Like the Cavalry of the Rustic by Pietro Mascagni, Leoncaval's Spiders were written for the Sonzagno Music Publishing House competition, announced in 1890 for a one-act opera (...) and the most successful are Rudger Leoncaval's opera. His Bohemians after Mirge, Zaza and Gypsies were successful in Italy, but today almost all of his operas, except Spiders, have been forgotten.
(...) Although he does not possess the originality of Mascagni, nor his expressive immediacy, Leoncavallo achieved a complete fusion of the text of the libretto, action and music with refined musical means. His motifs are short, less melodic, but suitable for thematic processing. He skillfully connects and develops them according to the requirements of the work, dressing them in a lavish orchestral spirit, weaving them into an orchestra, but the singing section always has an advantage. He writes them gratefully for the singers, gives them real arias, and does not neglect the choir. Maybe some beats are just trivial, but the events on the stage required such a musical expression. The prologue of the opera gives a real manifesto of verism, a musical-scenic direction that followed the ideas of naturalism of Zola and his followers. Real and true life on the music scene, completely congested with Wagner and his supporters, attracted an audience eager to see the real action and to truly suffer and sympathize with the heroes on the stage. Therefore, it can be rightly claimed that the veristic opera is the forerunner of the sound film. But hasn’t the real life also been portrayed in Figaro’s Marriage , the Barber of Seville , La Traviata , or Carmen , which anticipates all the major features of verismo, but in a much deeper, more spiritual, and higher way? Experience shows that Spiders(...) attract the attention of a wide audience looking for an exciting action, as well as the audience on stage in this opera. The visit of Maria del Monaco in the role of Kanija in our Opera was the most notable guest appearance in Belgrade Opera and the play that was mostly written about before and after it. Today, when the Spiders and Cavalry, these half-night operas inseparable as Siamese twins, have taken a permanent place in the current repertoire of all world opera houses that have protagonists for the lead roles, no one belittles these works because of brutality in action, sentimental musical expression and similar things. The greatest singers interpreted with undisguised pleasure the roles in these operas, which were recorded for gramophone records in about twenty different divisions. Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Zinka Kunz, Mario del Monaco, Franco Corelli, Tulio Serafini and Karajan contributed to the glory of these works, which met and fell in love with more spectators through the cinema screen and small screen than at all performances in opera houses and arenas. Time has proved that these operas did not come to the surface for a short time, due to the daily needs of the repertoire or thanks to advertising
