Ruggero Leoncavallo

Ruggero Leoncavallo (Naples, April 23, 1857 – Montecatini Terme, August 9, 1919) was an impulsive but jovial man, a gambler, smoker and unrepentant drinker, as well as an artist of rare intelligence, sensitivity and musical refinement.

After the glory achieved with Pagliacci his musical vein did not die out but other melodic geniuses, such as Puccini, loomed.

Leoncavallo's life was as adventurous as ever and his human story is intertwined with the sensational rise to success and the subsequent inexorable decline.

He traveled throughout Europe conducting orchestras even in concert cafés, composing famous pieces such as Serenatella and Mattinata.

The great composer, author of the opera Pagliacci - which is still among the most performed on modern stages - spent the last years of his life in Montecatini Terme, where he found a lively cultural environment, aware of all the novelties, an ideal terrain for his creativity.

In the spa town he conceived the opera Mameli, celebrating the epic of the Risorgimento, brilliant and ingenious operettas such as La Reginetta delle Rose, paradigmatic creations of the twilight of melodrama, such as Oedipus Rex.

In Montecatini, where he had taken up residence in a villa on Via Giannini, he continued to be the animator of spa life until 1919, the year of his death.

At the Maestro's funeral, in a Piazza del Popolo packed with people, many personalities from politics, culture and music could be seen, including Pietro Mascagni and also Giacomo Puccini, who had by then become the undisputed heir of Verdi, with whom the Neapolitan composer had strongly argued[1].

Against the backdrop of the last years of Leoncavallo's life, therefore, the Terme di Montecatini became the paradigm of elite tourism thanks to the numerous stays of the old Giuseppe Verdi and the obligatory destination of all the VIPs of the music star system of the time.

The Maestro's home still exists and bears the plaque "Casa Leoncavallo". Privately owned, it cannot be visited.

[1] Puccini, anticipating by one year the first performance of his Bohème at the Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896 compared to Leoncavallo's opera of the same name - which debuted at the Fenice in Venice in May 1897 - had 'burned' the success of the other great composer who had long been the main protagonist at the Baths. And the more Leoncavallo was angry about such a theft, the more Puccini mocked him by calling him “leonbestia”, “leonasino” or even “bisbestia” in the sense that in the name of his rival there existed at the same time both a lion and a horse. Referring to the strange combination of that surname, the famous illustrator Romeo Marchetti left to posterity a drawing in which the author of I Pagliacci walks on lion paws sowing musical notes between one foot and the other. Of Giacomo Puccini, instead, he left a courtly portrait while the composer is intent, with a quill pen in his hand, on composing a musical score.