To be a one-hit wonder is painful enough; to have posterity forever yoke one’s hit with the hit of another one-hit wonder suggests a torment straight out of Dante. Such, in brief, was the fate of Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945). Not only did his Cavalleria Rusticana (1888, premiered 1890) make him world-famous before he had turned twenty-eight, it also proved—after two misleading years of independent existence—unthinkable in the public mind save as part of a double-bill with Pagliacci (1892) by Mascagni’s rival Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857– 1919). Known to opera-lovers as “Cav and Pag” (or, more archly, “the heavenly twins”), both masterpieces found their way into Ogden Nash’s verse as an emblem for the umbilically conjoined:

Mr. Powers began to shave only once a week

because no one cared whether his chin was

scratchy.
He felt as lonely as Cavalleria without

Pagliacci.

Mascagni’s future was five decades of frustrating efforts to convince the world that he had not shot his bolt after one great commercial triumph. Only with the comedic (rather than comic) opera L’Amico Fritzdid he again come close to international success, and even this approval eventually acquired a bitter taste at home, since the opera’s sympathetic treatment of a rabbi caused it to be proscribed when Mussolini imposed anti-Jewish laws on Italy in 1938. This embarrassment failed to prevent the composer from vilification—by contemporaries and, still more, by later generalist historians—as Fascism’s toadying composer- laureate. That he accepted