There wasn’t much comedy in either of the usually paired, gritty verismo operas by young Italian composers Mascagni and Leoncavallo. It’s a fascinating time in Italian opera, dominated up till now by Verdi, and by the stories of royals and gods. The young radicals are drawn both to realist imaging of common lives in local villages and to the other worlds of Wagner, the massive scope of myths and global drama.
But the common lives won. There’s a good discussion here of the pairing: “Taken together, Cavalleria and Pagliacci are a masterclass in verismo. In opera, verismo works focus on bleak, emotionally intense and violent stories, often emphasizing the lives of common people, in order to be more realistic.”
It’s no accident that “Cav” and “Pag” are normally a double bill, and not merely for convenience. They were born as twin operas – Leoncavallo attended Cavalleria in 1890, and set about writing Pagliacci, his first opera, immediately. Commissioned by Sonzogno, the rival publisher, it premiered in 1892. (Nice detail of the rivalries here.)
So the two have in common the violence and bleak lives of the village. Read the interview with Pappano (who comes from one!) here: “Audiences were used to opera being about royalty or the powerful, but here you were stuck in these small villages, dealing with the rawest reactions to events and conflicts. Genuine emotions are played out, and they are played out for keeps. There is something about the crime of passion that is intrinsic to verismo opera. As the great soprano Renata Scotto said: ‘The knife is never very far away.’ And out of these rough‑hewn stories there is carved a page of life, as a phrase in Pagliacci has it.”
They also have in common a theme of revenge – revenge by the downtrodden, and revenge in the name of honour. “Cavalleria's Santuzza may be sympathetic while Pagliacci's Tonio is loathsome, but both are pushed beyond their limits by the sarcastic abuse they receive and both extract a terrible vengeance – by proxy, inevitably, for they are weak – as they incite the strong man of the piece to murder.” Read Backtrack on the ROH production.
But go beyond the similarities: Pagliacci broke new ground with its construction as a play within a play and the extraordinary merging of their tragedies. It also broke records, with the final aria, “Vesti la Giubba”, in which Canio puts on the clown’s makeup to cover his heartbreak. Words and commentary here. You need a tenor who can act.
Recorded by the great tenor Enrico Caruso in 1902, it became the first million-selling recording. “That was when the record industry really began,” explains Pappano. “And that aria became a symbol of the new technology."
Our production pairs with the one we viewed for Cavalleria. Domingo again is our lead tenor – here, Canio, the wronged husband. Synopsis here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagliacci.