Background Notes
Unlike many of his contemporaries (including Puccini), Ruggero Leoncavallo was a man of letters and in touch with the avant-garde trends of the day, including Italy 's giovane scuola. This ?young school? of writers was guided by the philosophy that the author's hand should not be apparent to the reader. Events should come about naturally, a ?slice of life,? with no editorial comment. The darker side of existence seemed to have greater appeal, and their resultant plots were often single-minded and fast-paced, accelerating toward an inevitably brutal conclusion. After witnessing the overwhelming success of Pietro Mascagni's opera, Cavalleria rusticana (based on one of these verismo plays), Leoncavallo was determined to take a stab at the genre himself.
Pagliacci, however, is not based on a work by the giovane scuola. It is an original plot, or so most thought until one French playwright, Catulle Mendès, claimed Leoncavallo had plagiarized his play, La femme de Tabarin. Mendès backed down when it was soon discovered that his play resembled several others, which put himself in jeopardy, but in the process of sorting it all out the composer was still forced to defend himself. Leoncavallo claimed the source of Pagliacci was an event from his own life ? as a boy in his father's courtroom he had witnessed the trial of an actor who had murdered his wife after she had had an affair. In fact, he claimed to have at his disposal the murderer himself, recently released from prison and prepared to testify on Leoncavallo's behalf. Still, a close comparison of libretto and play reveal the composer's debt to Mendès and others, whose dramas became familiar to him during his Parisian stay, but it was all within the boundaries of 19 th -century artistic license.
What is not commonly known is that the true facts are not exactly as Leoncavallo had lain out ? the real-life drama was a little closer to the composer's heart. Thanks to a little expert detective work by Matteo Sansone ( Music and Letters, LXX (1989), 342 ? 62), we now have the real story. The victim, Gaetano Scavello, was caretaker of young Ruggero. Scavello leapt to the defense of a young Montaltan woman who had been insulted by her lover, Luigi D'Alessandro. Publicly humiliated, D'Alessandro and his brother met Scavello as he left the theater one night and knifed him.
For his personal account and later his opera, Leoncavallo embellished the details a bit ? the murder happened ?right in front of him,? the murderer was a commedia dell'arte actor who had found a love note from Scavello in his wife's belongings, and the wife was also killed. The exact date of the double homicide was moved from March 5, 1865, to August 15, a holy festival day, to give credence as to why the traveling commedia troupe might be in the small town of Montalto .
Though Pagliacci was written for a famous baritone, Victor Maurel, it is really a tenor's opera. The role of Canio and his aria ?Vesti la giubba? was quickly apprehended and exploited by leading singers of the day. The singularity of the tenor's plight dominates the opera and pushes to the very end ? in fact early Canios went as far as appropriating the final line, ?La commedia è finita? from Tonio, and this practice was eventually published in the piano-vocal score. However, Tonio, by uttering the final line, completes the dramatic framework initiated in the Prologue, drawing to a close the play-within-a-play-within-a-play. In modern interpretations of the opera, directors commonly respect the composer's original intent.
Courtesy of Minnesota Opera
