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 vitaeis 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