Pietro Mascagni was a relatively young man of 27 when Cavalleria rusticana premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Mascagni came from humble origins, his father was a baker, and he went against his family’s wishes in order to pursue his desire to be a composer. With help from a local nobleman in Livorno, his home town, he went to the Milan Conservatory where he was a student with Ponchielli (the composer of La gioconda) and was a roommate living the bohemian student life with Giacomo Puccini. But he didn’t last long at the conservatory. His spirit rebelled against any kind of formal or structured compositional training, and in 1885 he left Milan and began to tour with various small opera companies, acting both as a kind of resident composer and arranger, as well as a conductor. He finally landed in Cerignola in the region of Apulia in 1886, making his living as a music teacher.
Things remained relatively quiet for Mascagni until the publishing firm of Sonzogno announced its second opera competition in 1889 (the competition was established in 1883). The Sonzogno Competition was a great prize for a young composer because it came not only with publication, but with an assured production of the work. The young Mascagni felt that he was ready to enter the competition and put everything aside in order to prepare an opera for it. There were 72 other applicants. Using Verga’s scena popolare Cavalleria rusticana, which he had seen with Duse in the key role of Santuzza in Milan, he entered the competition and won. With the overwhelming success of the opera the firm of Sonzogno began to collect composers and works which reflected the new veristic style, publishing Pagliacci (Leoncavallo), Andrea Chénier and Fedora (Giordano), L’amico Fritz (Mascagni) and La Gioconda (Ponchielli).
Mascagni, although he wrote a number of noteworthy operas, like Isabeau, Iris and L’amico Fritz, never had another success that was quite the equal of Cavalleria rusticana. He spent much of his life as an academician (director of the Liceo Musicale in Pesaro) and as a conductor of some renown. The much vaunted production of his final opera Nerone at La Scala in 1935 was concocted by the ruling Fascist government as a volley against modernism and the composer’s connection with the Mussolini regime clouded his reputation after his death in Rome in 1945.
Ruggero Leoncavallo was born to a magistrate in Naples and had a relatively well-off childhood. He attended the Naples Conservatory where he excelled in piano and composition and later continued his work at the Bologna University, the oldest university in Europe. He never finished his degree, traveling to Egypt to seek his fortune on the advice of an uncle in the foreign service. After that he returned to Europe, residing in Paris for a time, to act as a pianist and music teacher. He came under the influence of Wagner for a time, even plotting a Ring-like trilogy of operas that would be performed over successive nights (Crepusculum, begun in 1882). Through the intercession of Victor Maurel, the great baritone who first sang the roles of Falstaff and Iago, he got a commission from Giulio Ricordi to complete his trilogy for that great publishing house, but it came to naught. He eventually returned to Milan where he jumped into the musical life of the city, even aiding Puccini in the development of the libretto for Manon Lescaut.
Leoncavallo’s real break came with the overwhelming success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in 1890, an event which spurred his interest in writing a similar short work with a realistic and violent story at its core. He chose to write about something that happened in a town close to Naples when he was a child, an onstage murder of a wife by her jealous actor-husband. The case was brought before his magistrate father, from whom he undoubtedly received the story. But stories of jealousy with violent endings were quite the rage. Bizet’s Carmen was the most popular opera in Italy at the time, and its influence is strongly felt in these new verismo operas.
Although he had an earlier relationship with the house of Ricordi, Leoncavallo offered his idea to Sonzogno who grabbed it up enthusiastically, convinced that it would be as successful as Cavalleria had been. And, in fact, that is exactly what happened. At the premiere in Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme, Pagliacci was wildly successful, due in no small part to the baton of the relatively new conductor, Arturo Toscanini.
An interesting side-story to Leoncavallo’s life is the tussle between himself and Puccini over their attempts to bring Mürger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème to the opera stage. Evidently Leoncavallo had the idea first and was well into the composition of his La bohème when he met Puccini in a Milan café and heard that he had begun work on the same property. Leoncavallo accused Puccini of stealing the idea, convinced that he had mentioned it to Puccini previously. Puccini claimed innocence, but the argument thus begun was taken up in the Milanese press. Leoncavallo’s work, although it has much to recommend it (and was performed first!), ultimately does not have the spirit and fleetness of the Puccini. And although Leoncavallo’s La bohème was better received initially by audiences and critics alike, it was Puccini’s effort that eventually became established in the international repertory. Leoncavallo spent the rest of his years writing lighter fare, operettas of faint imagination and originality that did little to further his reputation as a serious composer of opera.