Art > Life > Art

Carl Cunningham holds the mirror up to life as it is portrayed in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

Does art imitate life, as Ruggero Leoncavallo implies in the play-within-a-play structure of his celebrated opera, Pagliacci? Or does vivid reality in the theatrical style known as “verismo” (realism) derive from an objective stage presentation largely devoid of artful manipulation? That is the message of Pagliacci’s famed companion piece, Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni.

    The case is argued both ways in Leoncavallo’s opera about an enraged actor murdering his unfaithful wife and her lover in the midst of a commedia dell’arte playlet dealing with the subject of infidelity. Leoncavallo claimed Pagliacci was inspired by an event from his own childhood: the murder of a young man by two brothers, after the man had insulted one of them and interfered with his girlfriend. Leoncavallo’s father, a jurist, had presided over the trial during the 1860s. The composer’s accounts of the story varied (he claimed at least once that the killing took place on stage and that he had actually witnessed it), but musicologist Matteo Sansone discovered while researching the source of Pagliacci that the murdered man, Gaetano Scavello di Carmine, had been a sort of babysitter to young Ruggero. It is no wonder the incident left an indelible impression upon him.

    While Leoncavallo realistically set the searing central plot of Pagliacci in the Calabrian town of Montalto during the 1860s, the place and time period of the murder, he employed the ancient device of a play-within-a-play to underline the parallels between fantasy and reality, comedy and tragedy. In so doing, he decorated a sensational true-to-life story with a layer of artifice, retreating just one step from the raw, naturalistic ideals of verismo opera exhibited in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana.

    No theatrical devices of that sort refine Mascagni’s story of Turiddu, who deserts his pregnant mistress, Santuzza, having been lured away by her rival (and his former girlfriend), Lola, only to be murdered in a revenge killing by Lola’s husband, the teamster Alfio.

    Verismo has come to mean several things in opera, depending upon whether one includes notions of sensationalism, violence and passionate emotion, or whether one defines operatic realism as subject matter dealing with common people drawn from contemporary life, presented in a naturalistic manner onstage.

     A coolly impersonal, almost journalistic style of writing that sprouted in Italian literature during the 1840s is cited as the ultimate
source of what was transformed into the emotionally charged late nineteenth-century operatic style now called verismo. Critics and other chroniclers of the time did not use the term, merely labeling it “giovane scuola” (the school of young composers). In one way or another, the term has been attached to a broad swath of later nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century operas, including Bizet’s Carmen, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, most of the operas of Puccini and several by Czech composer Leoš Janácek. Operas that premiered as late as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934) and as early as Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851) have also been cited for veristic tendencies. And the literary roots of verismo have been traced beyond Italy’s borders to the naturalistic style of nineteenth-century French-Italian novelist Émile Zola, who championed the cause of downtrodden laborers in Europe’s industrial era.

    Cavalleria rusticana was the first complete and only successful opera by Mascagni, who began musical studies late, at the age of nineteen, after defying his father’s wish that he take up the family baking business. After a period of undisciplined and incomplete studies at the Milan Conservatory, the impoverished young composer drifted into music teaching in an attempt to support his wife and family, while working interminably on his supposed masterpiece, an operatic setting of Heinrich Heine’s novel, William Ratcliff . When the Italian music publisher Sonzogno offered a 1,000-lire prize for a new opera, Mascagni was persuaded to take up the short story-turned-play Cavalleria rusticana by noted Italian author Giovanni Verga. He won the competition, the premiere featured leading Italian singers and the opera quickly gained worldwide fame.

     Mascagni had been lax in his dealings with Verga, failing to ask the author for permission to use the play, and the competition’s sponsor required him to do so before accepting the score. Verga readily granted him the rights, having previously done so for another composer who made an unsuccessful setting of his play. But when Mascagni unexpectedly won fame and a young fortune in royalties, Verga balked at being paid off with a mere 1,000 lire. He took the matter to court and won half the rights at a princely sum of 143,000 lire. Eventually, he admitted Mascagni’s opera earned him far more than his play or its original short-story version.

    While the strong passions and the contemporary setting among Italy’s working-class people appealed to audiences of the day, the opera’s long-term success is generally attributed to its melodious musical score. Th ere are several attractive arias and duets, beginning with the Sicilian folksong Turiddu sings to Lola immediately following the overture. But the glory of the music is heard in its magnifi cent choral scenes, sung during and after the Easter Sunday church scene. Th ese musical attributes relate Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana to the long, melodious tradition of Italian opera throughout the nineteenth century.

    As with Mascagni, Leoncavallo’s lifelong reputation rested upon the success of one youthful veristic opera. Not surprisingly, he carefully studied and imitated key elements of Cavalleria rusticana: in both operas, a love triangle erupts into a crime of passion, and the violence occurs on a religious holiday — Easter Sunday in Cavalleria, the Feast of the Assumption in Pagliacci. Leoncavallo compressed the story into two tightly woven acts and, like Mascagni, inserted an orchestral intermezzo at the center of the opera.

    The marks of verismo opera are readily apparent in the libretto and music of Pagliacci. However, the score contains threads from other operatic traditions that are cleverly woven into the raw, searing emotions associated with Italian verismo opera. Leoncavallo’s exposure to Wagnerism during his studies at the University of Bologna resulted in the use of thematic leitmotifs, a Wagnerian trait that gained acceptance in the late operas of Verdi and younger turn-of-the-century Italian composers. There are a half-dozen thematic motives in Pagliacci, variously associated with the Nedda-Silvio love affair, Canio’s jealousy, and other characters and plot situations.

    One of the most striking verismo applications of the leitmotif technique occurs just before Nedda is stabbed, when she defiantly
hurls the Silvio love theme at Canio while refusing to name him as her lover. Leoncavallo also draws upon the melody of the ironic phrase “Ridi Pagliaccio” (Laugh, Pagliaccio, for your love that is destroyed) from Canio’s celebrated aria, “Vesti la giubba.” It becomes a cruelly mocking orchestral codetta to the opera, immediately following the double murder of Nedda and Silvio.

    As with Mascagni, Leoncavallo became involved in litigation over the story line of Pagliacci. In his use of the play-within-a-play
format, he had to fight off charges of plagiarism from French playwright Catulle Mendès, whose 1887 play, La Femme de Tabarin,
was built on the same plot Leoncavallo employed five years later. In response, Leoncavallo identified the stabbing of Gaetano Scavello as his sole inspiration for the opera and Mendès eventually dropped his lawsuit against the composer.

    But modern operatic scholars have again scrutinized the Leoncavallo/ Mendès episode and some have felt that Leoncavallo did know Mendès’s play. More recently, Leoncavallo scholar Matteo Sansone has noted significant similarities between the plot lines and dialogue in the libretto Leoncavallo fashioned for Pagliacci and those of an earlier setting of La Femme de Tabarin by Paul Ferrier and Émile Pessard.

    So, just as art imitates life on the opera stage, we might remember that it also becomes involved in real-life issues — the kind of issues people in the age of verismo read about in their daily newspapers and we learn from nightly TV news and the Internet.
There are no singing roles for lawyers in the plots of Pagliacci and Cavalleria rusticana, but they were certainly pulling strings as
plots thickened behind the scenes.

Carl Cunningham has written continuously about the performing arts in Houston and across the nation for more than forty seasons, as performing arts critic for the former Houston Post for twenty-nine years, and as program annotator for the Houston Symphony for the past twelve seasons. He is co-author of a fifty-year history of Houston Grand Opera.