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Ruggiero Leoncavallo was born at Naples in March 1858, so that he was thirty-four when "Pagliacci" was produced in 1892. He is the son of Judge-President Leoncavallo and Virginia Dauria, daughter of a famous Neapolitan painter. He studied at the Naples Conservatoire, and at sixteen started on a tour as a pianist. At Bologna he heard "Tannhäuser," the first of Wagner’,s works he ever knew. "This new art," he says, "made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently." |