Ruggero Leoncavallo
Ruggero Leoncavallo was born in 1857 in Naples to a wealthy family, with a father who was a magistrate and a mother who was the daughter of the painter Raffaele D'Auria. Ruggero was admitted to the conservatory where he studied composition with Lauro Rossi, and enrolled in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bologna where he studied with Giosuè Carducci.
After working as a teacher and pianist in Egypt, he moved to Paris and at the Eldorado worked as a pianist in a café chantant, the singing teacher and accompanist in the most elegant Parisian salons, where he met Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet.
He returned to Milan, and found it overwhelmed by the overwhelming success of Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni: he decided to attempt a similar composition, set in the Calabria of his childhood and inspired by a real crime that occurred when the author was a child (the victim, his guardian), which his father had dealt with as a magistrate. In five months he wrote the score for Pagliacci achieving sensational success. This opera, conducted for the first time by Arturo Toscanini, transformed Leoncavallo into an internationally renowned composer, and it was revived in Europe and the United States. Along with Puccini, Mascagni, and others, Leoncavallo is a leading figure of the so-called Giovane scuola italiana, which aims for a verismo renewal of opera. And Pagliacci could be defined as the very essence of musical verismo:
In the show In fila per 6 col resto di 2 you listened to Ruggero Leoncavallo's Mattinata, a romance written in 1904 expressly for the then Gramophone Company (now HMV). The first performer was Enrico Caruso, in the recorded performance on April 8, 1904, with Leoncavallo himself at the piano.
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Perhaps not everyone knows that the 6th District hosts as many as 42 streets and squares named after great musicians, composers, and Italian conductors, creating a very particular toponymic context.
If we really want to proceed with a non-discriminatory project towards great musicians, we need to take a few more steps towards the center until we reach Via Giuseppe Verdi and Via Gioacchino Rossini... being stars of international opera, we risk seriously offending them.
In these years we will discover together the 44 great musicians who bring to life a special neighborhood in Turin, they are all neighbors!
Let's start with Antonio Vivaldi, Amilcare Ponchielli, Niccolò Paganini, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Alessandro Scarlatti, Giacomo Puccini.
The project is made possible thanks to the City of Turin.