HGO Music Director Patrick Summers muses on the origins and influence of opera’s most popular double feature.
With war bearing down on Europe, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s minister of popular culture, Lolla Alfieri, issued an edict early in 1940 that every opera house in Italy was to perform Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the opera’s premiere. It was hardly necessary; the opera had enjoyed tremendous success and many hundreds of performances in its young life, but the honor pleased the composer. To mark the occasion, he recorded the opera for posterity. Mascagni, a celebrity from the moment Cavalleria rusticana premiered in 1890, considered himself a guardian of the elusive quality of Italianità, the essence of what it means to be Italian. He was born in 1863, a few weeks after Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. The day after his death on August 5, 1945, the atomic age began in Hiroshima, Japan.
Undoubtedly his memory often turned to the fraternity of Italian composers of whom he was the last living link. He could recall Verdi, Ponchielli and Mercadante, all of whom, along with Wagner, influenced him, as well as his direct contemporaries, the giant Giacomo Puccini and the man with whom he would be linked forever, the composer of Pagliacci (Clowns), Ruggero Leoncavallo. Both Mascagni and Leoncavallo, despite singular and ambitious careers, were fated to be remembered for one work each, “Cav and Pag,” as they are known in the industry, or, occasionally, “Cavalliacci.”
Commerce played a role in the creation of both Cav and Pag. Mascagni, eager for financial success, entered Cavalleria rusticana in a one-act opera contest sponsored by Edoardo Sonzogno in 1890, which he won, and the work is largely credited with beginning the operatic verismo (realism) movement. But verismo began as a literary genre in the early 1870s with the French novelist and master of naturalism, Émile Zola. Giovanni Verga’s short story, Cavalleria rusticana, published in 1880, was the basis for the opera, its concise prose skirting the fringes of traditional plot and description, with an ending that can still shock — all in fewer than 2,000 words. Verga turned Cavalleria rusticana into a play in 1884, starring the iconic Italian actress Eleonora Duse as Santuzza, in performances in Turin attended by Mascagni. Leoncavallo was motivated to write Pagliacci not by Cavalleria’s score or libretto, but by envy of Mascagni’s financial success. The verismo operas featured potboiler plots — slices of life — with open-throated and lustfully sensuous singing. They rarely sat well with critics, who seemed to inherently distrust their lurid populism.
Mascagni and Leoncavallo didn’t know each other well, and neither was immune to petty jealousies — of each other and particularly of Puccini. Leoncavallo was by far the more prolific, writing twenty-two operas in addition to dozens of songs, orchestral works and extended pieces for solo piano, almost none of which are heard today. Mascagni wrote sixteen operas, each one utterly different from the one before, constantly challenging himself and being perhaps so adept at it that he failed to forge a recognizable and easily definable style. His facility influenced several generations of musicians, perhaps without their realizing it, though it is difficult to imagine that Harold Arlen had never heard the intermezzo from Mascagni’s 1895 Guglielmo Ratcliff when he first penned the melody for “Somewhere over the Rainbow” for the MGM classic The Wizard of Oz, so identical are the opening phrases of both. But there are other reasons Mascagni’s operas are so rarely heard: his vocal demands, particularly for his punishing tenor parts, can rarely be met, particularly in an era when it is a challenge to cast the tenor roles in Aida and Turandot. It would have been difficult to pick Leoncavallo out of a crowd. Mascagni, conversely, was matinee idol handsome, which probably did not hurt his international fame. Mascagni was not kind to Leoncavallo during most of his life, thinking him an ambitious upstart for writing Pagliacci so soon on the heels of his Cavalleria, and he delivered a back-handed compliment upon his death, “Poor Leoncavallo is dead, and his death has truly distressed me. He was a good man: he was far better than his reputation.”
