LA LEGGENDA DI SAKUNTALA

La leggenda di Sakuntala (1921) is the opera in which the composer Franco Alfano, both in his handling of the complexity of the tessiture and in realising the exotic atmosphere of the subject, gave clearest evidence of his mastery.  Here too the influence of Debussy remains fundamental, but essentially as a background on which the composer weaves a harmonic design of a wholly original nature. In 1936 the opera Cyrano de Bergerac marks a turning point from Alfano's first verismo manner, an achievement already anticipated in La Leggenda di Sakuntala, and here definitively consolidated.