To be a one-hit wonder is painful enough; to have posterity forever yoke one’s hit with the hit of another one-hit wonder suggests a torment straight out of Dante. Such, in brief, was the fate of Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945). Not only did his Cavalleria Rusticana (1888, premiered 1890) make him world-famous before he had turned twenty-eight, it also proved—after two misleading years of independent existence—unthinkable in the public mind save as part of a double-bill with Pagliacci (1892) by Mascagni’s rival Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857– 1919). Known to opera-lovers as “Cav and Pag” (or, more archly, “the heavenly twins”), both masterpieces found their way into Ogden Nash’s verse as an emblem for the umbilically conjoined:


Mr. Powers began to shave only once a week

because no one cared...

 

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