Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857 -1919)
Ruggiero Leoncavallo was born in 1857 in Naples, where he
entered the conservatory in 1866, proceeding ten years later to the University
of Bologna to take a degree in literature. His first opera, Chatterton, proved
initially unacceptable, while his second attempt at opera, with the first of an
intended
Renaissance trilogy, I Medici, did not please the
publisher Ricordi, who had started to take an interest in Leoncavallo's work,
and the trilogy remained unfinished. Ricordi had commissioned from him a libretto
for Puccini's planned
Manon Lescaut, but this was rejected by the composer. It
was in partial reaction to this early failure and to the very considerable
success of Mascagni's short and realist opera Cavalleria Rusticana, that
Leoncavallo, in 1892, wrote the text and music of Pagliacci, with a story based
on a murder case with which his father, a magistrate in Naples, had been
concerned. The work was at once accepted for performance by the impresario
Sonzogno and staged at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan with great success under
the direction of Arturo Toscanini.
The success of Pagliacci persuaded Sonzogno to stage I
Medici, the first part of the proposed trilogy, but the work failed to please,
either musically or dramatically. In 1897 Leoncavallo's version of La Boheme
was mounted at La
Fenice in Venice and was initially well enough received,
although Puccini's version of the same story, staged the year before, was
eventually to oust its later rival. A revised version of Chatterton failed, but
in 1900 the new opera
Zaza, staged at the Teatro Lirico in Milan under
Toscanini, fared well enough.
Leoncavallo's subsequent stage works enjoyed only
fleeting success, if any, and he wrote nothing to equal Pagliacci, although the
song Mattinata, written for recording and first recorded by Caruso in 1904,
remains a particularly popular item of tenor repertoire. He died in 1919.
Pagliacci remains Leoncavallo's most considerable
achievement. It came at a time when verismo, realism, often of a generally
sordid kind, had seized the imagination of the public, and is a successful
example of a genre that produced a number of contemporary operatic disasters,
whatever their passing commercial appeal. Music and text are dramatic and even
histrionic in a tragedy of jealousy expressed in the starkest terms. After its
first successful staging in Milan in May 1892 it was mounted at Covent Garden
in May the following years and in June 1893 at the Grand Opera House in New
York.