‘Si può?’ (Prologue, Pagliacci)

Program notes

About the Work

Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote both the words and the music of Pagliacci (“Clowns”), and the opera, first performed at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on 21 May 1892 under the young Arturo Toscanini, made him famous overnight. It is the classic example of Italian verismo (“realism”), the movement launched two years earlier by Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, with which Pagliacci is still often paired: stories about ordinary people, violent passions and sudden death, told in compact, highly charged music. Leoncavallo claimed that the plot was based on a real crime judged by his father, a magistrate in Calabria, when the composer was a child.

The opera tells of a troupe of travelling players arriving in a village in southern Italy. Canio, the head of the company, discovers that his wife Nedda is in love with another man; that evening, during the performance of a comedy in which he plays a clown betrayed by his wife, he loses his grip on the difference between play and reality and murders Nedda and her lover in front of the audience.

The opera begins with a unique Prologue. Before the curtain rises, Tonio, the hunchbacked member of the troupe, steps out in costume and asks the audience’s permission (“Si può?”, “May I?”) to explain what they are about to see. The author, he says, wanted to paint “a slice of life”: actors are men of flesh and blood, with real passions and real tears. The Prologue is a manifesto of verismo and one of the great solo scenes in Italian opera; in the opera it belongs to the baritone who sings Tonio.

What to Listen For

The Prologue begins with a lively orchestral introduction that previews the opera’s main themes: first the bright, bustling music of the travelling players, then a sombre, sobbing theme for Canio’s heartbreak (you will hear it again in “Vesti la giubba” later in the evening), and finally a warm, sweeping love theme.

Then the singer steps forward with “Si può? Si può? Signore! Signori!” Listen for the way the vocal line moves between conversation and song: the explanation of the author’s intentions is almost spoken, but when Tonio talks about the actors’ real feelings, that they too are men of flesh and blood, the music opens up into a broad, passionate melody. The Prologue ends with a famous call, “Incominciate!” (“Let’s begin!”), which sends the curtain up.