‘Recitar! … Vesti la giubba’ (Pagliacci, Act I)

Program notes

About the Work

“Recitar! … Vesti la giubba” (“To perform! … Put on the costume”) ends Act I of Pagliacci, and it is perhaps the most famous tenor aria of the verismo repertoire. Canio has just discovered that his wife Nedda has a lover, although he has not learned the man’s name. The performance for the villagers is about to begin, and he has to go on stage as the clown Pagliaccio, whose role in the comedy is to be the laughing-stock of a cheating wife.

Alone, Canio prepares himself. In the recitative he asks how he can perform when he is half out of his mind with grief; then, in the aria, he tells himself to put on the costume and the white face paint, because the audience has paid and wants to laugh. “Ridi, Pagliaccio”: laugh, clown, at your broken love. The contrast between the public mask and the private despair is the whole idea of the opera, and Leoncavallo expresses it in a melody of overwhelming directness.

The aria also has a place in the history of recorded sound. Enrico Caruso’s recordings of “Vesti la giubba”, made in 1902, 1904 and 1907, were among the best-selling records of the 78-rpm era, and did much to make the tenor voice the popular face of opera for the twentieth century. Jonas Kaufmann has sung the role of Canio on stage, and this aria is one of the great tests of any dramatic tenor: it demands both a huge climax and the ability to break down in real sobs at the end.

What to Listen For

Listen first to the recitative “Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio”: halting, broken phrases in which Canio can barely think straight, with the orchestra reacting to each outburst. Then comes the aria itself, built on the sobbing theme you heard in the Prologue’s introduction. The singer’s line rises steadily, reaching its climax on the words “Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto!” (“Laugh, clown, at your broken love!”), the highest and most exposed moment of the aria.

After that climax, the tenor often breaks into a real sob, and the orchestra takes up the melody in a great, grieving statement of its own as the curtain falls. Listen for the tension between singing and weeping: in the best performances you cannot quite tell where one ends and the other begins.