Leoncavallo: Life and Works.(Book review)

Leoncavallo: Life and Works. By Konrad Dryden. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. [xvi, 351 p. ISBN-10 0810858800; ISBN-13 9780810858800. $75.] Illustrations, references, bibliography, appendix, index.

No scholar deserves more credit for furthering the cause of neglected turn-of-the-twentieth-century Italian composers than Konrad Dryden. Following the publication of his biography of Riccardo Zandonai (New York: Lang, 1999), Dryden has now provided a study of Ruggiero Leoncavallo's life and works. With relatively little information about Leoncavallo readily accessible, Dryden had to start almost from scratch, wondering with some justification "why a composer of one of the world's most famous operas has received such little research over the past one hundred years" (p. xiii). Dryden set himself the lofty goal of writing "the ultimate reference on this important figure in music and opera history" (http://www.konrad-dryden.de [accessed 21 November 2007]); while this goal has turned out to be too ambitious, he has realized his goal of providing a foundation for future research (p. xv).

Dryden's study consists of two parts, a biography (to p. 186) and a description of the major works (to p. 320). An appendix of the major compositions (including references to the operas' literary sources, original casts, and places and dates of the first performances), a bibliography, and an index of names conclude the book.

Dryden paints a paradoxical but convincing picture of Leoncavallo. On the one hand, he sees a generous man of high culture who lived in four countries (Italy, Egypt, France, and Switzerland), had an extensive knowledge of literature (due in part to studies with Giosue Carducci), made generous charitable contributions, and composed effective works in addition to Pagliacci (especially La nuit de mai, La boheme, Zaza, and Maia). On the other hand, he sees a man who repeatedly sacrificed artistic integrity, accepted every libretto apparently without ever requesting revisions, played one publisher against another, and blamed others for his lack of success: his publisher Sonzogno for insufficient promotion, Ricordi for waging a war against him, and famous performers such as Enrico Caruso, Tita Ruffo, and Arturo Toscanini for not performing his works more often. According to Dryden, Leoncavallo's decline began with Der Roland von Berlin (commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II and premiered in 1904) and accelerated with Sonzogno's increasing financial problems and the onset of World War I, during which Leoncavallo's opportunistic but inconsistent stance vis-a-vis the Germans and the French proved counterproductive for the performance of his operas in those countries.

Dryden assembles a large number of unpublished documents and succeeds in shedding light on periods of Leoncavallo's life that have been hardly known at all, such as his relationship with the German publisher Furstner and his years in Paris, when he worked as a pianist in cafe concerts and barely managed to make ends meet. The introduction to the book raises the expectation that Dryden might also be able to solve some of the "mysteries" of Leoncavallo's life, most of which the composer himself promoted (beginning "with the uncertain year of his birth, the time spent in Egypt and Paris, his health, his finances, Pagliacci's origins, and his relationship with Puccini and other colleagues" [p. xiii]). Dryden does establish the date of Leoncavallo's birth (reproducing the birth certificate) and covers Leoncavallo's Egyptian period. But the composer's health, the origins of Pagliacci, and his relationship with Puccini remain either mysterious or less thoroughly covered than elsewhere. For example, Dryden's discussion of Leoncavallo's health is limited to providing Latin names for the illnesses, and his treatment of Pagliacci's origins is less thorough than has been provided by Matteo Sansone ("The Verismo of Ruggero Leoncavallo: A Source Study of Pagliacci," Music & Letters 70, no. 3 [August 1989]: 342-62). Similarly, the conflicts with Puccini (over Leoncavallo's contribution to the libretto for Manon Lescaut and the rights to Henri Murger's La vie de boheme, for instance) are poorly documented.

Dryden relies heavily on Leoncavallo's own view preserved in an extensive corpus of letters (which he located in some fifty libraries) and an autobiographical sketch (the so-called Appunti) dictated to a servant in Leoncavallo's later years. Dryden's conclusion that a "careful checking of facts proved most of the Appunti's details to be correct" (p. 12 n.) stands in contrast to Julian Budden's view that "recent research has shown this document to be an extraordinary tangle of fact and fiction that has yet to be fully unraveled" (p. 95), but Dryden apparently feels no need to address this alternative view--or other contrasting interpretations.

In regard to Leoncavallo's relationship with Puccini, for example, the reader wonders whether Dryden consulted the work of recent Puccini biographers (Mary Jane Phillips-Matz and Budden), who often provide conflicting, more detailed, ...