Infidelity and violence are not humorous in San Diego Opera’s ‘The Clowns’

Any production of Leoncavallo’s evergreen verismo masterwork I Pagliacci (The Clowns) — including the San Diego Opera’s (Oct. 31 – Nov. 2) — must grapple with the tension at the opera’s heart: its protagonist, Canio, is both a casualty of his wife’s infidelity and (spoiler alert) a lethally violent guy. His wife Nedda’s not-so-secret affair is the fulcrum around which Canio’s victimhood and his ultimate savagery hinge. So is he a villain or victim?

Back in composer Ruggero Leoncavallo’s nineteenth-century Italy, the fate of indiscreet wives like Nedda fell under the legal doctrine of “delitto d’onore” (honor killing). The sentence for a vengeful homicide could be reduced from life to a single year if the perp was the husband of an adulterous spouse. This cultural fact might explain the gentle terms Leoncavallo used when describing his Pagliacci: “una tragedia dell’anima semplice” (“a tragedy of a simple soul”), “la verità dei sentimenti umani” (“the truth of human feeling”), etc. Canio’s violence, the composer once said, is simply “destino” (fate).

How can a modern, post-patriarchal audience sensitized to domestic violence absorb an opera about a marriage gone very, very wrong? That responsibility falls on Christopher Mattaliano, the director of San Diego Opera’s 2025-26 season opener and a veteran of eight previous Pagliacci productions for companies from Orange County, Portland and Utah to Minnesota and Omaha (San Diego Opera’s last production, in 2014, was directed by Andrew Sinclair).

Will he soften Canio’s guilt by highlighting the perfidy of unfaithful Nedda, her lover Silvio, and/or Tonio, the lustful hunchback who plots revenge when Nedda rejects him? Or will he place the moral burden squarely on Canio, the possessive alcoholic (and abuser?) who finally explodes?

Whichever choices Mattaliano makes, it will be the job of dramatic tenor Jonathan Burton, a veteran of fourteen productions as Canio, to make this protagonist believably human, no cardboard lout. Speaking via Zoom from his home in Ohio, Burton explained his approach to Canio by quoting the character Beppe, a member of Canio’s acting troupe: “You know Canio is violent, but he’s a good man!”

“That line came up yesterday in rehearsing,” Burton said. “Everyone thought it was sort of a ridiculous thing to say. Well, it’s also one of the foundation pieces of my interpretation of the role. What strikes me about this show, as much or maybe more than every other, is the variance of interpretation that people will bring to it. I never know which type of production I’m involved in until we get in the middle of it.

“To some people, Canio is the sympathetic character; they think Tonio is the villain, like Iago in [Verdi’s] Otello. He orchestrates this thing [the opera’s dramatic conclusion], and he makes all the boulders collide, and he does it for fun, because he’s a sicko. They think that Nedda is ungrateful and a cheater and that poor Canio, even though he murders her in the end, is the sympathetic character.

“To a certain degree, that seems to be what the composer was thinking. But to other people, Canio is the villain who murdered his wife. It doesn’t matter how nice of a guy. You know, all the neighbors of Ed Gein [the “Butcher of Plainfield” Wisconsin] thought he was a lovely old guy too. But he was making lampshades out of people. It’s okay to get all of those different kinds of interpretations.”

Though Pagliacci is, according to Opera America, only the fourteenth most-performed opera, the cultural meme of the sad, mad, and/or violent clown it has spawned lives on in everything from Smokey Robinson pop standards, Marx Brothers movies and Hollywood gangster flicks to television series like Batman, Seinfeld, and the Simpsons. When Burton delivers the opera’s most defining moment, the aria “Vesti la giubba” (“Put on the costume”) — immortalized by legendary tenors from Caruso and Beniamino Gigli to Pavarotti and Domingo — he’ll be daring a long, exposed crescendo that requires equal parts emotional rawness and disciplined technical control.  

Given the role’s emotional intensity, sustained vocal pressures, and Leoncavalla’s thick orchestration, does Burton consider it the toughest in the repertoire? “It’s subjective. What’s difficult for one person may not be for another,” he said. “There are people who would be frightened to sing Canio, but I couldn’t sing their role if I had to. It comes down to ‘If it’s for you, it’s for you’. It isn’t necessarily scary. Something like [the role of] Paul in [Korngold’s] Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) — that’s like singing Canio three times!

“Calaf in [Puccini’s] Turandot takes a lot of similar [challenges] as Canio, but it adds lyricism. The same with Dick Johnson in [Puccini’s] La fanciulla del West (The Damsel of the West). All those roles are much longer than Canio. If you take everything that you have to sing, it’s probably only 20 minutes long, but it’s like orange-juice concentrate — it’s powerful and it’s concentrated, so you need to be able to withstand that short, very intense kind of punishment.”

Operatic punishment was not on Burton’s radar as a teenage rock guitarist in southeast Ohio. With the emergence of “attitude” bands like Nirvana, Burton saw the writing was on the wall for the specialized rock guitar he played, and pursued classical guitar until he saw he wasn’t any better than his talented Cincinnati Conservatory classmates. But he’d always sang, so when he was asked to sing in a high school musical, he decided to make sure he would do it right.

Enter Stan Workman, a former student of Metropolitan Opera dramatic soprano Margaret Harshaw and a local vocal coach, organist, and church music director. Workman “encouraged me to take a voice lesson [to] see what could be done,” Burton recalled. “After about maybe the second or third lesson, he said, ‘You know, have you ever thought about opera?’ Never once in my life had I thought about opera! He ran a little opera company there in Portsmouth, Ohio, and I started doing shows there and I started singing in his church. So that was my early training. It was very intensive, all week long, hours a day. I had probably been in about six or seven operas before I ever saw one in person. It’s been a weird, weird path I’ve taken, I suppose.”

That weird path has brought him today to a broad and distinguished repertoire (from Puccini, Verdi, and Bellini to Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Bizet) and gigs for opera companies as august as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Washington National Opera (Kennedy Center), and the U.K.’s Welsh National Opera. Burton speaks of his instrument like it’s a wild, potentially predatory animal he doesn’t know one moment to the next if he’ll be able to use.

“Your voice is in a different mood every day of the week,” he explained. “Yesterday, my voice felt great. Today, I can already feel I don’t want to use it. Tomorrow, it might be great again. When I was at Sea World when I was young, they did Q&A with the audience, and the lady [orca trainer] said, ‘If you walk around the pool, you can sense the mood in there with them.’ It’s the same with your voice. There are some days it just doesn’t want to, but it will, and you do fine.

“But you’re also going to have your colleagues give something different on an average day, or somehow the orchestra seems louder or quieter. There are so many variables that you can’t control, including the ones in your own body. The best thing you can do is think of it like being a gladiator or a samurai: I’ve trained for all of these possibilities, and I’m going to be able to make my best of them when I get thrown the curve ball.”

Given those curve balls — the sheer range of real-life variables that a role, performance date, peers, or his own body can present — Burton’s learned not to worry. “The most important thing you can do for your voice happens in your mind. If you worry, no good will come of it. If you fear, that will make everything worse,” he said.

“I agree with Yoda that fear is the path to the dark side. I find it best to just live as normal of a life as you can. You can never really be satisfied — that you’re done, and there’s no more to learn or perfect. The goal is to be able to forget the technique when you’re called upon to do the job, and to be able to just stand there and do it.”