The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In the Prologue, Tonio, speaking on behalf of Leoncavallo and then of the cast, reminds the audience that the artist and the actor are men. When we reach the play within the play all the contradictions are going simultaneously. Nedda is half- actress, half-woman, for she is expressing her real feelings in an imaginary situation; she is in love but not with Beppe who is playing Harlequin. Beppe is pure actor; as a man he is not in love with anybody. Tonio and Canio are themselves, for their real feelings and the situation correspond, to the greater amusement of the audience for it makes them act so convinc­ingly. Finally there is Nedda's lover Silvio, the member of the audience who has got into the act, though as yet invisibly. When Nedda as Columbine recites to Harlequin the line writ­ten for her, "A stannotte—e per sempre tua sard!" Canio as Pag- liaccio is tortured because he has heard her use, speaking as herself, these identical words to the lover he has not seen. One has only to imagine what the opera would be like if, with the same situation between the characters, the Commedia were omitted, to see how much the interest of the opera depends on the question of Illusion and Reality, a problem which is supposed only to concern idealists.

About the music of these two operas, I can, of course, only speak as a layman. The first thing that strikes me on hearing them is the extraordinary strength and vitality of the Italian operatic tradition. Since 1800 Italian opera had already pro­duced four fertile geniuses, Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi, yet there was still enough left to allow, not only the lesser but still formidable figure of Puccini, but also the talents of Ponchielli, Giordano, Mascagni and Leoncavallo to create original and successful works. Today, indeed—it may have seemed different in the nineties—we are more conscious in the works of these later composers of the continuity of the tradition than of any revolutionary novelty. We do not emerge from the house, after hearing Cavalleria or Pagliacci for the first time, saying to ourselves, "What a strange new kind of opera!" No, before the first ten bars are over, we are thinking: "Ah, an­other Italian opera. How jolly!"

Comparing one with the other (a rather silly but inevitable habit), Leoncavallo strikes me as much more technically adroit. One of the strange things about Mascagni is the almost old-fashioned simplicity of his musical means; he writes as if he were scarcely aware of even the middle Verdi. There are dull passages in Cavalleria Rusticana, e.g., the music of the mule-driving song, but, in the dramatic passages, the very primitive awkwardness of the music seems to go with the characters and give them a conviction which Leoncavallo fails to give to his down-at-heel actors. For instance, when I listen to Turiddu rejecting Santuzza in the duet, "No, no! Turiddu, rimani," I can believe that I am listening to a village Don Giovanni, but when I listen to Silvio making love to Nedda in the duet, "Decidi, il mio destin," I know that I am listening to a baritone. As a listener, then, I prefer Mascagni; if I were a singer, I daresay my preference would be reversed.

In making their way round the world, Cav & Pag have had two great advantages: they are relatively cheap to produce and the vocal writing is effective but does not make excessive demands so that they are enjoyable even when performed by provincial touring companies, whereas works like La Gioconda or Fedora are intolerable without great stars. Take, for ex­ample, the famous aria "Vesti la giubba": if the singer is in good voice, he has a fine opportunity to put it through its paces; if his voice is going, he can always throw away the notes and just bellow, a procedure which some audiences seem to prefer.