Ruggero Leoncavallo

Pagliacci made him, and then in a sense swallowed him. Written fast in the wake of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, to his own libretto, it went on at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan in May 1892 under Toscanini and has not left the repertory since; the play within the play, and the collision it stages between a performance and the jealousy underneath it, give the piece a concentration Leoncavallo never found again. Vesti la giubba became, through Caruso, one of the defining records of the early gramophone. He was born in Naples in 1857, studied at the conservatory of San Pietro a Majella and then read literature at Bologna under Carducci, and spent unsettled years as a pianist and teacher in Egypt and France before Milan and the publisher Ricordi. His own La bohème reached Venice in 1897, a year after Puccini's had reached Turin, and was buried by it. Zazà, I Medici and Der Roland von Berlin followed; the song Mattinata, written for Caruso to record, has outlived all of them. He died at Montecatini Terme in 1919. He entered the Naples conservatory at eight and had his maestro's diploma at sixteen, and took his doctorate in literature at twenty. Libretto and score of Pagliacci were finished in five months; nineteen more operas came after it, along with operettas, symphonic and piano music and songs.