Pagliacci

Leoncavallo wrote both text and music of Pagliacci in a few months and had it staged at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on 21 May 1892, with Arturo Toscanini, then twenty-five, in the pit. He claimed the plot came from a murder trial his father, a magistrate, had judged in Calabria, and defended that claim in court when the French writer Catulle Mendès accused him of lifting it from his own play. The prologue, in which a singer steps out to state that what follows is true, is the opera's manifesto and the clearest statement of verismo doctrine.