Konrad Dryden
Leoncavallo: Life and Works.
Scarecrow Press, 384 pages, $75

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.