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Book
synopsis
This is the first fully documented biography of
the beloved and popular composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857-1919), whose
credits include Pagliacci and the operatic works Chatterton, Der Roland
von Berlin, Zazà, Maïa, Zingari, La bohème, and the incomplete trilogy
Crepusculum. Author Konrad Dryden has amassed material from hundreds of
unpublished letters and photographs, creating the most complete portrait
of the composer to date.
Contents
"This
book examines various facets of Leoncavallo's history: from his youth as
the son of the Naples' judge who presided over the murder trial on which
Pagliacci was based to his studies with the poet Giosuè Carducci, and
from his sojourn in France as a café-chantant pianist to his appointment
in Egypt as music instructor to the Khedive. Careful documentation and
plot synopses of Leoncavallo's numerous works are provided and his two
U.S. tours are discussed. The biography also sheds new light on
Leoncavallo's colleagues and contemporaries, including composers Mahler,
Massenet, Puccini, Verdi, and Mascagni; singers Caruso, Ruffo,
Tetrazzini, and Sanderson; and historical personalities like Toscanini,
Hugo, Carducci, Wilhelm II, and Queen Victoria. A foreword by Plácido
Domingo, a photo spread featuring more than 25 photos, and an appendix
offering the complete list of the composer's opus add to the
bibliography and index, making this the ultimate reference on this
important figure in music and opera history."
©The
Scarecrow Press 2007
OFF
WITH THE MOTLEY
"Ruggiero Leoncavallo
(1857–1919) led a life so picaresque—some would come right out and say
“self-destructive”—that his failure to attract previous biographers in
any language seems well-nigh incredible. It can be explained solely, and
tentatively, by the dreadful inferiority complex under which Italian
musicology labored until very recent times, compared with its
Austro-German or British equivalents. That complex, in turn, doubtless
derives from the fact that Italian musicology originated during
Mussolini’s government, which, as every self-respecting liberal knows,
was among the most satanic non-German regimes that has ever arisen. (Quite
unlike the splendid chaps now prevailing in Hanoi, Havana, and Pyongyang.)
Yet much in Leoncavallo’s existence would challenge historians from even
the most intellectually self-confident milieux. He routinely obfuscated
details of his career (beginning with the very year of his birth, which
he usually gave as 1858), fought with critics, thrashed around in
lawsuits as time-wasting as they were inconclusive, shamelessly recycled
earlier works, permitted much of his correspondence to go missing, and
suffered from the disastrous (if well-meant) caprices of a widow who
thought nothing of attaching his name to third-rate operas partly by
other hands. So chaotic a curriculum vitae is bound to deter any but the
most patient and diligent researcher. Which, fortunately, Konrad Dryden
is. A descendant of the great poet, Dryden has already placed opera
buffs in his eternal debt with his 1999 book on Leoncavallo’s younger
rival Riccardo Zandonai. Here he performs a similar service to the man
now remembered for having written Pagliacci and for almost nothing else.
Maybe any Italian composer
born in 1857 would have suffered by comparison with Puccini. Certainly
the one-hit-wonder status of almost every other Italian composer from
Puccini’s own generation and the next—Leoncavallo himself, Zandonai,
Pietro Mascagni, Francesco Cileà, the short-lived Alfredo Catalani—suggests
a shared fate rather than mere individual shortcomings. With Leoncavallo,
though, the problem went deeper and remains mysterious. The son of a
judge, he nevertheless condemned himself in youth to the grimmest
poverty: fun to contemplate when watching Act I of La Bohème, perhaps,
but fairly frightful to have to live through. Did it spring from
friendlessness or charmlessness? Most assuredly no. Not only did he
spend his youth studying literature with the eminent Italian bard Giosuè
Carducci (Nobel laureate of 1906), but scarcely had he left Bologna
University than he made the acquaintance of Gounod, Massenet, Victor
Hugo, and several cashed-up aristocrats. He also possessed (as he seldom
tired of observing) a linguistic flair and culture générale at the very
opposite remove from Puccini’s purely instrumentalist notions of
non-musical arts. Dryden has somehow unearthed an 1880s photograph of
Leoncavallo playing cards with the two-term Prime Minister Francesco
Crispi. Rarely has so impressive an address book been so devoid of
positive results. Only after the wild popularity of Mascagni’s
Cavalleria Rusticana spurred Leoncavallo into composing Pagliacci—premiered
at Milan in 1892, and soon to become one of the most popular operas ever
written—did he score a worldly success to match his circle of contacts.
True to his Neapolitan background, he retained the desire to cut a good
figure—una bella figura—and Pagliacci’s acclaim would have destabilized,
if not simply unhinged, many a more phlegmatic creator than he. But in
his blustering there lurked no malice. Beside Mascagni, who dedicated
one of his less inspired lucubrations “to myself, with my distinguished
consideration and unaltering esteem,” Leoncavallo emerges as almost
humble. He remained—as
far as can be determined now—faithful to the one woman all his days, in
educative contrast to Mascagni’s and (still more) Puccini’s debauches.
