MUSIC : Plots of Revenge on Faithless Lovers Bring Overnight Success

If Pietro Mascagni, composer of the opera “Cavalleria Rusticana,” had had his way, we probably would never have heard of him.

Mascagni was eking out a living as a music teacher in the small town of Ceringola, Italy, when he read about a competition for a one-act opera.

He decided to send in the Fourth Act of a magnum opus opera he was working on--”Guglielmo Ratcliff,” based on a Romantic tragedy by the German poet Heinrich Heine.

But Mascagni’s wife, Lena, had other ideas.

Without her husband’s knowledge, she submitted a one-act work (“Cavalleria Rusticana”) that the composer himself considered rather hastily written and not reflective of his best efforts.

The competition jury felt otherwise.

Mascagni was declared one of three winners, and “Cavalleria” was produced in Rome on May 17, 1890. That night changed the course of opera history, and within a year made Mascagni famous.

“Cavalleria,” with its story of a jilted woman who gets revenge on her faithless lover, helped launch the verismo school that would dominate Italian opera for the next quarter-century.

The word verismo means simply “realism,” but as applied to opera, it means plots that concentrate on the everyday lives of poor people. The stories are full of emotions that boil over into revenge and murder.

Although “Cavalleria” made him famous, the four-act “Ratcliff” would remain Mascagni’s favorite composition of all the 15 operas he wrote. But his work, except for that one-act he hastily wrote when he was 26, has sunk into obscurity. Worse, after Mascagni allowed himself to become the official composer of Mussolini’s Fascist government, his reputation plummeted. He died in a cheap hotel in Rome, abandoned, confused and penniless, in 1945.

Ruggero Leoncavallo was the son of a police magistrate in Naples and a one-time itinerant cafe pianist and, later a frustrated librettist for the famous Ricordi publishing house. Leoncavallo envied Mascagni’s overnight success and was determined to emulate it. He shut himself up in his house for five months to write the libretto and music for “Pagliacci,” which, in fact, did repeat, if not exceed, Mascagni’s success. Toscanini conducted the premiere in Milan in 1892.

The plot, based on one of his father’s court cases, also concerns revenge on a faithless lover, in this case a husband on his wife. The two are itinerant commedia dell’arte players or pagliacci .

Leoncavallo originally planned the work to be a one-act opera, but so tumultuous was the applause after Canio’s aria “Vesti la Giubba” (“Put on the Clown’s Costume”) that he decided he had to divide the work into two acts.

Incidentally, he also directed the opera’s famous last line-- “La commedia e finita!” (The comedy is finished!)--to be spoken by Tonio, another of the players who begins the opera by stepping before the curtain to deliver the famous Prologue.

But early on, some tenor--either Fernando de Lucia or Enrico Caruso--in the lead role of Canio apparently could not stand to have someone else have the last word. So he appropriated the line for himself.

Tenors ever since have exerted the same prerogative.

Like Mascagni, Leoncavallo peaked early and remains known for a single work written when he was a comparatively young--35.

Because of their brevity, “Cav/Pag,” as the two operas are known in opera shorthand, are usually paired on a single evening. This is the way they will be presented this weekend, when Opera Pacific begins a six-performance run (through Sept. 15) at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

What: Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”

When: At 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 7; Wednesday, Sept. 11, and Sept. 13 and 14. At 2 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 8, and Sept. 15.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $20 to $75.

Where to Call: (714) 546-7372.