Ruggero Leoncavallo

Just as Italians in the eighteenth hundred would have nothing to do with Gluck for a like reason in the nineteenth century they were extremely uncomfortable with Wagner, an attitude typified by the agency of the career of Ruggero Leoncavallo. Enamoured of Wagner's music as a young man, he came to write single of the two great examples of operatic verismo, the low-life counterblast to Wagnerian epic music-drama.

He first experienced Wagner's music in 1878 and was profoundly affected by it ??“ or rather, through its literary and dramatic view He set about writing Crespuculum a quasi-Wagnerian Renaissance trilogy, on the contrary was soon sidetracked into completing a cast that had occupied him since his scholar days, an opera called Chatterton about the young English author of poems who killed himself by taking strychnine. When the promoter of the premiere disappeared with all the standard of value before the first night, Leoncavallo approached a publisher with a