What is "belfagor"

Belfagor (premiere 26 April 1923) is an Italian-language opera by the composer Ottorino Respighi to a libretto by Claudio Guastalla (1880-1948) based on the comedy Belfagor of Ercole Luigi Morselli (1882-1921), itself loosely based on the novella Belfagor arcidiavolo by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was premiered in 1923 at La Scala in Milan, under the baton of Antonio Guarnieri, since Toscanini was unavailable. The cast featured Irish soprano Margaret Burke Sheridan as Candida, tenor Mariano Stabile as her lover Baldo, and baritone Francesco Merli as the titular Belfagor, a "arcidiavolo" who tries to marry a human maiden while in disguise as a nobleman, using gifts of money to her father.

The première obtained a «full and warm» approval, with several curtain calls for the composer, but the opinion of the critics was divided, ranging from the enthusiasm of Marinetti, enchanted by the futuristic aspects of the opera, and of the music critic S. A. Lucani, to those who judged opera and libretto absolutely not enjoyable. Gaetano Cesari wrote that this work looked like an attempt, not fully accomplished, to merge in a comic opera «the fabolous and the clownish, the miracolous and the sentimental» and that the comic expressivity was damaged by the absence of «assertiveness of the melodic plan and its capacity to develop rapidly».