Royal Opera’s Cavalleria rusticana isn’t nearly vulgar enough

How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same week? Never, until this last week in London, when Opera Rara gave a concert performance of Zazà at the Barbican, and six days later the Royal Opera mounted its first production since the 1980s of Cav. and Pag. Both Leoncavallo and Mascagni are routinely thought of as one-opera composers. Zazà didn’t do a lot to undermine that view, and I doubt whether if it had been staged it would have made any stronger an impression. Like Pag., its libretto is by the composer: Wagner seems to have made that temporarily mandatory. But the plot is feeble almost to the point of nonexistence. Zazà is a club singer who falls for one of the clients, finds out that he is married with a young teenage daughter, and so renounces him, though rather surprisingly no one dies.