Sarah returns to Opera Western Reserve to make her role debut as Nedda in Pagliacci in the beautifully restored 2,500 seat Powers Auditorium

Always an audience favorite for its dramatic, passionate music and colorful scenes, “Pagliacci” (The Clown) is a Verismo style opera, featuring realistic characters thrust into everyday life crises. Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote both the wrods and the music in 1892, and not only is the opera based on a true story, but it is perhaps Opera’s original “Reality Show.”

The story follows a raucous band of traveling clowns, jugglers, and actors who arrive in a small italian town to perform their boisterous comedy act. Amid the circus-like atmosphere, tensions arise behind the scenes between the actor playing Pagliaccio, the lead clown, and his young wife. Pagliaccio suspects his wife is having an affair. As his personal conflict is mirrored in the drama they are portraying on stage, the boundaries between performance and reality begin to blur. Consumed with jealousy, suspicion, and rage, Pagliaccio is unable to separate his own life from the fictional play they are enacting. A real-life tragedy unfolds on stage while the audience of villagers mistakes the emotionally-charged drama as expert acting. 

The tenor aria “Vesti la glubba,” (Put on the costume), sung bay Pagliaccio immediagetly following his realization that his wife has humiliated him, is the most iconic and famous of the opera. Even though his heart is breaking, he must still play the clown, plaster his face with make-up and a smile. In fact, the very first record to sell one-million copies was famed tenor Enrico Caruso’s 1902 recording of “Vesti la giubba.”