PagliacciRipped from the Headlines: Jealous Husband Stabs Wife and her Lover!

As one of the seminal Verismo operas, Pagliacci is formally and thematically innovative. From its opening moments, as Tonio breaks the “fourth wall” to prepare us for the action to follow, Leoncavallo’s skills as a dramatist are clear. So we needn’t worry about unproven claims by Leoncavallo’s contemporaries that the story was derivative, a notion that provoked some lawsuits that went nowhere back in the day. But if Leoncavallo’s musical approach was new, the story was as old as marriage itself. It remains as topical as last week’s video stream.

As the son of an eminent police magistrate and judge, Leoncavallo was familiar with stories of jealous, vengeful lovers and their crimes of passion since childhood. So were his audiences. And if the story seemed familiar, opera’s troupe of comic actors were even more so. Itinerant theatricals were staples of small-town entertainment in 19th-Century Italy. Their players were instantly recognizable—standard characters enacting comic situations that could be traced back centuries, to the plays of Plautus and Terence. In the opera’s play-within-a-play, we hear these comic types referred to by their standard-issue IDs. For example, Nedda plays Colombina (a Columbine, always perky, always concealing ulterior motives); the male clowns are similarly recognizable as Pulcinellas or Arlecchinos (Harlequins) or, in Canio’s case, a Vecchio or a Dottore—an older, possessive husband. He plays Pagliacco, but they are all pagliacci—clowns. And, as Tonio and Canio remind us, they are all real human beings under all that make-up.