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Updated: June 24, 2025
"I Pagliacci," an Italian opera in two acts, words by the composer, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, was first performed at Milan, May 21, 1892, and was introduced in this country in the spring of 1894, Mme. Arnoldson, Mme. Calvé, and Signors Ancona, Gromzeski, Guetary, and De Lucia taking the principal parts. The scene is laid in Calabria during the Feast of the Assumption.
One of them was the arrival of the Italian composer, Leoncavallo, in Berlin, to hand the Emperor the text of the opera "Der Roland von Berlin," Leoncavallo had composed at the Emperor's express request.
Leoncavallo, though older than Mascagni, must be regarded as in a certain sense his follower, since his most popular work, 'Pagliacci, was undoubtedly inspired by 'Cavalleria Rusticana. The story begins with the arrival of a troupe of travelling comedians, or Pagliacci, in an Italian village. All is not harmony in the little company.
I will not suffer you to debase the loveliness of the world by heaping up in the same basket things holy and things shameful, by giving, as you do at present, the prelude to Parsifal between a fantasia on the Daughter of the Regiment and a saxophone quartette, or an adagio of Beethoven between a cakewalk and the rubbish of Leoncavallo. You boast of being a musical people.
In January he had exchanged telegrams with the Czar and the Mikado concerning his bestowal of the Order of Merit on Generals Stoessel and Nogi, asking permission to bestow the Order and receiving expressions of consent. Another telegram went to the composer Leoncavallo in Naples, congratulating him on the success there of his "Roland von Berlin."
And there the society of which Leoncavallo was president, gave him a dinner, at which the conversation turned principally on the beauties of the Italian climate and the glories of her historic past. These things did not, however, wound that professional vanity of which Ivan possessed so infinitesimal an amount. Never was man more thoroughly inoculated by amor Italiæ than Gregoriev.
Cleverness is his predominating vice, and a marked predilection for time-serving; that is, he, like the excellent musical journalist that he is, feels the public pulse, spreads his sails to the breeze of popular favour, and while he is never as banal as Humperdinck or Leoncavallo, he exhibits this quality in suffusion. Above all, he is not original.
This in no way detracts from what Mascagni, Leoncavallo and others have accomplished. It is only my personal estimate of Puccini as a composer.
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