I’ve often thought it would be very fruitful to write director’s notes after the rehearsal process, when the backstage stories and the cast of characters have just flowered into all the art amid the chaos that must transpire behind the scenes... Before you, the audience, arrive.
In a sense, you are aware of that secret process, as in Pagliacci's play within a play: The watchers sense what the actor is thinking.
What lies in the space between reality and illusion, and how does the actor lose himself in a part, merging and developing another facet, even another full persona? Divining those mysteries by experiencing that metamorphosis is the truth that is strived for. And the birth of verismo contributed to this phase of the modern theater.
Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, opera’s most famous twins, ignited a revolution. When first composed and performed in 1890 and 1892 respectively, they created a furor of excitement, ushered in a new age of modernity and changed the direction of Italian opera. This verismo or “truth” style replaced the old protagonists of gods, kings, and heroes with the common man and his real-life dramas.
Cav-Pag, as it is affectionately been called since they were first paired in 1903, not only founded verismo, but holds the bar high in terms of the most passionate and high-voltage emotional conflicts presented in opera.
It is interesting to note that there are essentially two traditional periods in which Cavalleria and Pagliacci are usually set: one is the period of their composition and the other is the 1930s. We have chosen the traditional 1930s setting, as it was a time of tremendous growth and ferment in Italy, with World War II brewing and the Mafiosi gaining power. This Godfather era resonates powerfully with the images and conflicts of Cav-Pag. As in Fellini’s La Strada, we see the mix of the ancient elements and birth of the modern world—a World War II motorcycle mixed with medieval customs and laws. We see that, no matter what the birth struggle of a new time might be, the old order holds. Even the commedia dell’arte play we present in Pagliacci is built from the ancient sources and drawings. Each lazzi, or trick and joke, is historical and has played for hundreds of years.
With Cavalleria Rusticana (literally translated as “Rustic Chivalry”), Mascagni won a composition contest as a very young man right out of the conservatory, and he was catapulted to fame immediately. He based Cavalleria on the play by Giovanni Verga, who is a beloved playwright in Sicily.
The story is typically Sicilian and connects with the most primitive aspects of passion, sexuality and physical attraction: body and blood unbridled with wine and strong physical dimensions. It is a young, hot love story flying in the face of rules of culture and church. For Turiddu, Santuzza and Lola, the triangle is locked and inescapable. Passion and instinct rule—people are doing what they do fiercely and with total self-absorption. They are people with feet of clay, which makes the aspiration for love all the more beautiful.
Cavalleria emphasizes the pathos of emotions set against the backdrop of a festive Easter morning. The villagers celebrate a holy day and the rituals of spring and new beginnings. There is an icy, bitter irony in the destruction on this day of hope and resurrection.
Is this man in love with two women at once? The triangle and the results of betrayed love is the core issue in both pieces, along with the German concept of sehnsucht, the human longing for something more exalted in life. Turiddu, the young hero of Cavalleria, has loved Santuzza and is torn with guilt, and yet he focuses his longing on the woman who is unattainable and just out of reach. Meanwhile, Santuzza (“little saint”) is a godly girl who loves passionately and finds herself pregnant, excommunicated and an outcast. She fights for him, maybe too violently, and at her apparent rejection, turns into the destroyer.
The music of Cavalleria has widespread recognition today, not only for the opera itself and the famous Intermezzo, but also for its use in many films, particularly The Godfather Part III. This is the opera that Michael Corleone’s son Anthony starred in when the family visited Sicily, and the last scene is even extrapolated musically and dramatically to the climax of the film.
I Pagliacci (“The Clowns") was based on an actual incident in the Calabrian village of Montalto. Leoncavallo’s father was the magistrate who presided over the trial for the murders. Like Mascagni, Leoncavallo wrote Pagliacci while still a very young composer, and he also won immediate fame for the opera, but he is known for little else from his body of work.
The themes again are passion, longing, jealousy, and betrayal—another husband betrayed by his young wife who is starved of life and love and who longs for something more.
Here we also have the concept of the “Mask”, which in theater and in our own lives is explosive and can be enlightening. In Pagliacci, each character enters with a psychological mask intact, but with unexpected growth and crises bubbling beneath the surface. Each mask cracks open and the real understories spill out in the course of the play.
For clowns and for the Italian commedia dell’arte (the ancient and improvised Italian comedy) presented here, the actor plays the same role for most of his life. Any actor will tell you how much a single role can creep in and get under his skin, creating the possibility for a new persona. How much more with the Commedia clowns, who historically live their one role for decades so that they can freely improvise along a story line.
And every night it’s the same story: Colombina betraying her husband Pagliaccio and getting away with it, all in fun.
Clowns are notoriously depressed, as behind the masks and lazzi, real, unexpressed human emotion builds up. Tonio tells us in the Prologue, “The artist is a man! Our tears aren’t false!” The strange, violently comic life of the clown doesn’t often allow the mask to crack open, but in Pagliacci, catalysts starting with a flock of wild birds crack open the players, one by one. It happens too late for the love story between husband and wife to have the chance to flourish. Again we see sehnsucht, a young woman longing for something, for the rapture of feeling alive, and allowing another man to stand in for that mystery, and to be her escape.
The final cracking open of masks ends with Canio (Pagliaccio), who is iconically dressed in white with a white cone hat for the Commedia. He plays a “White Clown,” the superstar of the clown world, often bossy, fierce, charismatic and very dominating. Historically, the others are portrayed as lowly servants in his court. Even Colombina is a crafty, charming servant girl. Taddeo is a jester or fool, and Harlequin a common rogue with extravagant capers and pratfalls.
Canio’s mask is dominating, brutal, and strong—it cracks first in the famous aria, “Vesti la giuba,” preparing to go onstage while lost in pain, and later as Pagliaccio, as he pours out his love and new vulnerability within the play. The Commedia continues, and what is real and what is illusion blur.
There is a no-man’s land between the borders of reality and illusion on the stage, and the artist is caught there in a dream-like state more vivid and intense than waking life. We wonder about what is happening really among the actors in any play, and does conflict push through? Will the masks hold? And do they (or should they) hold for us, the audience, in our lives?
You can find yourself in these operas. That truly is the manifesto for “verismo.”
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