Cavalleria Rustica and Pagliacci
Pietro Mascagni (Music); Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti & Guido Menasci (Libretto): Cavalleria Rustica
Ruggero Leoncavallo (Music & Libretto): Pagliacci
San Jose Opera
Infidelity that leads to fatal revenge is the subject of a musically invigorating and visually lush double-billing by San Jose Opera of two, late-nineteenth-century Italian operas often paired together. Each is a prime example of the intense, passionate, and violent style of realistic, Italian. verismo operas typically about ordinary people. Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rustica and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci both quickly engage an audience with compelling stories of love triangles gone astray and with music that is glorious and often recognized even to those less familiar with operas in general.
Stage Director Shawna Lucey sets each opera in the same, Sicilian village, with Cavalleria Rustica occurring just prior to World War I and Pagliacci, soon after the Great War. With the rocky shoreline of a blue Mediterranean in the background, Scenic Designer Stephen C. Kemp has created a lovely community of tightly packed and shuttered homes and an outdoor wine cafe separated from the massive doors and edifice of the town’s church by a sweeping set of steps lined with orange trees. As each opera packs its action into a short time period of quickly passing hours, the lighting artistry of Michael James Clark creates an array of colors as the sun rises, peaks, and falls.
A definite highlight of both operas is the musical score of each, so magnificently played by the near-fifty-member orchestra conducted with insightful vigor and sensitivity by Alma Deutscher. That is immediately clear as the Overture of Cavalleria Rustica commences when mesmerizing strings and woodwinds followed eventually by a trio of flutes, French horns, and harp lure us into believing that what we are about to witness in this idyllic, Italian village is a tale of love and harmony.
The ruse is furthered by the composer and his librettists (Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci) as we hear a full-voiced, sweetly intoned tenor singing from afar a love song by unseen Turiddu (Christopher Oglesby) to his Lola. Cleverly adding more fodder to the belief of a romantic tale to come are the village’s women emerging to greet their returning men as they sing in hypnotically lyrical harmonies, “Now all the world is glad, the love’s happy hour.” Equally melodic with Italian flair sing the returning orange-grove workers with their picks, rakes, and shovels an echoing of the same lines. As they sing, couples meet, hug, and even head to darkened corners for heavy smooching (the much-accomplished and enjoyable stage-filling Chorus under direction of Noah Lindquist).
But we will soon realize not all is as it seems in the village — at least for golden-haired Santuzza who is left alone in the plaza as all others head home to prepare for vespers. In powerful soprano with just the right amount of expressive vibrato, Maria Natale sadly sings of Santuzza’s excommunication from the church and of “a barb in my heart.” Later, as the townspeople join in an elaborate Easter procession to the church singing a heavenly voiced set of “Alleluias,” her Santuzza sings heart-rendering cries of supplication as she prays alone.
What we learn is that after Turiddu returned from the war and discovered his pre-war beloved, Lola, had married while he was away a fellow villager, Alfio, he then seduced Santuzza with false promises of love, only now to have resumed an affair with the married Lola. Santuzza confronts Lola (mezzo-soprano Courtney Miller) as she heads to the church — a Lola who hauntingly mocks Santuzza in convincing notes dripping with scorn.
But it is when Turiddu (Christopher Oglesby) also heads toward the church that a major eruption between the two occurs as Santuzza begs him to stay, clinging to his body before being pitched violently to the ground. With respective soprano and tenor vocals that roll in piercing phrases, their mutual anger rises. The final rejection by the powerfully voiced Turiddu leads both Santuzza and the accompanying orchestra to cry out a incredibly impressive, bone-rattling damnation of Turiddu.
That curse is of course a surety of Turiddu’s final fate. A hurt and now-maddened Santuzza ensures Lola’s husband, Alfio, finds out about her affair, affording baritone Kidon Choi a chance to demonstrate his own thundering power of rich, fervent notes that pledge a righteous revenge. A second half of the one-act provides each of these three principles ample opportunities further to amaze us with both their acting and their singing, but not before we as an audience sink back in our seats thoroughly to enjoy the opera’s famous, oft-heard Intermezzo that combines a sense of a peaceful Easter along with some warning of the upcoming and inevitable tragedy.
