Operas

Both men began work on new operas, Boito's eventually becoming Mefistofele. Faccio returned to Milan to write his first opera, I profughi fiamminghi, which was based on a text by Emilio Praga and written for La Scala where it was presented on 11 November 1863. Not a success, it survived for only five performances.^[2] However, its failure was followed by a celebratory party given for Faccio by his friends. The event included Boito's reading of the infamous "Ode saffica col bicchiere alla mano", which infuriated Giuseppe Verdi.^[2][3][4]

Faccio's second opera, Amleto, one of the many operas based on William Shakespeare's Hamlet, was written for Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice and was given its première on 30 May 1865. The cast included some of the finest singers of the day. As Ashbrook notes, while its "innovatory libretto" was written by Boito, there was "dismay at the score's paucity of melody",^[2] but he does add that Ophelia's funeral march, the "Marcia Funebre", "[won] general approval".^[2]

However, the critics were unanimous in their praise of the promise shown in the young composer and, in the following contemporary accounts, the audience appears to have shown its pleasure at what they had heard. On 31 May, the Gazzetta di Genova wrote:

The opera was generally applauded at the end of the first act, at Ofelia and Amleto’s duet, at the finale of the second act, at Ofelia’s canzone in the third, and at the funeral march of the fourth. The young maestro was called to the stage many times.^[5]

In a letter to Faccio’s Milan teacher Ronchetti-Monteviti, Alberto Mazzucato wrote of the premiere:

Amleto [...] aroused unusual and profound emotions in the Genovese public, which celebrated your distinguished student with every type of flattering reception. The curtain-calls for the maestro and the performers were unanimous, insistent, continuous, and ever warmer as the imaginative work unfolded before the eyes of the listeners who were highly surprised with the truth of its conception, the newness of form, the passion of the melodies, the ensemble harmony, and of the robust skill that dominates the whole score.^[5][6]

As a conductor

Faccio left Italy for two years and "honed his skills as an opera conductor in Scandinavia [but] secured a post at the Teatro Carcano on his return to Milan in the Autumn of 1868".^[2] He also taught composition at the Milan Conservatory for the following ten years. In 1871, after working as an assistant conductor under Eugenio Terziani^[7] at La Scala, he was named as music director of that house which mounted a revised version of Amleto on 12 February that year. It was not a success, and was never performed again during Faccio's lifetime.

At La Scala, he conducted the first Italian performance of Aida in 1872^[2] and this was followed by the first performance of Verdi's Otello in 1887,^[2] which starred his long-time lover Romilda Pantaleoni as Desdemona, Francesco Tamagno as Otello and Victor Maurel as Iago. Other premieres of the revised versions which he conducted included Simon Boccanegra in 1881^[8] and Don Carlo in 1884.^[9] Faccio helped to launch Puccini's career, conducting his graduation piece from the Milan Conservatory, Capriccio sinfonico, in 1884.^[10]

When Victor Maurel was planning to revive the Théâtre-Italien company at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1883, it was hoped that Faccio would be chief conductor.^[11][12] He was hoping for not less than 100,000 francs. However, the managers at La Scala, the Corti brothers, agreed a new contract with Faccio which kept him in Milan.^[13] In the end Gialdino Gialdini was engaged instead, with a young Arnaldo Conti as assistant conductor: Faccio only conducted four of the eight performances of Simon Boccanegra in Paris through the 1883-1884 season.^[14]

He continued to have an active conducting career in several Italian cities, as well as abroad where Otello was given its première. These included London on 5 July 1889^[2] with Tamagno repeating his triumph as the Moor, and the Italian premiere of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger.^[10] But by late 1889, his health was having a profound effect on his work. Verdi arranged for a less stressful post in Parma, but even that was too much.^[15] After a diagnosis related to syphilis, he was institutionalized in Monza and died there.