“Svesti La Giubba,” Or, Uncloaking the Genesis of Pagliacci
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ANDREAS GIGER “Svesti la giubba” “Svesti la giubba,” or, Uncloaking the Genesis of Pagliacci ANDREAS GIGER Sooner or later, every man invents for himself a story he believes to be his life. The premiere of Pagliacci on 21 May 1892 made The story of the opera has proven to be pro- Ruggero Leoncavallo a famous man overnight foundly moving. Set in two acts as a play within at the age of thirty-five. His first opera, a play, it centers on the itinerant troupe of Chatterton, had languished unperformed in the Canio, his wife Nedda, Tonio, and Peppe, who archives of Luigi Trebbi and Achille Tedeschi have arrived at the Calabrian village of Montalto since 1876, and his second, I Medici, nearly to present their commedia dell’arte. The ac- complete, had been dropped by its publisher tors will play the traditional characters of Ricordi in favor of Puccini’s revised Edgar in Pagliaccio, Columbina, Pulcinella (called 1891. The success of Pagliacci was somewhat Taddeo), and Arlecchino. In act I, Canio discov- unexpected, but it has endured. In 1907, fifteen ers through the treachery of Nedda’s spurned years after the premiere, Pagliacci became the admirer, Tonio, that Nedda has been secretly first opera to be recorded in its entirety, and to meeting with her young lover, Silvio. Over- this day it remains one of the most frequently whelmed with grief and jealousy, Canio sings performed.1 his famous aria “Vesti la giubba” at the close of act I. When the “Commedia” is performed that evening (act II), Canio as Pagliaccio cannot I would like to thank Lorenza Guiot and Francesco Braghetta for their help in obtaining and transcribing some maintain his role in the farce of discovering of the sources used for this article and the anonymous Colombina in a tryst with Arlecchino, and de- reviewers for their helpful feedback. The epigraph is from mands that Nedda reveal the name of her real- Max Frisch, Mein Name sei Gantenbein. “Jeder Mensch erfindet sich früher oder später eine Geschichte, die er für life lover. As Silvio rushes from the audience to sein Leben hält.” defend her, Canio kills both of them before the eyes of the horrified audience. The opera’s vio- 1The statistics for 2014 are at http://operabase.com/ top.cgi?lang=en&season=2014, accessed 1 October 2017; lence, low-class characters, “Prologue” with its those for earlier seasons reveal similar results. promise to depict “a slice of life,” and premiere 19th-Century Music, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 225–251 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2018 by the Regents of 225 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals.php?p=reprints. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2018.41.3.225. 19TH within two years of Mascagni’s Cavalleria biographer has relied on them almost exclu- CENTURY 4 MUSIC rusticana (based on the play of the same name sively. Konrad Dryden, the author of the first by Giovanni Verga) have elevated Pagliacci to full-length biography in English, even goes a the status of a quintessential verismo opera in step further, claiming that “a careful checking which context it continues to be covered in of facts proved most of the Appunti’s details to scholarly and pedagogical literature.2 be correct.”5 But no Leoncavallo scholar has The fame of the opera greatly exceeds our drawn on the best sources for verifying the knowledge of its history. The reasons for this “Appunti”: Edoardo Sonzogno’s letters to the discrepancy are manifold and related. The prin- composer held at the Fondo Leoncavallo of the cipal one dates to August of 1943, when the Biblioteca cantonale ticinese in Locarno, to- British Bomber Command began a series of gether with unpublished letters from Leon- nightly aerial attacks on Milan, destroying the cavallo to influential friends, their recollections, Casa musicale of Leoncavallo’s publisher, and notifications in the press. These sources Sonzogno, and heavily damaging the Teatro Dal have not been consulted for a variety of rea- Verme, where Pagliacci was first performed. sons. The Sonzogno letters are extremely The resulting scarcity of documents pertinent difficult to read and have thus been quoted to the opera’s compositional history has led only in snippets; only now are they being deci- scholarship to rely almost exclusively on phered and transcribed in full.6 Other sources Leoncavallo’s “Appunti,” an incomplete eighty- had been forgotten, misinterpreted, or ignored: page autobiography that the composer dictated these include letters to and from Leoncavallo, in 1915 to Giuseppe Andriulli, a journalist work- the Pagliacci contract, libretto fragments in- ing for Sonzogno’s daily Il secolo.3 Throughout tended to enlarge the role of Tonio, and a manu- his life, Leoncavallo frequently felt wronged script copy of Tamayo y Baus’s Un drama and took advantage of opportunities to justify nuevo, a potential source for Pagliacci, all to be his actions, either in personal letters to friends discussed below. The remaining sources