When Puccini’s Rival Got here to Seattle

Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote each the phrases and music of Pagliacci.
It’s not his story, precisely. When Pagliacci turned successful, the French
author Catulle Mendès threatened to sue Leoncavallo for plagiarizing Mendès’s
play of five years earlier, wherein an actor murders his spouse. In rebuttal,
Leoncavallo identified that Mendès had stolen his plot from a Spanish play
written twenty years earlier. Moreover, Leoncavallo defined, his inspiration
got here from one thing he’d witnessed as a toddler, in 1865, when his father—a
district decide in Italy’s deep south—adjudicated against the law of ardour: an actor
had murdered his spouse and her lover. (Students have since identified
Leoncavallo was both misremembering or mendacity: the real-life case barely
resembles Pagliacci.)

Regardless of the origin of its story, Pagliacci won’t
have gotten off the bottom with out
help from one other Frenchman, the nice baritone Victor Maurel, who created
the function of Iago in Verdi’s Otello in 1887. Leoncavallo, then a café pianist
scrounging for work in Paris, had helped Maurel study that function. Just a few years
later, when Leoncavallo had finished Pagliacci, Maurel compelled Milan’s
Teatro Dal Verme to take a danger on his unknown composer-friend. Maurel would
create the function of Tonio, offered that Leoncavallo wrote him an aria (the
Prologue), modified the opera’s identify from Il pagliaccio (The Clown) to Pagliacci
(Clowns, i.e. together with Tonio) gave Tonio the well-known spoken final line, “La
commedia è fi nita.” (Fairly shortly tenors, together with Enrico Caru took over
supply of that line, to forestall baritones from upstaging them on the climax!)

So, Pagliacci isn’t precisely Leoncavallo’s story. The
poisonous masculinity that drives the tragedy was in every single place in Leoncavallo’s
world—besides within the composer’s residence and life. His marriage was extra about consolation
and companionship than identify, honor, or procreation. (Leoncavallo helped increase a
lady, presumably his spouse’s illegitimate daughter, who ultimately inherited his
property.) Leoncavallo knew nothing of the adultery, womanizing, and insane
jealousy that characterised the lifetime of his rival, Giacomo Puccini.

COMPOSER VS. COMPOSER

However professionally, Leoncavallo’s destiny was all the time to lose
out to Puccini. At first, they had been pleasant collaborators: Leoncavallo helped
write the libretto for Puccini’s first success, Manon Lescaut. However inside
a month of its premiere, each Leoncavallo and Puccini had been composing operas on La bohème, and quarreling publicly about who had
prior rights to the topic. Puccini’s La bohème hit the stage fi rst, in 1896;
Leoncavallo’s adopted in 1897. Though Leoncavallo’s model has its followers,
Puccini’s La bohème has an indeniable common enchantment and an
unshakable standing because the ‘excellent’ opera. Each composers had been outrageously
gifted at writing melody. Due to Puccini’s uncanny intuition for musical
drama, his melodies all the time strike listeners squarely on the photo voltaic plexus.
Leoncavallo’s melodies actually solely accomplish that in Pagliacci. Of Leoncavallo’s
twenty or so operas and operettas, solely Pagliacci is irresistible.

Unable to repeat the nice success of Pagliacci,
Leoncavallo concluded that his enemies—Puccini, however much more Puccini’s
writer, Ricordi—had been intentionally sabotaging his profession. When cash turned
scarce, Leoncavallo took to writing fast, simple, frivolous operettas (Puccini
adopted go well with with La rondine) and to touring. Within the fall of 1906, a
tour of America with seven singers and the 75-piece “La Scala Orchestra”
introduced Leoncavallo to Seattle.

They traveled 27,000 miles in eight weeks, scurrying up and
down the east coast earlier than performances within the Midwest, the Nice Plains, the
Pacifi c Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and Washington, D.C.. Their journey
concluded in Muncie, Indiana. That exhausting schedule should have taken its
toll; not less than one reviewer complained that Leoncavallo’s “orchestra, stated to
be that of La Scala, Milan, is of inferior high quality, with strings and wind
devices usually at variance as to pitch.” This skepticism in regards to the
orchestra’s affiliation with La Scala reflects a letter Ricordi revealed within the
New York Solar attacking Leoncavallo for misrepresentation in promoting:
“The La Scala orchestra…by no means existed….When [La Scala] is closed nobody who
has performed there can declare to be a member of [the] La Scala orchestra.”
Leoncavallo’s rebuttal: “Each musician who has ever shaped a part of the La
Scala [orchestra] has a proper to put declare to the very fact, and the orchestra which
I now have consists completely of La Scala gamers.”

A hearth broken Seattle’s Grand Opera Home hours after Leoncavallo carried out there, in 1906. © College of Washington Libraries, Particular Collections

LEONCAVALLO IN THE EMERALD CITY

In Seattle, the place they performed three live shows, November 23,
1906, was “an evening of nights for opera-goers.” The Seattle Day by day Instances known as
it “probably the most sensible musical occasions within the historical past of town….
By no means earlier than did singers on that stage [Seattle’s Grand Opera House, 217 Cherry
St.] have so magnificent an instrumental accompaniment as that given by
Leoncavallo and his males to those songbirds…. Nothing may have been extra
fully profitable than their rendition of excerpts from ‘I Pagliacci’.”
In addition they carried out excerpts from Leoncavallo’s La bohème, Rolando di
Berlin, and Zazà, in addition to “Viva l’America,” Leoncavallo’s
unlucky association of ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘Dixie.’ Puccini had extra
success garbling American music a pair years later, when La fanciulla del
West premiered in New York.

The unusual factor about Leoncavallo’s Seattle journey:
later that evening, a burglar tried to interrupt into the theater’s protected—and the
constructing caught fi re. The subsequent morning, a doorman who slept on the Grand was
woke up by the noise of the automated sprinkler system. He groped his method
by means of thick smoke to the field workplace, the place he telephoned the fire division.
The fire was put out shortly; the harm (principally from smoke and water) was
estimated at $5,000 to $7,500. The housebreaking was deserted, most likely as a result of the
burglar observed—or maybe precipitated—the fire. The one actual casualty was the
doorman’s pet rat, who died from smoke inhalation. The reason for the fire was
by no means decided. Leoncavallo’s matinee and night live shows the following day had been
moved to the close by Seattle Theatre. After repairs, the Grand Opera Home
reopened just a few weeks later. However it burned down once more—this time for good—in
1917. Immediately there’s a parking storage at 217 Cherry St.

And Leoncavallo, too, is lengthy gone. Artists, like theaters,
are all too fragile and mortal. Allow us to be grateful for our artists and our arts
areas, as a result of nothing lasts without end, not even reminiscence. If Leoncavallo
remembered Seattle, among the many many American communities he visited, it was
most likely for the chaos and panic of that fi re. However we keep in mind him—certainly, in a
method he’s right here with us once more—once we carry out Pagliacci correctly: in a method that
burns down the home.