having witnessed Bellincioni and Stagno singing amidst "the garbage of the alleys" and "the prisons of sinful womanhood" (i.e.

[6] However, according to Matteo Sansone, there was also outrage that the opera's morally dubious characters and the squalid alleys in which they lived were presented as typical of Naples.

[2] Mala vita received a much warmer reception from the audience in Vienna when it was presented the following September at the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre, along with other operas by Sonzogno's composers, including Cavalleria rusticana, L'amico Fritz, and Pagliacci.

The German critic, Eduard Hanslick, who had seen the Vienna performance wrote: In its merciless truthfulness to life Mala vita is both gripping and revolting at the same time, like most of these realistic pieces.

The music of Maestro Giordano makes its effects through the rough-hewn ability to achieve a tone appropriate to the situation, and now and again by means of a gentler passage, as for example in Cristina's first entry.

With the help of Daspuro, Giordano revised the libretto in 1894 and sought to tone down the gritty verismo features of the original in the hope of making it more acceptable to Italian audiences.

[9] The revised work, re-titled Il voto, premiered on 10 November 1897 at the Teatro Lirico in Milan with Enrico Caruso as Vito and Rosina Storchio as Cristina.

After a few sporadic performances, including a run at the Teatro Bellini in Naples in 1902 with Armanda Degli Abbati as Cristina, it too disappeared from the repertoire.

[4] Setting: The slums of the Basso Porto quarter of Naples in 1810, a few days before the start of the Piedigrotta festival[11] Act 1 A crowd of people has gathered in the square outside Vito's dyeing workshop.

The barber Marco and the crowd comment that Vito's illness is God's punishment for his affair with Annetiello's wife, Amalia.

He begs for God's forgiveness and healing and vows that in return he will marry a "fallen women" and save her from a life of sin.

Annetiello is momentarily nonplussed but then sings a paean to the approaching Piedigrotta festival, joined by the boys and men in the square, "Tutto è già pronto".

Now alone and standing before the shrine where Vito had made his vow, Cristina sings of her grief, how she had longed for someone to rescue her from her sordid life, but in the end, God had refused her wish, "Lascia quei cenci".