pened their minds to an
appreciation of its meaning and beauty, while the youthful genius who
had created it sank almost unnoticed into his grave; but they had not
seen the advent of a work which almost in a day set the world on fire
and raised an unknown musician from penury and obscurity to affluence
and fame. In the face of such an experience it was scarcely to be
wondered at that judgment was flung to the winds and that the most
volatile of musical nations and the staidest alike hailed the young
composer as the successor of Verdi, the regenerator of operatic Italy,
and the pioneer of a new school which should revitalize opera and make
unnecessary the hopeless task of trying to work along the lines laid
down by Wagner.

And this opera was the outcome of a competition based on the frankest
kind of commercialism--one of those "occasionals" from which we have
been taught to believe we ought never to expect anything of ideal and
lasting merit. "Pagliacci" was, in a way, a fruit of the same
competition. Three years before "Cavalleria Rusticana" had started the
universal conflagration Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who at sixteen years of
age had won his diploma at the Naples Conservatory and received the
degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bologna at twenty,
had read his dramatic poem "I Medici" to the publisher Ricordi and been
commissioned to set it to music. For this work he was to receive 2400
francs. He completed the composition within a year, but there was no
contract that the opera should be performed, and this hoped-for
consummation did not follow. Then came Mascagni's triumph, and
Leoncavallo, who had been obliged meanwhile to return to the routine
work of an operatic repetiteur, lost patience. Satisfied that Ricordi
would never do anything more for him, and become desperate, he shut
himself in his room to attempt "one more work"--as he said in an
autobiographical sketch which appeared in "La Reforme," a journal
published in Alexandria. In five months he had written the book and
music of "Pagliacci," which was accepted for publication and production
by Sonzogno, Ricordi's business rival, after a single reading of the
poem. Maurel, whose friendship Leoncavallo had made while coaching
opera singers in Paris, used his influence in favor of the opera,
offered to create the part of Tonio, and did so at the first
performance of the opera at the Teatro dal Verme, Milan, on May 17,
1892.

Leoncavallo's opera tur