“This is the Opera”. On the morning of the opening night of Utah Opera’s Pagliacci – 1892, Ruggero Leoncavallo – I stood on the spot in Utah where on 24th July 1847 Brigham Young and his Mormon pioneers concluded their 111-day, 1,300-mile flight to freedom across the Rocky Mountains.
In 1838, Missouri Governor, Lilburn Boggs passed the innocuous sounding Missouri Executive Order 44, a.k.a. the Mormon Extermination Order. Brutal summary, Mormons had to flee, or die where they lived. Genocide is not a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Having fought his way through a narrow pass in the Oquirrh Mountains, Young surveyed the sprawling valley below, dominated by its great salt lake, and pronounced. “This is the right place, move on.”
I was visiting This is the Place heritage park, marking that spot, celebrating the tragedies and achievements of Young’s odyssey alike.
The park pulls no punches. Six hundred and eighty-four children died on the trail, all memorialised meticulously. Forty-seven bronze statues tell of their valour. Their names are carved in stone. My assiduous guide for the morning had searched the names and found a relation. Spoken of with tears.
The positives were the hospital, the university and church, erected in short order, essentials of a budding community. This was a frank acknowledgement of verismo (truth in life) in all its searing, emotive power.
Good prep for a dose of verismo of another sort, the plot set to unfold downtown in Salt Lake City’s Capitol Theater that evening, as the tragic tale of Pagliacci wound to its conclusion before a capacity 1,800 crowd. Spoiler alert. In the final two minutes the grumpy clown brutally knives his wife and her lover, emphatically breaking the strained boundary separating stage and life.
The post romantic verismo opera movement kicked off with Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in Rome in 1890. Traditional 19th century operas were mostly populated with myths, gods and historical heroes. Now fictional tales were to be ditched for reality.
Stories featuring ordinary people, conflicted emotions, thwarted ambitions, jealousy, sexual desire and political struggle. The shock effect on audiences was as profound as the BBC move from polite drawing room drama to black and white kitchen sink drama in 1950’s Britain.
Puccini’s Tosca, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Wolf-Ferrari’s The Jewels of the Madonna are other notable examples of the genre, which faded in the 1920s. Only to experience a rebirth in 21st century American opera, with works like Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, about a prisoner on death row, and Grounded, Jeanine Tesori, focused on the post traumatic stress disorder suffered by a female F16 pilot turned drone controller.
Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci are often paired in a programme, known as the Cav and Pag package. BOGOF bargain. What’s not to like? I think that’s a mistake. Although both are short operas they deserve the entire focus of an evening audience, else their impact is lost.
Utah Opera was staging Pagliacci as a stand-alone and I had reasoned that with stage director Tara Faircloth in charge of the action and Maestro Joseph Colaneri in the pit, both drama and music would triumph.
Tara delivered a blisteringly comical The Marriage of Figaro at Utah last season. Maestro Joe is a frequent visitor to Reaction’s pages, Glimmerglass, New York’s Met and Juilliard School, Verdi at the Strathmore Center, Washington, not necessarily in the order. A lightning trip to Utah must be worth a journey. And so it proved.
A precis. The opera opens in rural southern Italy with a curtain prologue from Tonio, a clown, part of a travelling troupe, telling us what we are about to see. Despite the clowning, actors will share the same joys and sorrows as the rest of the audience.
Canio, boss clown, is warned by a villager that Tonio is courting his wife, Nedda. Canio utters a bitter warning. Flirtation offstage is a no-no. Life and theatre are not the same.
Nedda, much younger than Canio, has grown intolerant of her hubby’s jealousy. But she snubs Tonio who tries to force himself on her. In fact, she has another fancy-man, Silvio. He pitches up and encourages elopement. Tonio overhears them and alerts Canio. Smoothy-chops Silvio scarpers.
Challenged, Nedda refuses to reveal the name of her secret lover. Beppe another performer advises Canio to hold fire until after the performance. Then, he can catch the culprit.
