Leoncavallo: Pagliacci - Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (2019) [Blu-ray]

Premièred on 21 May 1892 at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, Pagliacci was an immediate success, and today it remains Leoncavallo’s best known opera, just as “Vesti la giubba” is perhaps one of the most famous operatic arias of all time.

The composer drew inspiration from a real incident that had occurred in a Calabrian town, an incident steeped in love and death, which inspired him to write his personal contribution to the new stylistic-aesthetic trend in Italian opera. In the Prologue, Leoncavallo inserted a clear manifesto on verismo (real theatre). His aim was to “paint a scene from real life” and since “the artist is a person, […] he should write for the people. Therefore, he took inspiration from real life.”

In the story of Nedda, Tonio and Canio we therefore find a well managed mix of art and reality, operatic theatre and life, with the latter almost superseding the former, to the extent that the chorus exclaims towards the end: “This scene seems so real!” This production, recorded at Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in September 2019, was critically acclaimed.

Conductor Valerio Galli “reads the score with the proper technique, succeeding in enhancing all the various shades for each scene … Pagliacci is conducted with passion… with a careful eye for the dramatic development of the story, and the sound is rendered with a variety of shades and colours.”