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.
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