Mascagni fans are surprisingly numerous, particularly considering the rarity of hearing any of his operas besides Cavalleria rusticana. One of the most ardent of the Mascagnani was the longtime Metropolitan Opera chorus master David Stivender, 1933 – 90, who compiled primary source material to create an autobiography of the composer, a “must-read” for opera fans. To him went the honor of conducting the great Hymn of the Sun, the ravishing opening chorus from Mascagni’s opera Iris, to celebrate the Metropolitan Opera’s centennial in 1983. Iris, attended by Giacomo Puccini several years prior to his own Madama Butterfly, was the first European opera with a Japanese setting. Though Puccini’s direct inspiration for Butterfly was his attendance at a performance of David Belasco’s play of the same name in New York, in a language of which he barely spoke a word, he undoubtedly was affected by the success of Iris, which enjoyed great popularity with the Italian public for several decades. Mascagni was a European bon-vivant and renowned raconteur, a celebrity conductor prior to his final years in Rome, where he was a beloved national figure ensconced in the Hotel Plaza on what is today the Via del Corso in central Rome, where one occasionally still sees flowers of remembrance. Leoncavallo was an intellectual polymath, highly influenced by the works of Italian poet Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1906). In the 1880s, prior to Pagliacci’s success and deeply in debt, Leoncavallo fled to Egypt, then Turkey and Greece, where he barely made a living as a café pianist, all the while planning an ambitious Wagner-inspired Italian “Ring” entitled Il crepusculum, based on historic Italian characters: the Medici family, Geralamo Savonarola, and Cesare Borgia. He eventually landed in Paris, where he befriended star baritone Victor Maurel, Verdi’s Iago and Falstaff, and eventually the creator of Tonio in Pagliacci, who encouraged him to return to Italy in 1889. Singers like Maurel used their fame to promote new works, something sadly rare among famous singers today, and it was Maurel who changed the opera’s title to Pagliacci, the plural of the original singular Pagliaccio, so that his role would be among the title characters. The premiere of Pagliacci, with Maurel’s help, saw the assembly of a fine cast, and Giuseppe Verdi himself recommended the conductor, a relatively unknown young Italian — Arturo Toscanini. Leoncavallo never took verismo very seriously as a movement, even though Pagliacci was a prime example of the genre, and he was openly hostile to the trend and its exponents. But with Pagliacci, Leoncavallo got it right. Few operas provide more viscerally thrilling listening or viewing. Familiarity can obscure some of Pagliacci’s inventive touches: the playful opening scene deceives us into believing we may be attending a comedy. Leoncavallo marked his famous prologue with multiple dozens of expressive markings, which combine to make it both highly entertaining, disturbing and touching, all in just over three minutes. The choral writing is truly exuberant, leaving us surprised by the longing-for-freedom imagery of Nedda’s translucent Ballatella. Nedda’s duet with her clandestine lover Silvio is the most beautiful extended passage of the score, particularly their impassioned ascending lines near the end, where they seem to enter a parallel world reminiscent of several of Wagner’s lovers. The opera’s most famous music, the aria “Vesti la giubba” — with its sad long accompanying chords leading to its tortured final phrase “Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto” (Laugh, Clown, at your fractured love) — is iconic. But the true brilliance of the score is in the finale, the commedia dell’arte scene, the opera-within-the-opera.
Leoncavallo dexterously transforms the traditional commedia dell’arte characters so familiar to Italian opera audiences: “Pantaleon,” the miser, who shows up as Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, and Rossini’s Bartolo and Don Magnifico, is represented in Pagliacci by Tonio, a character we first believe to be comic; “Leandro,” the handsome and simple young man, is in Pagliacci played by Silvio, a local villager, the only character in the opera not among the strolling players. Leandro’s fawning female counterpart, “Innamorata,” shows up as nearly every female lead in Italian comic opera: her most famous personification is Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville. An audience expecting the traditional commedia characters would have found Leoncavallo’s earthy Nedda particularly shocking and, ultimately, tragic. The most beloved and light-hearted of the commedia characters, Harlequin, the wily clown who pretends to be simple, is turned into the jealous and violent Canio in Pagliacci. Commedia dell’arte’s influence still exists in the intricate productions of Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, and indirectly, though clearly, in the major characters of the recent hit musical Hairspray.
Cavalleria rusticana has had four film versions, and Pagliacci was the first opera telecast in the United States, in 1940, though few owned the televisions to view it. Acting styles in early Hollywood and European films, well into the 1940s, would have been easily recognized by Leoncavallo and Mascagni. The “actor as flesh and blood” idea infused many plots in the early days of cinema, particularly a 1932 film entitled What Price Hollywood?, which has been successfully remade a number of times as A Star is Born. One of the last great Hollywood “Pagliacci” stories in the old style was George Cukor’s 1948 A Double Life, which starred Ronald Coleman in an Oscar-winning performance as an actor who takes on the personal characteristics of each character he plays — with disastrous results when he is cast as Shakespeare’s murderously jealous Othello. Cavalleria rusticana and its literary antecedents have also played a major role in more recent cinematic history, infusing the style and substance of Martin Scorsese’s legendary Godfather trilogy, and even appearing in the third of the films, with a blood-soaked finale occurring just outside the auditorium during a Sicilian performance of the opera. Scorsese turned to Mascagni again for his 1980 Raging Bull, which opens and closes with the intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana. The central theme of so many novels and operas of the late nineteenth century was fate, and fate would not be particularly kind to Mascagni or Leoncavallo, bestowing renown on each for only one work. They are both thoroughly and permanently of their time, connected to their worlds to a degree that will hopefully make them permanently relevant. Émile Zola, the novelist who forced the nineteenth century to look at its own darker qualities, best defined the passions of artists like himself, Puccini, Leoncavallo and Mascagni, writing, “If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” Leoncavallo would echo Zola in Pagliacci’s prologue, in words undoubtedly weighted with his own ambition:
E voi, piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane d’istrioni le nostr’anime considerate, poiche siam uomini di carne e d’ossa, e che di quest’orfano mondo al pari di voi spiriamo l’aere! And you, therefore, instead of our poor players clothes, consider our souls, for we are men of flesh and bone, and, like you, are breathing the same air of this orphan world!
E voi, piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane d’istrioni le nostr’anime considerate, poiche siam uomini di carne e d’ossa, e che di quest’orfano mondo al pari di voi spiriamo l’aere!
And you, therefore, instead of our poor players clothes, consider our souls, for we are men of flesh and bone, and, like you, are breathing the same air of this orphan world!
