Art & Creativity Quote by Ruggero Leoncavallo

Leoncavallo’s line reads like a polite diary entry, but it’s really a flare shot from the edge of a cultural revolution. “This new art” is deliberately unspecific, the kind of phrase an artist uses when the name of the thing is still settling into history. In the late 19th century, “new art” could plausibly mean Wagnerian music drama, verismo’s gritty theatrical realism, or even the emerging technologies and aesthetics reshaping performance. The vagueness is strategic: it frames his conversion not as a trend-chasing move but as an encounter with something bigger than a school or style.

The sentence turns on “made a deep impression on me.” He doesn’t claim mastery or originality; he claims impact. That’s a composer quietly admitting vulnerability, which is rarer than bravado in artistic self-mythology. Then comes the hinge: “and I began to study it ardently.” “Study” signals discipline, not inspiration. “Ardently” supplies the heat. Together they sketch the classic modern artist’s posture: passion justified by work, desire made respectable through rigor.

There’s also a careerist subtext that feels distinctly fin-de-siecle. Opera was an arena where taste could flip quickly, where yesterday’s rhetoric became tomorrow’s museum piece. To “study” the new art is to stay employable; to do it “ardently” is to sound chosen rather than pressured. Leoncavallo positions himself as both student and believer, aligning with modernity while keeping the dignity of craft. It’s self-fashioning, but it’s credible because it’s modest: the moment before the manifesto, when a life in music pivots on a single, irresistible aesthetic shock.