1857–1919 · 20th century
Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919) was an Italian composer of the verismo era, born in Naples, a pianist-accompanist and the author of more than twenty operas. He is remembered for the opera Pagliacci, whose libretto he wrote himself, and for the song Mattinata, made for a gramophone recording. The site has his Mattinata for voice and piano.
Ruggero Leoncavallo was born in Naples on 23 April 1857. His father, Vincenzo Leoncavallo, was a judge, and his mother, Virginia d’Aurio, came from a family of Neapolitan painters and sculptors.
As a boy he went with his father to Montalto Uffugo, a small town in Calabria, and spent his youth there. In 1868 he went back to Naples and in time became a student at the conservatory.
At the Naples conservatory Leoncavallo studied composition with Lauro Rossi, and his piano teacher was Beniamino Cesi. He also had a literary education: he finished the literature course at the University of Bologna, where he was a pupil of the poet Giosuè Carducci, and received the title of doctor of literature.
In his youth Leoncavallo was an excellent pianist and accompanist. He toured as an accompanist in England, France, Germany, Holland and Egypt, and for a time, while he kept composing, he worked as a singing teacher. Recordings survive of works performed by Leoncavallo and Enrico Caruso.
In 1879 the composer’s uncle Giuseppe, who headed the press department of the Egyptian foreign ministry, suggested that his nephew come to Cairo and show his skill as a pianist. Leoncavallo reached the country soon after Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman sultan, removed Khedive Ismail in June 1879 and put Ismail’s son Tewfik Pasha in his place. The new khedive’s brother, the teenage Mahmud Hamdi Pasha, named Leoncavallo as his own court musician.
His stay in Egypt came to a sudden end in mid-1882, when Britain intervened in Ahmed Urabi’s uprising in Alexandria and Cairo and the composer escaped to France, finding lodgings in Montmartre in Paris.
A Paris agent on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis got Leoncavallo a post accompanying and coaching artists who played at Sunday café concerts. There he got to know the singer Berthe Rambaud, who became his favourite pupil. In 1888 they became a couple in Paris, and in 1895 they married in Milan.
Growing ever more inspired by the French Romantics, above all Alfred de Musset, Leoncavallo began a symphonic poem to Musset’s verse, La nuit de mai. He finished it in Paris in 1886, and it was first performed in April 1887 to warm praise from critics. After this success, with enough money saved, Leoncavallo and Rambaud moved to Milan in 1888.
Back in Italy he taught for some years and failed to get several operas produced, Chatterton chief among them. In 1890 Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana became a huge hit, and Leoncavallo at once turned to a verismo opera of his own: Pagliacci.
By the composer’s own account, the story of Pagliacci had a real-life basis: Leoncavallo claimed to have taken it from a trial for murder at Montalto Uffugo that his father had presided over.
The first night of Pagliacci was 21 May 1892 at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme, and the audience took to it immediately. Of all his operas, only this one has a place in the standard repertoire. Enrico Caruso recorded the best-known aria from it, Vesti la giubba, which means “put on the costume.”
The opera I Medici was staged in Milan in 1893 as well, yet it and Chatterton, which only reached the stage in 1896, won no lasting favour; both were early works. Even so, the Gramophone Company recorded a large part of Chatterton as early as 1908.
It took La bohème, staged in Venice in 1897, to win him public confirmation of his gift. Puccini’s opera on the same subject, first shown by the Teatro Regio of Turin in February 1896, cast it in shadow, though two of its tenor arias are still heard occasionally, chiefly in Italy.
The 1900s brought the operas Zazà (1900) and Der Roland von Berlin (1904). Zazà is the very opera in which the singer Geraldine Farrar gave her famous farewell performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1922. In 1906 Leoncavallo brought singers and orchestral players from La Scala to New York for concerts of his music and made a long tour of the United States; on the whole the trip was a success with reservations.
Zingari, whose first Italian-language performance took place in London in 1912, enjoyed a short-lived success and ran for a long time at the Hippodrome Theatre. It travelled to the United States as well, yet quickly vanished from the repertoire. The operetta La reginetta delle rose also dates from 1912.
Most of his operas have libretti by Leoncavallo himself. When Arrigo Boito died in 1918, some placed Leoncavallo first among Italy’s librettists. His writing for other composers included a share in the text of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut of 1893.
Leoncavallo died on 9 August 1919 in Montecatini Terme in Tuscany. The funeral took place two days afterwards; hundreds attended, among them the composer Pietro Mascagni and his old rival Giacomo Puccini. The composer was buried in Florence.
Seventy years after the composer’s death a campaign began to transfer his remains to Brissago in Switzerland. The trigger was a letter that supposedly showed his own wish to lie there, yet nobody ever located it. He held honorary citizenship of Brissago and had a sumptuous summer home in the town, Villa Myriam. A speech of 1904 had him saying he would accept a resting place in the town, but nothing about it was put in writing. Piera Leoncavallo-Grand, the composer’s last living descendant, gave the plan her approval; on 22 September 1989 the body was exhumed to be taken to Switzerland and buried there next to his wife Berthe, who died in 1926.
Brissago opened a Leoncavallo museum in 2002, showing his personal effects and original manuscripts, plus statues of figures from Der Roland von Berlin and Zazà. A second museum followed in 2010 in Montalto Uffugo, in the house where he grew up; it too keeps manuscripts and personal effects, and the composer’s own piano.
Leoncavallo is the author of over twenty operas. His best-loved is Pagliacci (1892, Teatro Dal Verme in Milan), with a libretto by the composer himself. His other operas include Zazà (1900), Der Roland von Berlin (1904), Zingari (1912) and La bohème (1897), which also has the title Life in the Latin Quarter. He also wrote operettas, for example La reginetta delle rose (1912), and a ballet, The Life of a Marionette (around 1900), as well as songs, romances and piano pieces.
Premieres of his other stage works: I Medici on 9 November 1893 in Milan (it opens the unfinished trilogy Crepusculum); Chatterton on 10 March 1896 in Rome (a reworking of something he had written in 1876); Maïa on 15 January 1910 in Rome; Mimi Pinson, a revision of La bohème, in 1913 in Palermo; Mameli on 27 April 1916 in Genoa. His operettas include Malbrouck (1910), Are You There? (1913, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London), La candidata (1915) and Prestami tua moglie (“Lend Me Your Wife”, 1916, Montecatini). Operettas staged after his death include A chi la giarrettiera? (“Whose Garter Is This?”, 1919), Il primo bacio (1923) and La maschera nuda (1925).
Little of his other operatic music is heard today. Zazà’s baritone arias were favourites in concerts and on records, and the opera itself is sometimes revived; the same goes for La bohème, whose tenor arias are still popular with singers making records.
Beyond opera, Leoncavallo composed orchestral music on literary subjects. La nuit de mai, finished in Paris in 1886, is a symphonic poem after Alfred de Musset, scored for tenor and orchestra; it was given and recorded in 1990, and again in 2010 with Plácido Domingo. Another symphonic poem, Séraphitus Séraphita, based on Honoré de Balzac, was heard at La Scala in Milan in 1894.
Best known among Leoncavallo’s songs is Mattinata, written in 1904 on commission from the Gramophone Company specially for a recording by the tenor Enrico Caruso, with the composer himself at the piano. It was one of the first songs written for sound recording rather than live performance. The recording was made on 8 April 1904.
The site offers one edition: Mattinata for voice and piano, at the advanced level. If you want to meet Leoncavallo as a song composer, this is the place to begin.