When Puccini's Rival Came to Seattle

Pagliacci has been one of the world’s favorite operas since its 1892 premiere. Here at Seattle Opera we’ve given it five times now (1966, 1974, 1983, 2008, and now 2024), sometimes on its own, sometimes as part of a double-bill with operas such as Cavalleria rusticana or Gianni Schicchi. But among the opera “classics” performed repeatedly in Seattle there’s something unique about Pagliacci: this opera’s creator once visited our fair city.

Initially collaborators, Puccini (left) and Leoncavallo (right) became arch-rivals when both made operas about La bohème.

Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote both the words and music of Pagliacci. It’s not his story, exactly. When Pagliacci became a hit, the French writer Catulle Mendès threatened to sue Leoncavallo for plagiarizing Mendès’s play of five years earlier, in which an actor murders his wife. In rebuttal, Leoncavallo pointed out that Mendès had stolen his plot from a Spanish play written twenty years earlier. Besides, Leoncavallo explained, his inspiration came from something he’d witnessed as a child, in 1865, when his father—a district judge in Italy’s deep south—adjudicated a crime of passion: an actor had murdered his wife and her lover. (Scholars have since pointed out Leoncavallo was either misremembering or lying: the real-life case barely resembles Pagliacci.)

Whatever the origin of its story, Pagliacci might not have gotten off the ground without support from another Frenchman, the great baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago in Verdi’s Otello in 1887. Leoncavallo, then a café pianist scrounging for work in Paris, had helped Maurel learn that role. A few years later, when Leoncavallo had finished Pagliacci, Maurel compelled Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme to take a risk on his unknown composer-friend. Maurel would create the role of Tonio, provided that Leoncavallo wrote him an aria (the Prologue), changed the opera’s name from Il pagliaccio (The Clown) to Pagliacci (Clowns, i.e. including Tonio) gave Tonio the famous spoken last line, “La commedia è fi nita.” (Pretty quickly tenors, including Enrico Caru took over delivery of that line, to prevent baritones from upstaging them at the climax!)

So, Pagliacci isn’t exactly Leoncavallo’s story. The toxic masculinity that drives the tragedy was everywhere in Leoncavallo’s world—except in the composer’s home and life. His marriage was more about comfort and companionship than name, honor, or procreation. (Leoncavallo helped raise a girl, presumably his wife’s illegitimate daughter, who eventually inherited his estate.) Leoncavallo knew nothing of the adultery, womanizing, and insane jealousy that characterized the life of his rival, Giacomo Puccini.

COMPOSER VS. COMPOSER

But professionally, Leoncavallo’s fate was always to lose out to Puccini. At first, they were friendly collaborators: Leoncavallo helped write the libretto for Puccini’s first success, Manon Lescaut. But within a month of its premiere, both Leoncavallo and Puccini were composing operas on La bohème, and quarreling publicly about who had prior rights to the subject. Puccini’s La bohème hit the stage fi rst, in 1896; Leoncavallo’s followed in 1897. Although Leoncavallo’s version has its fans, Puccini’s La bohème has an indisputable universal appeal and an unshakable status as the ‘perfect’ opera. Both composers were outrageously gifted at writing melody. Thanks to Puccini’s uncanny instinct for musical drama, his melodies always strike listeners squarely on the solar plexus. Leoncavallo’s melodies really only do so in Pagliacci. Of Leoncavallo’s twenty or so operas and operettas, only Pagliacci is irresistible.

Unable to repeat the great success of Pagliacci, Leoncavallo concluded that his enemies—Puccini, but even more Puccini’s publisher, Ricordi—were deliberately sabotaging his career. When money became scarce, Leoncavallo took to writing quick, easy, frivolous operettas (Puccini followed suit with La rondine) and to touring. In the fall of 1906, a tour of America with seven singers and the 75-piece “La Scala Orchestra” brought Leoncavallo to Seattle.

They traveled 27,000 miles in eight weeks, scurrying up and down the east coast before performances in the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Pacifi c Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and Washington, D.C.. Their adventure concluded in Muncie, Indiana. That exhausting schedule must have taken its toll; at least one reviewer complained that Leoncavallo’s “orchestra, said to be that of La Scala, Milan, is of inferior quality, with strings and wind instruments often at variance as to pitch.” This skepticism about the orchestra’s affiliation with La Scala reflects a letter Ricordi published in the New York Sun attacking Leoncavallo for misrepresentation in advertising: “The La Scala orchestra...never existed....When [La Scala] is closed no one who has played there can claim to be a member of [the] La Scala orchestra.” Leoncavallo’s rebuttal: “Every musician who has ever formed part of the La Scala [orchestra] has a right to lay claim to the fact, and the orchestra which I now have is composed exclusively of La Scala players.”

A fire damaged Seattle's Grand Opera House hours after Leoncavallo conducted there, in 1906. © University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections

LEONCAVALLO IN THE EMERALD CITY

In Seattle, where they played three concerts, November 23, 1906, was “a night of nights for opera-goers.” The Seattle Daily Times called it “one of the most brilliant musical events in the history of the city.... Never before 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 men to these songbirds.... Nothing could have been more completely successful than their rendition of excerpts from ‘I Pagliacci’.” They also performed excerpts from Leoncavallo’s La bohème, Rolando di Berlin, and Zazà, as well as “Viva l’America,” Leoncavallo’s unfortunate arrangement of ‘Yankee Doodle’ and ‘Dixie.’ Puccini had more success garbling American music a couple years later, when La fanciulla del West premiered in New York.

The strange thing about Leoncavallo’s Seattle adventure: later that night, a burglar attempted to break into the theater’s safe—and the building caught fi re. The next morning, a doorman who slept at the Grand was awakened by the noise of the automatic sprinkler system. He groped his way through thick smoke to the box office, where he telephoned the fire department. The fire was put out quickly; the damage (mostly from smoke and water) was estimated at $5,000 to $7,500. The burglary was abandoned, probably because the burglar noticed—or perhaps caused—the fire. The only real casualty was the doorman’s pet rat, who died from smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire was never determined. Leoncavallo’s matinee and evening concerts the next day were moved to the nearby Seattle Theatre. After repairs, the Grand Opera House reopened a few weeks later. But it burned down again—this time for good—in 1917. Today there’s a parking garage at 217 Cherry St.

And Leoncavallo, too, is long gone. Artists, like theaters, are all too fragile and mortal. Let us be thankful for our artists and our arts spaces, because nothing lasts forever, not even memory. If Leoncavallo remembered Seattle, among the many American communities he visited, it was probably for the chaos and panic of that fi re. But we remember him—indeed, in a way he is here with us again—when we perform Pagliacci properly: in a way that burns down the house.

Pagliacci runs August 3–17, 2024 at McCaw Hall.
Tickets and info at seattleopera.org/pagliacci.