The latest issue in Frank Strobel’s Original Motion Picture Scores series, surveying orchestral music written as live accompaniment for silent film classics, focuses on Mascagni’s score for Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia satanica (‘Satan’s Rhapsody’), released in June 1917, shortly before its precociously talented director was killed, aged only 28, in the First World War. Its narrative is a variant on the Faust legend, with some fashionably decadent Wagnerisms thrown in. The elderly Countess Alba d’Oltrevita sells her soul to the Devil in exchange for her lost youth on condition she renounces love, as a consequence of which her froideur drives one of her admirers, Sergio, to suicide. The process of rejuvenation begins to reverse itself, however, when she finds herself drawn to his brother Tristano, and a curious Liebestod looms.

The score is not so much a study in diablierie as an examination of the Countess’s state of mind. The Tristan-esque cor anglais solo with which it opens, blatantly evoking ideas of a literally fatal attraction, ushers in a heady, melodically appealing exercise in post-Wagnerian melancholia. Mascagni’s harmonic idiom sometimes turns conservative, though striking chromatic sideslips suggest the Countess finds her newly acquired youth both exhilarating and disorienting. Strobel has a real sense of the music’s grand passions, and his Ludwigshafen-based orchestra is impressive, too, with plenty of glamour in the woodwind and appropriately lush strings. You’ll like it if you like Mascagni’s operas.

The film’s fastidious elegance, meanwhile, cast long shadows over Italian cinema, notably influencing Visconti’s costume dramas, so the selection of extracts from Nino Rota’s soundtrack to his 1963 film Il gattopardo (‘The Leopard’) makes an appropriate filler. Strobel avoids the ballroom dances recorded by Riccardo Muti and Josep Pons, and concentrates on the opening and closing sequences, one of the Risorgimento battles, and the unforgettable love scenes between Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale – heart-on-sleeve stuff, played with considerable flair and bags of panache.