There is a considerable list of composers known primarily for only one piece of music, even though they wrote many. Claude Joseph Roget de Lisle comes to mind immediately; he was the composer of the stirring national anthem of France, La Marseillaise. Another is Julius Ernst Wilhelm Fu?ík, known in his day as “The Bohemian Sousa”; in our day, however, only his “circus march,” Entrance of the Gladiators (or Thunder and Blazes) is what most people know of his some 300 marches, polkas and waltzes. And what to say about James Pierpont? His one hold on distinction (besides being the uncle of robber-baron James Pierpont Morgan) is that he wrote Jingle Bells—and wouldn’t you like to have the royalties on that one?!

Alas, Neapolitan composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) is on that list. He studied at the San Pietro a Majella music conservatory in Naples and then wandered in England, France, Holland, Germany— even as far afield as Egypt—as an itinerant teacher of voice and piano as well as a pianist in the popular cafés chantants of the day. He came of age just in time to get in on the new music of verismo—realism, the likes of Bizet’s Carmen or Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, but he made only a single lasting contribution: Pagliacci (Clowns). It is still one of the most popular works in the repertoire and so short that it forms an inevitable double-bill with Cavalleria Rusticana.

Pagliacci premiered in 1892 in Milan and was greeted with great enthusiasm. The most famous aria, Vesti la giubba, was later recorded by Enrico Caruso and was the first recording to sell one million copies. It remains extremely popular today.

Leoncavallo wrote other operas—i Medici (1893), Chatterton(1896), Zazà (1900), and Der Roland von Berlin (1904)—but none of those remain in the standard repertoire (especially not the one with the German title! It was commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself—an ardent Leoncavallo fan. Indeed, the work—about the early days of the Hohenzollern dynasty—premiered in Berlin with the Kaiser present. The work went belly-up even before the Hohenzollern dynasty did.)

Between 1909 and 1910, Leoncavallo wrote a number of other operas, operettas, and songs, which today are totally obscure. He never did return to his youthful ambition to compose an operatic trilogy about the Italian Renaissance. Actually, he did finish the first part—I Medici—produced as a stand-alone piece. The other parts were to be called Savonarola and Cesare Borgia. There is no evidence that he ever even came close to finishing those. The entire trilogy was to have borne the title Crepuscolo (meaning “Twilight,” a play on the Italian title—Crespuscolo degli Dei—of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung—Twilight of the Gods).

An unfortunate destiny for any musician is to be the composer of “the other one”—that is, another version of a more famous work by another composer. There are two great examples of this in Italian opera: one is Paisiello’s Barber of Seville, still played occasionally as an historical curiosity but totally overshadowed—to put it mildly—by Rossini’s later work of that name; the other is Leoncavallo’s La Bohème. It premiered in 1897, less than a year after Puccini’s work. Critics and public passed judgment on the two operas immediately. It wasn’t even close. At least one treatment of the life of Puccini I have seen on Italian TV has the two composers engaged in a nasty rivalry. I have no idea if there is any truth to that, but Leoncavallo actually wrote part of the libretto for Puccini’s Manon Lascaut; it is hard to imagine him doing that for a bitter rival. Interestingly, Leoncavallo (like Wagner and a few others) was the librettist for all of his own operas and was considered a great one.

Who knows if that was not part of Leocavallo’s problem? —too many interests. A number of sources try to deal with the “flash in the pan” aspect in his life. They come to no conclusion, except to point out that the composer was not obsessed with music to the exclusion of all else. The reason he was a fine librettist, for example, is that his literary interests took him to Bologna after his music studies in Naples so he could attend the university there, particularly literature classes held by Carducci, Nobel laureate and the greatest Italian poet of the day. Leoncavallo may have been a Jack of At Least Two Trades.