Despite his best efforts to achieve otherwise, the Italian was doomed to be forever famous for one short opera, says Alexandra Wilson
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Ruggero Leoncavallo was a man on a mission. In 1890, he had watched his younger compatriot Pietro Mascagni achieve global success with the short opera Cavalleria rusticana. With single-minded determination, Leoncavallo set about using the same formula – a gritty tale of poverty, adultery and violent death, all set to impassioned music – to create a hit of his own. Soon enough, his Pagliacci was pleasing audiences throughout Italy and beyond, in due course becoming a regular partner for the work that had inspired it.
Pagliacci was the product of pragmatism – a calculated attempt to make money. In 1892, Leoncavallo was 35 years old, becoming jaded after years of trying to make it as a professional composer, and financially quite desperate. His family background was one of cultured affluence – his father, who hailed from Apulian aristocracy, was a judge and his mother a painter from a famous Neapolitan artistic family. The young Ruggero received family support in his musical ambitions, but finding a publisher or impresario interested in his early operatic efforts proved futile. After a few years in Bologna, he took himself off to Cairo – an uncle had a position in the Foreign Ministry there – where he drifted, finding odds and sods of work as a pianist and teacher.
Leoncavallo’s Egyptian sojourn came to a dramatic end when he was forced to flee a military coup that saw foreigners being threatened and even murdered. He made his way to France, determined to seek fame and fortune in the capital, showing characteristic drive in placing a notice in the small ads announcing his arrival and his availability for work. His life in Paris gave him first-hand experience of the sort of environment he would depict in one of his later operas, La bohème. He endured a period of genuine poverty and hunger, wandering the streets looking for work, occasionally being hired to accompany singers at a café-concert or vaudeville.
After a vigorous period of determined networking, he began to gain a reputation as a concert accompanist and vocal teacher and met leading Parisian singers, writers and publishers, as well as composers including Massenet and Gounod. The famous baritone Victor Maurel suggested he and his wife Berthe go with him to Milan – he was about to create the role of Iago in the première of Verdi’s Otello – where he promised to introduce him to the publisher Giulio Ricordi.
The move to Milan turned out to be not quite the great breakthrough for which Le