Act I ends with one of the most famous arias in the repertoire, Vesti la giubba, (Put on the costume). Even with his heart breaking, Canio will make sure the show goes on.
Act II. The play. Silvio is in the audience. Nedda, married to an absent Pagliaccio, plays Columbine, serenaded by Harlequin, Beppe. Her buffoonish servant Taddeo – Tonio – is dismissed and the lovers plot to poison Pagliaccio.
When Pagliaccio appears and finds two place settings at his kitchen table, Harlequin hoofs it and Taddeo slyly reassures Canio of his wife’s innocence. Which only serves to enrage Canio, who forgets the role of Pagliaccio. Nedda heroically tries to carry on as Columbine, refusing to name her real-life lover.
The audience thinks this show is terrific. What acting? Oscars all round. But Canio snaps, stabbing Nedda. Silvio, rushing to her aid, has his throat slit.
Having similarly butchered the synopsis in the interest of brevity, I offer readers a more measured account here.
The opera with one of the most famous arias, ends with one of its most totemic lines, La commedia è finite, The comedy is finished. Most commonly it is sung by Canio, but Faircloth gave it to Tonio, the narrator of the prologue.
There is an operatic tiff over which it should be – the original libretto names Tonio, Leoncavallo’s score, Canio. I’m in the Tonio corner with Faircloth and the libretto. He who opened the show should close the show.
I asked her afterwards and she responded, “I think the idea that it comes full circle to Tonio is just too tempting…. not to mention, I feel Canio must be completely out of gas at that point, as he slowly realises what he has done.”
Faircloth was blessed with a Nedda who could sing superbly and maintain the false comedic art the role demands right up to her bitter end. Lydia Grindatto, a soprano from New Mexico missed the dress rehearsal because of illness, but there was no evidence of whatever it was that had ailed her on the night.
Someone somewhere has described her as “high octane”. I give her 105 amid a field of Regular 93. Sheer star quality dominated the stage and her direction by Faircloth, especially when the dissimulation of “life going on as normal” while being threatened with death by Canio, all the while interacting comically with the audience built the tension in the theatre to breaking point.
Delighted to discover that I will encounter Grindatto again at Glimmerglass as Ann Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and again at Wexford Festival Opera, as Léonore in Verdi’s Le Trouvère, a French version of Il Trovatore. She is well on her way to a stellar international career.
Darren Drone, baritone was a resonant Tonio. It was obvious why Faircloth gave him the closing line. Ohio tenor, Jonathan Burton sang Canio emotionally and convincingly as the cuckolded clown. His rendering of Vesti la giubba was suitably harrowing – and without the customary props of the surround-lit mirror and pots of makeup.
Faircloth dispensed with distractions. Focus on Canio. Or, perhaps Utah couldn’t afford the mirror. Faircloth gets the benefit of the doubt!
Maestro Colaneri has this work in his veins, the blood running nearly as thick as his favoured Verdi. Pagliacci was performed at Glimmerglass last year. The Utah Symphony responded magnificently. They are a great mid-West orchestra, and this year will host the League of American Operas in July.
The chorus directed by Austin McWilliams deserves a shout out, both for their voices and the execution of their important role in the action, right up to the point when they suddenly realise they are immersed in a horror story, not a comedy.
A whirlwind Salt Lake City Saturday. This is the Place heritage park in the morning, an afternoon matinee performance of the musical Prince of Egypt in the local Hale Theatre, topped off by another stunner from Utah Opera in the evening.
I hear Tara Faircloth is directing Beethoven’s Fidelio there in January 2026. Rounding up a posse.
It would have been impossible to see my marathon Saturday through to a successful conclusion without doing my bit for history. Scoffing a bag of warm, recently fried Brigham’s Donuts in the This is the Place café.
Brigham Young is reported to have had 56 wives. Whether any of them had a recipe for doughnuts is moot. Now, that’s a story worthy of a verismo opera.