Ruggero Leoncavallo

The son of Vincenzo Leoncavallo, a police magistrate and judge, Leoncavallo was born in Naples, at the time the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, on 23 April 1857. As a child, Leoncavallo moved with his father to the town of Montalto Uffugo in Calabria, where he lived during his adolescence. In 1868 he returned to Naples, where he eventually became a student at San Pietro a Majella Conservatory. From 1876 to 1877, he studied literature under the famed Italian poet Giosuè Carducci at the University of Bologna. He also lived in Potenza, since 1876 until 1878. In 1879, Leoncavallo's uncle Giuseppe, director of the press department at the Foreign Ministry in Egypt, suggested that his young nephew come to Cairo to showcase his pianistic abilities. Ruggero Leoncavallo arrived in Egypt shortly after the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II had deposed Khedive Ismail (June 1879) and replaced him as Khedive of Egypt with Ismail's son Tewfik Pasha. Mahmud Hamdi Pasha (1863–1921), the teenage brother of the new Khedive, appointed Ruggero Leoncavallo as "his private musician". His time in Egypt concluded abruptly in mid-1882, as the British intervened in the Urabi revolt of 1879–1882 in Alexandria and Cairo led by Ahmed Urabi; the composer fled and travelled to France. In Paris, Leoncavallo found lodging in Montmartre. An agent located in the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis secured Leoncavallo employment as an accompanist and instructor for artists who performed in Sunday concerts mostly …

Estratto dalla biografia Wikipedia di Ruggero Leoncavallo — testo rilasciato con licenza CC BY-SA 4.0. Leggi la biografia completa →