Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci Program Notes
Alive with passion and vivid with local color, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci burst on the opera scene in the early 1890s and changed it forever. As a result, their composers – Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo – were transformed into celebrities overnight.
Cavalleria rusticana
Mascagni was a true revolutionary, because he wrote this simple work in an era when opera was still “grand”, and its characters were often kings, queens, or nobility. Verdi’s Aida, the grandest of all, was the most popular spectacle in the repertory. Mascagni, however, turned his back on all that in Cavalleria rusticana and depicted poor Sicilian peasants and a brutal slice of village life instead.
Born in 1863 in the Tuscan port city of Livorno, Mascagni had to fight hard for music lessons, because his father, a baker, wanted him to take over the family business. Defiant and helped by friends and relatives, he studied briefly at the venerable Royal Conservatory in Milan, where he roomed with another young musician: Giacomo Puccini. Bleak poverty was their order of the day; and finally the desperate Mascagni left school to conduct for minor operetta troupes. His next jobs were teaching music in a small town near the heel of the Italian boot and composing a long, traditional opera that almost no one remembers today.
Pure chance led him to enter a competition for a one-act opera, but his musical genius won him the prize. The source of Cavalleria rusticana is a famous Sicilian writer’s drama about adultery, jealousy, and violent, brutal vengeance. It is laden with irony, because the title means “Rustic Chivalry” and the opera is set on Easter Day. Woven into the raw story is a depiction simple people and religious faith. Almost miraculously Mascagni managed to turn this strange mix into a tight, effective theatrical piece.
Cavalleria rusticana had its world premiere in Rome’s historic Teatro Costanzi on May 17, 1890. Still an unknown, Mascagni was lucky in having a respected conductor in the pit and two famous singers in leading roles. Soprano Gemma Bellincioni, praised for her beauty and dramatic gifts, was Santuzza; her husband, the tenor Roberto Stagno, had the clarion voice needed for Turiddu’s music.
It is certainly no exaggeration to say that Cavalleria rusticana stands as a milestone in the history of opera, for it opened the door to Italian opera known as verismo. Within months Mascagni’s little opera was wildly popular and was being given everywhere, often with him conducting it. Respected in Europe and in the United States, he went on to affect many composers who followed him and earned an enduring reputation. He died in Rome in 1945.
Pagliacci
Born in Naples in 1857, Leoncavallo came from a distinguished family that even boasted some noblemen in its ranks. After study in a great conservatory in his native city, he moved on, first to Bologna, then to Egypt, Paris, and, finally, Milan. Unlike Mascagni, Leoncavallo was profoundly influenced by international styles. Under Wagner’s spell he planned a grand Italian operatic trilogy that would follow the outlines of the German master’s Ring of the Nibelungen, but he wrote only one of its three operas. Like Mascagni, he composed many works that few remember.
Leoncavallo was the librettist of his own operas and even worked with Puccini on the text for Manon Lescaut. Later the two battled in bitter rivalry after both wrote operas called La bohème. Puccini’s, of course, was successful while Leoncavallo’s was not. They were also rivals for the attention of Giulio Ricordi, Italy’s most powerful music publisher; but Leoncavallo’s effort on that front was wasted, because Ricordi had backed Puccini.
Desperate for fame after 1890, Leoncavallo composed Pagliacci, deliberately creating a short, intense verismo work modeled on Cavalleria rusticana. He may even have dreamed of a success similar to Mascagni’s, and he was not to be disappointed. Pagliacci had its world premiere on May 21, 1892 at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan, with the great French baritone Victor Maurel in the role of Tonio and young Arturo Toscanini conducting.
Pagliacci is set in Southern Italy, and it is claimed to be based in part on reality, for the composer said he remembered his father – a judge – presiding over the trial of a murderer not unlike Canio. Another source was a French play about a poor, itinerant theatrical troupe. Like Cavalleria, Pagliacci is about adultery and murder, but it is much bloodier than Mascagni’s opera, with Canio killing his wife and her lover onstage.
Leoncavallo’s success with Pagliacci surpassed his every expectation, for it scored a real triumph and made him rich. By 1893 it had swept across Europe and was on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, paired in a double bill with Cavalleria. The composer even made an American tour in 1906. In later years he wrote more operas, operettas, and short works, but he never had another big success. He died in Montecatini, a Tuscan spa town, in 1919.
MARY JANE PHILLIPS-MATZ (1926-2013) was the author of several books on opera including “Verdi, A Biography” (1993) and “Puccini, A Biography” (2002). She was co-founder and executive board member of the American Institute for Verdi Studies at New York University.