In this same setting and with the same set of townspeople now recouping their lives after a brutal war, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci opens with the community ready to put aside any current difficulties and to enjoy the hilarity of a traveling troupe of commedia dell’arte actors — one featuring the antics of clown-faced and cuckholded Pagliacci whose unfaithful Columbina is giving him plenty of reasons to be hilariously upset.
But like the previous act’s unfolding of unfaithfulness, in this case what is being played as a farce on the town’s stage is in fact a tragedy in the making among these actors in painted faces.
Once again, we are provided an opening that is delightfully off-setting of what is to come as a brightly attired clown pops out of the closed curtain to announce “I am the Prologue.” First Act’s Kidon Choi returns to the stage and proceeds as now Tonio to entertain us in his arresting baritone with a preview of the range of emotions we will soon witness. He also provides us the telling clue that “we actors are real people” — something we will soon see tragically prove true.
The entangled love wishes, affairs, and deceits in Pagliacci are even more complicated than in Cavalleria Rustica. Laughing and teasing townspeople taunt traveling favorite Canio (whose Pagliacci on the stage they adore) that fellow actor Tonio has eyes for his wife Nedda (who plays Pagliacci’s betraying wife Columbina in their show). Nedda is in fact having an affair, as we will soon learn; but it is not with Tonio, but with a local, handsome lad, Silvio, whom she has promised to escape her oft-abusive and detested husband, Canio, that very night after the show.
As in the previous opera, discoveries of secret rendezvous where intimate kisses are plentiful will be made surreptitiously; and plans of infuriated revenge are set in motion on a course that cannot be altered — in this case acts of horror on a stage full of clownish comics trying to entertain a town full of gleefully singing villagers, including a bevy of playful children (members of Vivace Youth Chorus).
Kidon Choi employs all the stirring aspects of his baritone prowess as his Tonio flirts with increasing pressure the uninterested Nedda. Mikayla Sager mocks with piercing soprano his efforts and eventually raises both voice and arm to strike down his efforts. Tonio, now angered and humiliated, slinks away, ready to find a way for a payback which will of course occur.
In the meantime, we see another side of Nedda as she and her secret love — a gallant in voice and looks, Silvio (Luis Alejandro Orozco) — meet and sing their mutual passion in beautifully intertwined voices as their bodies likewise become physically interlocked.
But in a small village, secrets never remain so for long, especially when Tonio is on the prowl and is more than ready to spill the beans to an already suspicious Canio.
As the troupe prepares for the evening’s light-hearted playlet, Canio begins to apply white to his already pale-with-anger face. While doing so, Ben Gulley delivers the entire evening’s pinnacle moment, the famous and familiar aria known world wide via the likes of Pavarotti and Domingo, “Vesti la giubba” (“Put on the Costume”). His stellar tenor voice near shakes the rafters. His sung grief of being fooled by his wife turns into a resolve to put on the powder and paint and please the people who have paid to see his Pagliacci, ending with a laugh that contains the anger and the resolve of what will play out that night as Camio’s real life takes over Pagliacci’s staged life.
Two operas joined at the hips in setting and theme and each showcasing some of opera’s most compelling and captivating music are given their full due and more by San Jose Opera’s two casts, its directors of stage and music, the creative team, and especially the orchestra. Raw emotions explode in passions of love, jealousy, and revenge as San Jose Opera offers an evening of marvelously pleasurable opera presenting Cavalleria Rustica and Pagliacci.
Rating: 5 E
A Theatre Eddys Best Bet Production
Cavalleria Rustica and Pagliacci continue through March 1 2026 in a two-hour, forty-five-minute production (with intermission) by Opera San Jose at the California Theatre, 345 1st Street, San Jose, CA. Tickets are available online at www.operasj.org or by phone at 408-437-4450, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., Monday – Friday.
Photo Credits: David Allen
