Ruggiero Leoncavallo
Ruggiero Leoncavallo was born in Naples, Italy, on March 8, 1858. He was graduated from the Bologna Conservatory, then spent several years traveling. He finally came to Paris where he earned his living playing the piano, singing, and writing music-hall songs. The powerful Italian publisher, Ricordi, commissioned him to write a trilogy of operas set in the Renaissance. Leoncavallo completed the first of these operas, I Medici, but it proved too expensive to mount and was shelved. This experience convinced him that he ought to write an opera of slighter dimensions, one which would not cost too much to produce, and which would be in the realistic style (“Verismo”) just made so popular by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. In four months’ time, Leoncavallo completed Pagliacci, the opera through which his name survives. It received a triumphant première in Milan in 1892, with Toscanini conducting. Though Leoncavallo wrote many operas after that he never wrote one as good or as popular as the one that made him world famous. Only one of these later operas has retained interest, Zaza, introduced in 1900. A third opera, La Bohème, was well received when introduced in Venice in 1897, but was soon thrown into complete obscurity by a rival opera on the same subject, that of Puccini. In 1906 Leoncavallo toured the United States in performances of Pagliacci. The failures of his last operas made him a bitter, broken man in the last years of his life. He died in Montecatini, Italy, on August 9, 1919.
The composer prepared his own libretto for Pagliacci, a play within a play. A troupe of strolling players headed by Canio arrives for performances in a Calabrian village. Canio’s wife, Nedda, falls in love with Silvio, one of the villagers, and she in turn is being pursued by the pathetic clown of the troupe, Tonio. Through Tonio, Canio discovers his wife has been unfaithful to him, but fails to learn the identity of his rival. At the troupe’s evening performance—and in a play that closely resembles the actual happenings within the company—Canio kills Nedda when she fails to tell him who her lover is. But Silvio, in the audience, reveals himself by rushing on the stage to help Nedda. There Canio kills him.
Many of the selections from this opera are famous, but the most famous of all is the tenor aria, in which Canio speaks his immense grief on discovering that his wife has a lover, “Vesti la giubba.”
The other familiar excerpts include the baritone prologue, “Si può,” in which Tonio explains to his audience that the incidents in the play about to be presented are true to life and that the players are not performers but human beings; Nedda’s delightful ballatella, “The Bird Song” (“Stridono lassù”) where she tries to forget about Tonio’s initial response of jealousy by watching and describing the casual and carefree flight of birds overhead; the “Harlequin’s Serenade” in the play within the play sequence in the second act, “O Columbina!”; and a melodious orchestral Intermezzo which separates the first and second acts, music which hints darkly at impending tragedy through a poignant recall of Tonio’s prologue.