are in and colleagues or in open letters to newspa- obscure publications that have become readily pers. The “Appunti” were probably intended as accessible only through such Web sites as yet another outlet for him to use in telling his gallica.bnf.fr or internetculturale.it. Thus, it is side of the story. hardly surprising that such a large corpus of The “Appunti” are without doubt an impor- newly considered sources tells a story of tant source for Leoncavallo’s biography through Pagliacci that differs substantially from the one the composition of Pagliacci, and every recent told in the “Appunti.” It is understandable that Leoncavallo would have tailored the narrative of Pagliacci’s ori- 2For the “Prologue” as operatic manifesto of verismo, see, for instance, Federico Fornoni, “Pagliacci: libretto e guida all’opera,” in La Fenice prima dell’Opera 2008 [No.] 9, ed. Michele Girardi, Cecilia Palandri, and Elena Tonolo (Treviso: L’artegrafica, 2008), 91; Daniele Rubboli, Ridi 4In addition to Dryden, see Rubboli, Ridi, Pagliaccio; Pagliaccio (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1985), 74; Mauro Lubrani/Tavanti, Ruggero Leoncavallo; and Sabrina Landi- Lubrani and Giuseppe Tavanti, Ruggero Leoncavallo: I Malavolti, Ruggero Leoncavallo: Vita, opere, anedotti e successi, i sogni, le delusioni (Florence: Polistampa, 2007), curiosità (Perugia: Ibiskos, 2008). Earlier biographers re- 21; and Konrad Dryden, Leoncavallo: Life and Works lied on Leoncavallo’s much shorter autobiographical sketch (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 37. For the quintes- in Illustri italiani contemporanei. Memorie giovanili sential verismo opera, see Hans-Joachim Wagner, Fremde autobiografiche: Letterati, artisti, scienziati, uomini Welten: Die Oper des italienischen Verismo (Stuttgart: politici, patrioti e pubblicisti, compiled by Onorato Roux, Metzler, 1999), 171. For music history textbooks, see Ri- 4 vols. (Florence: Bemporad, n.d.), II, part 2:295–300. See, chard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs, The Oxford for instance, Raffaello De Rensis, Umberto Giordano e History of Western Music, College Edition (Oxford: Ox- Ruggero Leoncavallo (Siena: Ticci, 1949); and Carlo Nardi, ford University Press, 2013), 777–78. Based on the promi- L’origine del melodramma Pagliacci con uno studio critico nence of offstage song, performer-characters, and an ex- sull’arte di Leoncavallo e Puccini del maestro Francesco treme reliance on bells, Arman Schwartz has recently ar- Saverio Salfi (Genoa: Di Stefano, 1959). gued for Puccini’s Tosca as a particularly good exemplar of 5Dryden, Leoncavallo, 12. a verismo opera. See his “Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo 6Francesco Braghetta (who is working on a complete edi- Reconsidered,” this journal 31 (2008): 228–44. tion of all the letters to and from Leoncavallo) and I have 3A brief history of the document appears in Dryden, independently transcribed the early ones (the ones rel- Leoncavallo, 12. evant to this study) and then compared our transcriptions. 226 gins to his advantage, but the “Appunti” have In consultation with a lawyer, Ferruccio Foà, ANDREAS GIGER nevertheless obscured our understanding of the Leoncavallo devised a plan to circumvent his “Svesti la opera’s history with a harlequin costume of contractual obligations with Ricordi.9 Accord- giubba” omissions and distortions. These include such ing to this plan, Leoncavallo would read the intertwined topics as Leoncavallo’s early deal- libretto of Pagliaccio to Ricordi in the com- ings with Sonzogno, the sources for the libretto pany of witnesses, and if Ricordi did not offer and music, and the performances planned for him a contract, Leoncavallo would be free to Paris. The topic of originality would play a take his work elsewhere. The plan worked. particularly important role in this narrative as Ricordi insisted on seeing the music before of- Leoncavallo found himself confronted with fering a contract, whereas Leoncavallo insisted charges of overt influence, borrowing, or pla- on a contract based on the libretto alone, in giarism. As we will see, he would defend him- agreement with the procedure they had fol- self in open and private letters and, toward the lowed with I Medici. When Ricordi did not end of his life, in his “Appunti,” emphasizing budge, Leoncavallo walked out of the meeting, the novelty and real-life basis of his Pagliacci intent on approaching Sonzogno.10 and thus aligning it with the verismo of the At this point, Leoncavallo’s memoir begins giovane scuola. Indebtedness to earlier compo- to diverge from the accounts available in other sitions, whether those of others or his own, sources. According to the “Appunti,” Leon- would need to be suppressed. In short, cavallo knew two of Sonzogno’s associates: Leoncavallo would attempt to protect his legacy, Alessandro Barilati (a former impresario), and shaping a false impression of the opera’s gen- Amintore Galli (Sonzogno’s second-in-com- esis and skewing the assessment of its prov- mand and editor of Sonzogno’s house journal Il enance and historical position.