Moreover, he never lost the suspicion that Pagliacci had been more like
a freakish lottery win than a culmination of solid effort. Accordingly
he avoided sustained bad-mouthing of his most distinguished
contemporaries, and he likewise eschewed the dirty pool which Puccini
played with enthusiasm against almost every Italian colleague who seemed
like a threat. Characteristically, upon learning of Mahler’s hostility
toward him, Leoncavallo tried to appease Vienna’s artistic leaders by
pretending to be Jewish. Such was his idea of ingenious public
relations.
He exhibited no greater skill in backing winners during World War I,
being simultaneously too Germanized for Italian musicians, too
Italianate for German musicians, and far too fond of Kaiser Wilhelm II
to command respect anywhere very much outside Berlin’s more obviously
militaristic environments. His friendship with the Kaiser represented,
if not a marriage of true minds, then at any rate a marriage of true
mustaches. In the book’s later photos, the luxuriant growth beneath
Leoncavallo’s nose has acquired a sort of epic defiance far transcending
its owner’s physical and mental state: he perished from nephritis after
years of degrading commercial failure. Pagliacci’s climactic words—“La
commedia è finita,” “The comedy is ended”—acquired, in its composer’s
decline, a dreadful appositeness.
Altogether a sad story,
sad as Falstaff’s downfall or Micawber’s dauntless optimism is sad, and
abundant, as Dryden has com- prehensively demonstrated, in the most tan-
talizing might-have-beens. Leoncavallo’s publishers never came close to
impinging on the almost totalitarian control over Italian music that the
mighty Casa Ricordi firm enjoyed, thanks in part to its canny
investments in Puccini and, before him, Verdi. A bullying wife (like
Puccini’s) might have counteracted Leoncavallo’s innate tendencies
towards laziness, and might also have sharpened his rather too easily
mollified artistic conscience. At least, because of Dryden, he has
finally been accorded a memorial entirely unlike himself: that is,
unassuming, focused, disciplined, and perilously near to perfection. The
preface, by no less a performer than Plácido Domingo, merely confirms
the whole project’s quality. It is impossible to imagine any subsequent
book on Leoncavallo doing more than adding a handful of grace notes, and
perhaps the very occasional cadenza, to Dryden’s quietly heroic art."
R.J. Stove, THE NEW
CRITERION
"Anyone writing a book
about Leoncavallo faces problems. There are no full-scale earlier
studies to draw on, serious mistakes have been perpetuated even in
standard reference works, while source material has been dispersed and
in some cases is hard to access. Further, Leoncavallo's own accounts are
unreliable, not to say mendacious. Konrad Dryden, who has previously
written a book about Zandonai, an Italian opera composer of the next
generation, knows this territory well, and in producing what is (surprisingly)
the first substantial study of the composer in English can be
congratulated in assembling so much new information."
George Hall, BBC MUSIC
MAGAZINE
"Das Angenehmste an Konrad
Drydens Biografie über Ruggiero Leoncavallo, den Schöpfer der
unsterblichen "Pagliacci", ist die klare Strukturierung des 350 Seiten
starken Bandes in einen biografischen Teil und eine Beschreibung der
mehr als 20 Bühnenwerke des berühmten Komponisten. Noch rechtzeitig im
150. Jahr nach der Geburt des Komponisten 1857 und in englischer Sprache
erschienen, darf es als wichtige Bereicherung jeder privaten oder
öffentlichen Opernbibliothek gelten."
Michael Lehnert, DAS
OPERNGLAS
"...This
new volume on Leoncavallo by Konrad Dryden is an important addition to
the scholarship of this composer...thorougly researched, generously
documented, and written in a non-technical language that is easily
accessible by the general reader. His style is conventional, somewhat
academic but not dry. ...This book must be considered THE definitive
source on the composer and is an invaluable reference for anyone who has
an interest in Leoncavallo."
JKS,
THE MUSIC SCENE
"Konrad Claude Dryden, der
nun erstmals eine umfassende Biographie und Werkübersicht des
Komponisten (einschl. Opernführer) vorlegte, weist mit Recht auf die
derzeit völlige Unterbelichtung dieser Epoche des italienischen
Musikdramas und des Oeuvres von Zandonai im Besonderen hin. ...Seine
Monographie ist weit mehr als die vordergründige Abhandlung von
Lebensfakten: Sie ist ein einziges Pläydoyer für einen zu Unrecht
Vergessenen der Operngeschichte. Mit großer Detailkenntnis und unter
geradezu akribischer Auswertung bisher unzugänglicher Briefwechsel
porträtiert der Autor das aufschlussreiche Bild einer interessanten
Musikerpersönlichkeit.... Trotz der umfangreichen Quellenarbeit und
exakter Zitierweise geriet die neue Zandonai-Biografie keineswegs
akademisch trocken, wenngleich das wissenschaftliche fundierte Arbeiten
des Autors nicht unerwähnt bleiben sollte."
J.M. Wienecke, DAS
OPERNGLAS |
