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Alas, Neapolitan
composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo is on that list. He studied
at the San Pietro a Majella
music conservatory in Leoncavallo
wrote other operas—i Medici (1893), Chatterton (1896), Zazà
(1900), and Der Roland von Berlin
(1904), but none of those remain in the standard
repertoire, especially not the one with the German title! It was
commissioned
by Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself—an ardent Leoncavallo fan. Indeed, the
work—about
the early days of the Hohenzollern dynasty—premiered in
An unfortunate
destiny for any musician is to be the composer of “the other one”—that
is, of a version of a more famous work by another composer. There are
two great
examples of this in Italian opera: one is Paisiello’s
Barber of
Seville1,
still played occasionally as an historical curiosity but totally overshadowed—to
put it mildly—by Rossini’s later work of that name; the other is
Leoncavallo’s La
Bohème. It premiered in 1897, less than a year after
Puccini’s work.
Critics and public passed judgment on the two operas immediately. It
wasn’t
even close. At least one treatment of the life of Puccini I have seen
on
Italian TV has the two composers engaged in a nasty rivalry. I have no
idea if
there is any truth to that, but Leoncavallo actually wrote part of the libretto for
Puccini’s Manon Lascaut; it is hard to imagine him
doing that for a bitter
rival.2
Interestingly,
Leoncavallo (like Wagner and a few others) was
the librettist
for all of his own operas and was considered a great one. Leoncavallo wrote
a beautiful song, Mattinata, which remains popular. He composed
it in
1903 at the request of a recording company; Enrico Caruso then recorded
it,
accompanied by Leoncavallo, himself, at the piano. You have heard the
song
somewhere, sometime. Everyone has.
Leoncavallo wrote both music and
lyrics. The
title means “Morning,” and the Italian text starts:
It is
very literary, even
containing a reference to Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn.” Who knows if
that was
not part of Leoncavallo’s problem? —too many interests. A number of
sources,
indeed, try to deal with the “flash in the pan” aspect in his life.
They come
to no conclusion, except to point out that the composer was not
obsessed with music to the exclusion
of all else. The reason he was a fine librettist, for example, is that
his
literary interests took him to Bologne after his music studies in
1. There
are at least 11 versions of The
Barber of Seville. Here is a list. 2.
There is, however, evidence of at least some amusing rivalry. There
exists a letter (cited in "A Little-Known Letter by Berlioz and
Unpublished Letters by Cherubini, Leoncavallo, and Hugo Wolf" by Artur
Holde in The Musical Quarterly,
Vol. 37, No. 3 (Jul., 1951), pp. 340-353) from Leoncavallo to French
composer, Jules Massenet, in which Leoncavallo asks about getting
permission from Edmond Rostand to set Rostand's 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac, to music before
Puccini got hold of it! As it turns out, Rostand wasn't interested,
saying that "...there is already enough music in my work." |
There is a considerable list of composers
known primarily for only one piece of music, even though they wrote
many.
Claude Joseph Roget de Lisle comes to mind immediately; he was the
composer of
the stirring national anthem of France, La
Marseillaise. Another is 
Between 1909
and his death, Leoncavallo wrote a number of other operas, operettas
and
songs,
which today are totally obscure. He never did return to his youthful
ambition
to compose an operatic trilogy about the Italian Renaissance. Actually,
he did
finish the first part—I Medici—produced as a stand-alone piece
(see
above). The other parts were to be called