London this summer saw broken temperature records and the collapse of the government over a cocktail party—but the show wasn’t over yet. The Royal Opera came to the end of its season with several productions, including the famed operatic pairing of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci by the composers Pietro Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo. Conceived separately in the early 1890s, the operas were first presented on the same “double bill” by New York’s Metropolitan Opera, creating a convention that has held ever since. In London, however, the pairing had not been attempted for some twenty-five years before the Italian director Damiano Michieletto accepted the challenge of this staging, which premiered in 2015.
The pairing made dramatic sense. Both operas are violent “slices of life” that exemplify the verismo school of Italian opera by exploring lurid adultery and jealous betrayal. In Cavalleria, the ne’er-do-well Turridu carries on with Lola, the wife of the carter Alfio, despite having seduced and impregnated the unfortunate Santuzza. Rejected by Turridu, Santuzza exposes the new affair to Alfio, leading to an honor challenge. Offstage, Turridu is killed by gunshots, to the villagers’ popular horror. In Pagliacci, the faithless Nedda, the lead actress of a traveling commedia dell’arte troupe, betrays her marriage to her fellow actor Canio with the villager Silvio. When Nedda rejects another member of the troupe, the malign, hunchbacked Tonio, he reveals her infidelity to Canio. During a performance staged within the opera, Canio demands to know the name of his rival before killing both Nedda and the unfortunate young Silvio, who steps forward in an ill-fated attempt to save her. Tonio gets the last line: “La commedia è finita!”
Michieletto took the Cav/Pag association a step further. His production cleverly intertwines their plots by setting the operas in the same village, where the events occur consecutively in a continuum of drama. The sets feature worn-down buildings and occasional trappings of underdeveloped modernity that suggest a bleak 1970s milieu. In Cavalleria, advance men put up posters for the troupe of Pagliacci. Turridu’s mother, Mamma Lucia, runs a bakery that employs Silvio, who has no official role in Cavalleria. Most movingly of all, Santuzza and Mamma Lucia, whose relationship is left fractured in Cavalleria, reconcile during the intermezzo of Pagliacci, pantomiming that Santuzza bears the child of the slain Turridu, and the family now accepts her.
The production won the coveted Olivier Award shortly after it premiered, and it has been starrily cast ever since. The superstar German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was slated to appear this year in the lead tenor roles in both operas—a difficult feat performed by Bryan Hymel here in 2017—but he was prevented from performing by COVID. There were hopes that he would still appear as Turridu in Cavalleria, though at nearly the last moment it was announced that a lengthy recovery period had compelled his withdrawal altogether. His Pagliacci substitute also left the cast, replaced by the veteran singer Roberto Alagna in the role of Canio. Alagna has had ups and downs in recent seasons, but here he was in full form delivering a devastating performance. The moving aria “Vesti La Giubba” resounded with anguish. The play-within-the-play murder chilled the bones.
Alagna was felicitously paired with his real-life wife, the soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, who sang Nedda with an appealing trill that nevertheless captured presentiments of death. Her aria “Stridono lassù,” which compares her character to birds seeking escape, radiated sympathy and warmth. Kurzak was also a fine addition to the cast of Cavalleria, replacing the superb Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili, who withdrew from the role of Santuzza. Santuzza needs to plumb the lower depths of the female vocal range, and Kurzak, though she began her career as a coloratura soprano, has evolved to the point where she can deliver a credible performance of this tortured role. The only problem came in the production’s conceit. When Santuzza reconciles with Mamma Lucia during the Pagliacci intermezzo, it was hard to dissociate Kurzak, the same singer, from Nedda, whom she was simultaneously performing. She was, however, finely paired with the Korean tenor SeokJeong Baek in Cavalleria, who brought a brilliant squillo sound to Turridu’s insolence and depravity. Dimitri Platanias did broad-voiced, barrel-chested double duty in the respective operas as the outraged Alfio and vindictive Tonio.
Sir Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s music director since 2002, is scheduled to leave his post for the London Symphony in 2024. His operatic conducting remains red-hot, and he led a stellar performance. The choruses in both operas drew enormously from the talents of the chorus director William Spaulding, who navigated both operas’ complicated dimensions with aplomb. In addition to his Royal Opera responsibilities, Spaulding is also developing a superb recitation of John Milton’s polyphonic Paradise Lost. Judging from a private performance, I think it should win international acclaim.