Dynamic duo: “Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci”

The unlikely journey of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci — two verismo masterpieces, beloved by audiences and tethered almost by chance.

It all started with a contest. In 1888 the Milanese music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno, hoping to encourage emerging compositional talent, invited interested young Italian composers to submit a one-act opera to a panel of prominent critics and musicians. Three entries would receive fully-staged performances at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Just two months before the deadline, the competition came to the attention of Pietro Mascagni, a young Tuscan who had dabbled in opera with little success. Mascagni seized his opportunity aggressively, requesting that poets Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci provide a libretto.

As source material, Mascagni’s librettists made the inspired choice of Cavalleria Rusticana, a novella and play about a toxic love triangle in a rural Sicilian village, by Italy’s master of the realistic school, Giovanni Verga. The title (“Rustic chivalry”) contains a twist of intentional irony and may confuse those who associate “chivalry” with an idealized code of masculine honor; Verga was a writer who rendered his affection for his countrymen through a warts-and-all examination of their flaws, faith, and often overpowering passion. His vision is that of the common chivalry of the streets.

Cavalleria premiered on May 17, 1890, with the glamorous husband and wife team Gemma Bellincioni and Roberto Stagno creating the roles of Santuzza and Turridu. The opera caused a sensation. Here was the unbridled passion and narrative approach that was to define a newly-emerging operatic style; the orchestral interlude following the opening Siciliana could not evoke anything but a sun-drenched Sicilian square on Easter Sunday. Even Verdi was impressed. “He has invented a most effective genre,” the venerated composer recorded, “short operas without pointless longueurs.” Cavalleria swept Italy, and by the end of 1891 had premiered in Berlin, London, Philadelphia, and Chicago, arriving at the Metropolitan Opera on December 30th. Bellincioni later re-created her Santuzza for a 1916 silent film, and in 1953 Anthony Quinn mimed to Tito Gobbi’s voice in another filmed version, marketed in the United States under the steamy title Fatal Desire.

Cavalleria’s success was duly noted by ambitious musicians, among them a young Neapolitan, Ruggiero Leoncavallo. Like Mascagni, Leoncavallo had despaired of receiving an operatic commission, and was resigning himself to a career in academia; now with Cavalleria’s shining example before him, he set about composing Pagliacci. The source inspiration for the libretto has never been definitively verified. Popular legend has long held that Leoncavallo’s police magistrate-turned judge father brought home the story of the jealously deranged clown who so confuses actual and theatrical reality he murders his wife onstage. On at least one occasion, Leoncavallo also claimed to have witnessed the events personally (a suspect version, given he was responding to a plagiarism lawsuit; his storyline’s similarity to Catulle Mendes’ La Femme de Tabarin had caught attention). Whatever the truth, Leoncavallo’s libretto is a veristic dream come true, its earthy appeal heightened by his setting the action in Calabria, one of Italy’s more impoverished provinces.

Pagliacci premiered in Milan on May 21, 1892, with a cast including Fiorello Giraud, Adelina Stehle, and the great French baritone Victor Maurel as Tonio. Like Cavalleria, Pagliacci was an immediate hit. The opera was first performed in North America at the Grand Opera House, New York, in June of 1893 and came to the Met the following December 11th. In 1907, Pagliacci became the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, and in 1931 the first to be filmed complete with sound, in a now rarely-seen document starring Fernando Bertini and the San Carlo Opera company.

The initial pairing of the operas as a double bill may have occurred at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in 1893. The Met first performed the “Cav/Pag” amalgam on December 22 of that year, though both works have subsequently been strange bedfellows there to such disparate partners as Salome, La traviata, and Gluck’s Orfeo; Lyric performed Pagliacci in 1982 alongside Poulenc’s La Voix Humane. Beyond these occasional anomalies the operas have rarely been disjoined, and neither has slipped from the permanent repertory.

After more than a century of shared billing, “Cav and Pag” have developed something of a dyadic identity. “Opera’s Castor and Pollux,” they have been called and, more irreverently, “opera’s ham and eggs.” There is a sensible history behind the humor, however, for though not conceived as the ubiquitous duo they became, the two works inadvertently poured the musical foundation for a burgeoning artistic movement known as verismo, or “realism.”

