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Monday, September 23, 2019

The layers of Pagliacci

The cast of Pagliacci receiving the applaus in The National Opera in Amsterdam

In Leoncavallo’s opera “Pagliacci” the actors Canio and Nedda act in a stage play in which Pagliaccio (played by Canio) is deceived by his wife Colombina (Nedda) and kills her. What the public in this play doesn’t know is that in “real life” Canio is deceived by his wife Nedda, and that the murder in this drama is not acted (as it should be) but that it is a real murder: While playing Pagliaccio, Canio becomes so angry that he forgets that he is acting and during the play Pagliaccio becomes Canio who has been deceived by the real Nedda. The border between fiction and fact fades away.
In the opera we see a double-layered story: The first layer is the play with Pagliaccio and Colombina and the second layer is the “real life” of the actors Canio and Nedda, who act their lives in this opera. It’s not without reason that I write real life between quotation marks, for in this case also the “real life” is a play. Actually, it’s not difficult to add more layers. For instance what if the tenor Brandon Jovanovich, who sang the part of Canio, would have been the husband of the soprano Aylin Pérez (Nedda) and would have murdered her on the stage when I was watching the opera, because she had deceived him? Then fiction would really have become fact. But even without this layer that springs from my imagination there are at least two other layers, namely the spectators in the opera hall (I and my wife and the others present in the hall), for during the time of the opera they had stepped out of “real life” so to speak, and played the part of real spectators (to be distinguished from the actors in the opera who play the parts of the spectators in the play). And then, of course, there is also the real world outside the opera building. So we can distinguish at least four layers, each with their own realities and each with their own fictions and facts, their own actions and events.
The idea of layers is also thematized in philosophy. Maybe the first philosopher who did was Plato with his Allegory of the Cave: A group of people is imprisoned in a cave already since childhood. Behind their backs a fire is burning and between the fire and the prisoners people are continuously passing by. The prisoners cannot see what occurs behind them. They see only the shadows of the passers-by on a wall in front of them. Therefore the prisoners know only how these people look like and what they do in an indirect way. For the prisoners the projections on the wall constitute the real world, since they don’t know the world in another way. Here, we see two layers: (1) the world of the shadows on the wall and their spectators (which is the real world for these spectators), and (2) the world behind the backs of these spectators. However, as the Dutch philosopher Nicole des Bouvrie remarks, when commenting on this allegory: How does Plato know that there is not yet another layer, another reality? And indeed, there is at least one other layer, like in Leoncavallo’s opera. Just like the spectators of the opera in the hall in the same way the readers of Plato’s allegory constitute a layer as well.
An opera wouldn’t be an opera and an allegory wouldn’t be an allegory if they wouldn’t stand for something in reality. And isn’t it so that we all play our parts and that we all have our realities that we try to keep apart and that often interlock like layers? A job is often merely a way to get the money to live, as it is for the actors (as actors) in the opera. Our “real life” – for us – may be at home with our family, or in our club, or elsewhere. And this “real life” is enclosed by a world outside, like the life of the town where we live, our country and the wide world, which have a big influence on us and on what we can do. Real life consists of layers of fiction and fact. For aren’t we often playing a role in our job, for instance, when we hide what we actually think in order to avoid a conflict with our boss? Don’t we often screen off a part of us, so that it becomes a separate layer? (Who of the other students in my class at school knew that already then I loved classical music and opera and not, say, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones)?
Layering is a fact of life. Often it has a protective function, and it simplifies our view on reality. It makes our life structured and surveyable and helps us act in the right way. This is exemplified by Leoncavallo’s opera in a negative way: Negative in the sense that we see there what can happen if the border between two layers fades away and the fiction of a lower layer becomes the fact of a higher layer. Then we can get a problem. Examples are relatives or friends who have to do with each other in different roles. A teacher with her daughter in her class. A mayor who gives a building order to a friend. A husband who deceives his wife with her best friend / A woman who deceives her best friend with her husband. Suddenly the situation explodes. We have a scandal. The business deal becomes public. The marriage ends in a divorce. In the worst case there is a murder. If this happens the last words of “Pagliacci” apply: The comedy is finished. La commedia è finita.

Reference: Bouvrie, Nicole des, Diagnose van de moderne filosoof. Waarom filosofen gek zijn. Eindhoven: Damon, 2018

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