Seattle Opera Weblog: PAGLIACCI and COMMEDIA

Every commedia performer would specialise in a sure function, and will improvise as that character with the characters turning into better-known than the artists who portrayed them. In efficiency, commedia characters wore masks. The masks helped exaggerate the characters, in an over-the-top, cartoonish means, and made them immediately recognizable from a distance, irrespective of who was taking part in them that point.

The present they’re performing in Pagliacci stars Columbina, her lover Harlequin, her husband Pagliaccio, and their servant Taddeo. Harlequin, one in all commedia’s hottest characters, was a poor servant motivated largely by lust and starvation. Columbina was a wise and sassy lower-class woman; she’s all the time getting the most effective of richer characters or male characters (most of whom lust after her). Pagliaccio, was often candy, sluggish, dreamy, and annoyed in love. Taddeo is an enormous man who’s simple to frighten and intimidate, one thing like The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion.

Zerbinetta (Rachele Gilmore) and Harlekin (Andrew Garland) from our 2015 manufacturing of Ariadne auf Naxos. © Elise Bakketun

As introduced in Pagliacci, Taddeo appears to have picked up traits of Pulcinello, or Punch, together with a hunchback (higher described, as we speak, as “a curvature of the backbone”). In our 2024 Pagliacci, the hunch (“gobbo” in Italian) belongs to Taddeo (the character), to not Tonio (the actor); it’s a costume-piece that will get tossed round onstage as they’re establishing the show-within-a-show.  In Tonio/Taddeo Leoncavallo created a personality who appears to have internalized what was an exterior situation. Or, as Nedda tells him, after Tonio tries to rape her: “You’re just like the character you play: twisted, warped!”

You’ll find hundreds extra details about commedia dell’arte on-line. For a scene of the purest commedia affect on music theater, take pleasure in this sequence from Stephen Sondheim’s A Humorous Factor Occurred On The Method To The Discussion board. The 1966 movie directed by Richard Lester starred (on this specific scene) Buster Keaton because the dim outdated man, Jack Gilford because the nervous servant, and the incomparable Zero Mostel because the artful servant: