Pagliacci

The triumph of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (1890)—one of the winners of Italian publisher Sonzogno’s competition for new one-act operas—quickly spawned successors keen to mine this fashionable seam of musical verismo (realism). One of the swiftest and most successful was Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). The setting—southern Italy—and the plot, a murderous love triangle among a travelling theatre troupe, both echo the earlier opera. But Leoncavallo ups the ante, leaning into the gritty emotional realism in Act I before expanding it with an artful play-within-an-opera framework in Act II. Artifice and real life collide, and opera’s history comes together with its future in an elegant and bloody denouement. Actor Canio is convinced that his wife Nedda is unfaithful. He may play the foolish husband on stage, but refuses to do so in life. In the play’s final confrontation, Canio’s anger overflows. He sets the script aside, stabbing first his wife and then her lover Silvio to death. While Mascagni’s opera is rooted in standalone arias and ensembles, Leoncavallo’s opera unfolds in seamless arcs, with music and drama absolutely and tautly unified. The arias carry the emotional action forward, whether in the yearning lyricism of Nedda’s “Stridono lassù”, in which she envies the freedom of the birds, or the dark intensity of Canio’s “Vesti la giubba”, contrasting his silently breaking heart with his painted-on clown’s smile.