Leoncavallo: Life and Works (review)

Received wisdom goes something like this: Ruggiero Leoncavallo was a one-hit wonder, his 'Pag'—the epitome of violent operatic realism—forever destined to be paired in double bills with Mascagni's 'Cav'. But that is only part of the story: in fact, Leoncavallo wrote almost twenty stage works, ranging from ambitious Wagner-inspired epics to operettas, as well as a respectable number of songs, orchestral works, and chamber compositions. Yet despite this considerable body of work, scholarly research into Leon-cavallo's life and music has been scant, with the exception of the published proceedings of a series of conferences on the composer held in Locarno during the early 1990s, edited by Lorenza Guiot and Jürgen Maehder (Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo: Atti del I° convegno internazionale di studi su Ruggero Leoncavallo, Locarno, Biblioteca Cantonale, 3—4—5 ottobre 1991 (Milan, 1993); Letteratura, musica e teatro al tempo di Ruggero Leoncavallo: Atti del 2° convegno internazionale 'Rugero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo', Locarno, Biblioteca Cantonale, 7—8—9 ottobre 1993 (Milan, 1995); Nazionalismo e cosmopolitismo nell'opera fra' 800 e' 900: Atti del 3° convegno internazionale 'Ruggero Leoncavallo nel suo tempo', Locarno, Biblioteca Cantonale, 6—7 October 1995 (Milan, 1998)). Indeed, it was the experience of participating in one of the Locarno conferences that inspired Konrad Dryden to set about writing this book, which he calls 'the first fully documented biography'of the composer.

It might seem somewhat surprising that there should be so little literature devoted to Leoncavallo, given the ongoing popularity of Pagliacci, and even more so when one learns that the details of Leoncavallo's life were both quirky and paradoxical. This was a man who taught piano at the court of the Khedive of Egypt and then got a job accompanying excruciating singers on the harmonium at a provincial French café-concert. This was a man who played billiards with Johann Strauss II but who aspired to compose his own version of the Ring; a man whose operas were inspired both by the gory criminal trials he had attended as a child and by the lectures given by the poet Carducci he had heard as a student. This was a man of great ambition, but one destined to suffer extreme disappointment, who was able to buy a fabulously luxurious house beside Lake Maggiore, but who was later forced to flee, pursued by creditors. His astonishing social circle included not only musicians (Puccini—whose international success he greatly resented—Toscanini, Massenet, Gounod, Emmy Destinn, Emma Calvé, Sybil Sanderson, and others) but a wide range of figures from the worlds of art, literature, and politics. To read the story of Leoncavallo's life is to read a panorama of his times—and what fascinating times they were.

So why has Leoncavallo's life story been previously neglected? Doubtless the paucity of literature can be attributed at least in part to the disdain with which Verismo has historically been held by much of the academic establishment. (The publication of an article on Verismo in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, however, would seem to suggest that the tide is turning: Andreas Giger, 'Verismo: Origin, Corruption and Redemption of an Operatic Term', JAMS 60 (2007), 271—315.) But another reason why this particular Verismo composer has been neglected is that, in Dryden's own words, 'Ruggiero Leoncavallo makes a difficult case for any biographer' (p. xiii). In order to investigate the life of a composer he calls 'opera's mystery man' he has carried out research both at the Fondo Leoncavallo in Locarno and in an extensive number of archives across Europe and in the USA. Nevertheless, his task has evidently been a frustrating one. Many of Leoncavallo's letters were lost or destroyed—the surviving correspondence between him and his wife consists of a single postcard—and he kept no diary. To make matters worse, this was a composer who was in the habit of 'reinventing himself', habitually lying...