Alessandro Scarlatti and Leoncavallo, 2015

Alessandro Scarlatti and Leoncavallo, 2015

April 27, 2015.  Alessandro Scarlatti and Leoncavallo.  Two wonderful Italian opera composer were born around this time, two centuries apart -  Alessandro Scarlatti and Ruggero Leoncavallo. Scarlatti was close to the beginning of the Italian opera, Leoncavallo – at the end of it, or at least that’s how it feels from our vantage point (let’s hope the Italian Alessandro Scarlattigenius rejuvenates itself in the near future).   Alessandro Scarlatti was born on May 2nd of 1660 in Palermo, Sicily (we’ve written about him a number of times, for example here and here).  When he was 12, he went to Rome and studied there with Giacomo Carissimi, another seminal figure in the history of Italian opera (Carissimi’s birthday was just several days ago: he was born on April 18th of 1605).  Scarlatti wrote his first opera at the age of 19.  As so many Roman composers of his time, Scarlatti worked under the patronage of Queen Christina.  He then went to Naples to serve at the courts of the Viceroys, who ruled Naples on behalf of the King of Spain.  He moved between Naples and Rome for the rest of his life.  Scarlatti wrote 115 opera, of which 64 survive.  In the process, he came up with a number of innovations, di capo aria being one of them; di capo, a tripartite aria in which the third part repeats the first (di capo meaning “from the head” or from the beginning in Italian), but with improvisations, became a mainstay of the baroque opera.  Scarlatti’s last opera, La Griselda, was written in 1721.  Here’s the aria In voler cio che tu brami... Che arrechi, Ottone.  It’s sung by the wonderful Italian soprano Mirella Freni; Nino Sanzogno conducts the Alessandro Scarlatti Orchestra.  Scarlatti wrote several oratorios, and here’s an aria from one of them, Oratorio La Santissima Vergine del Rosario.  The music is absolutely exquisite and so is the performance by the incomparable mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli.  Les Musiciens du Louvre are conducted by Marc Minkowski.

Ruggero Leoncavallo

Ruggero Leoncavallo is famous for just one piece of music, but what a great piece it is!  Pagliacci became immensely popular immediately after its first performance in May of 1892 and it remained one of the most often performed operas ever since.  Leoncavallo was born on April 23rd of 1857 in Naples into a well-to-do family (his father was a magistrate).  Leoncavallo went to the Naples conservatory where he studied composition with an opera composer Lauro Rossi.  Upon graduating in 1876, he wrote an opera, Chatterton, but couldn’t get it staged (it was premiered 20 years later but vanished from the repertory soon after).  He traveled to Egypt and France and settled in Paris, living a bohemian life and earning some money giving music lessons.  In Paris he heard Wagner’s The Ring and decided to create a trilogy as an Italian response to the German epic.  He worked on it on and off; the results never amounted to much.  In Paris Leoncavallo married Berthe Rambaud, a French singer.  Soon after they returned to Milan, where Leoncavallo proceeded to work as librettist and composer; one of his most successful works was the libretto for Giacomo Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.  1890 witnessed the enormously successful premier of Pietro Mascagni’s  Cavalleria rusticana.  It strongly affected Leoncavallo, who decided to write an opera in a similar realistic (verismo) style and almost immediately started working on Pagliacci (The Clowns).  Leoncavallo claimed that he wrote the libretto based on an episode from his childhood, when his father presided over a murder trial involving a love triangle.  Some critics maintain that in reality the basis was a French play.  The opera was premiered in Milan to mixed critical reviews and great popular acclaim.  It became the first complete opera ever to be recorded and the aria Vesti la giubba (Put on the costume) became a signature piece of the great Caruso (his recording of the aria was the first to sell one million copies).  Here’s Luciano Pavarotti, in a 1994 recording with the Met orchestra and James Levine.