Intermezzo from Pagliacci

Program notes

About the Work

Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote both words and music of Pagliacci (Clowns), first performed at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan in May 1892 under the young Arturo Toscanini. It made him famous overnight. Like Cavalleria rusticana, it tells a story of jealousy and sudden violence among ordinary people: Canio, head of a troupe of travelling players in a southern Italian village, discovers that his wife Nedda has a lover, and that evening, during a comedy in which he plays a betrayed clown, he kills them both in front of the audience.

Between the two acts Leoncavallo placed a short orchestral Intermezzo. It follows Canio’s outburst of grief at the end of Act I and leads into the evening performance of Act II, where the catastrophe will unfold. Like the more famous Intermezzo in Cavalleria rusticana, it gives the orchestra a moment to itself and has become a popular concert piece. In tonight’s programme the order is reversed: the Intermezzo comes first, as a prelude to Canio’s aria.

What to Listen For

A weighty, solemn opening, then themes of grief from the opera taken up broadly by the strings. The music swells to a passionate climax and then subsides into a quiet, dark close: a few minutes of the warm, emotional Italian orchestral sound of the 1890s.