As the 19th century neared its end, Italian opera found itself surrounded by a rapidly evolving cultural consciousness. A gritty naturalism had crept into the visual arts through the paintings of Antonio Mancini and Francesco Paolo Michetti, and particularly into literature as manifested by the works of Giovanni Verga and the Frenchman Émile Zola. Theatrical writing eased away from romantic verse-drama and chivalric fancies in favor of an emerging fascination with the everyday (and often sordid) dramas of the working class.

Compositional styles had advanced as well; both Verdi and Wagner had achieved a coalescence of music and text heretofore unknown in opera. But the new obsession with the plight of the common man within his social environment brought opera yet further away from one of the primary tenants of bel canto — beautiful sound for beauty’s own sake — towards what many today might describe as a “cinematic” style of aural narration; Nothing was to be merely pleasing to the ear.

The verismo era was relatively short-lived, and many of its exponents have vanished into the sands of operatic time. Puccini is occasionally tendered as an exception, and his output contains veristic elements, but his lyrical, Italianate writing is generally considered a thing apart from strict verismo. And when did anyone last hear Tommasini’s Uguale Fortuna? Or Guasco’s Leggenda delle sette torri?

As a distinct performance style, however, verismo’s impact on the vocal art is incalculable. The career of Bellincioni, Santuzza at the Cavalleria premiere, is instructive; a prodigiously gifted singing actress, much admired in Traviata by Verdi himself, Bellincioni went from Santuzza to create roles in many new works, including Giordano’s Fedora, establishing herself as the first true verismo soprano. Contemporary accounts suggest that the dramatic employment of her instrument required by veristic exercise exacted a price in flexibility and ease on high (though nominally scored for soprano, Santuzza’s tessitura is rather low-lying; the role is often effectively taken by a mezzo with a good top). Purists were alarmed, fearing the standards of bel canto were fading away, but popular taste prevailed and singers enthusiastically adopted the new style.

That verismo could be sung beautifully was exemplified in the person of Enrico Caruso. Revered today as the quintessential Golden Age singer, in his own time the great tenor sang a great deal of what was then contemporary music, finding the genre dovetailed perfectly with the extrovert style and populist sympathies which had set him apart from his predecessors. Caruso embraced the repertory with relish (photographs of him as Pagliacci’s Canio remain iconic images to this day), and endowed the music with all his accustomed tonal resplendency and technical prowess.

Over time, Caruso’s example attenuated as vocalists sacrificed purity of line in a misguided quest for veristic passion, often interpolating sobs and verbal tics into the music. But while verismo was an outgrowth of bel canto (and in some ways a counter-movement) it was never intended as a wholesale rejection of its principles. The proof lies in the scores; Leoncavallo asks that Nedda field two perfectly calibrated trills in the introduction to the balatella “Qual fiamma,” and in order for Turridu’s Siciliana to make a proper effect, it requires the precise, seamlessly flowing legato of a belcantist. Happily, in the late-20th century many singers, notably soprano Renata Scotto, sought to restore the genre to its original luster. “Much verismo had a bad reputation as I was learning it,” Scotto explains, “and I have felt compelled throughout my career to rediscover it and display it in a clean, bright light... sloppy sobbings and lazy vocal technique became associated with verismo as an aberration.”

Neither Mascagni nor Leoncavallo ever matched their initial triumphs. Leoncavallo’s Zazà had a brief shining moment, and he had great hope for his La Bohème, based on Henri Murger’s popular novel — little suspecting that Puccini had the same idea. Mascagni was somewhat luckier with his Iris and the delightful L’amico Fritz, which have earned a rare revival or two. But had neither composer produced anything beyond their flagship efforts, their legacy would be assured — and their names forever intertwined — for these two seminal masterworks.

Mark Thomas Ketterson was the longtime Chicago correspondent for Opera News. He has also written for Opera UK, Playbill, the Chicago Tribune, Ravinia, the Edinburgh Festival, and other publications.