figure
Masaniello
also: Мазаньелло
The mute fisherman-hero of Daniel Auber's opera "La Muette de Portici", who leads a Neapolitan uprising and is prone to wild mood swings before his death; invoked here as the third term of a mock-heroic couplet describing Lensky's range -- Hamlet and Othello onstage, Lear in drawing rooms, and "Masaniello" among friends -- a joke Chekhov immediately undercuts by asking what "Masaniello" is even supposed to mean.
Reading notes
- To A. P. Lensky, 27 September 1889. Moscow. §4 In drawing rooms a Lear, with friends a Masaniello.
The couplet's punchline: King Lear in polite drawing-room company, but among friends a "Masaniello" -- the volatile, mood-swinging fisherman-revolutionary hero of Daniel Auber's opera "La Muette de Portici", used here as comic shorthand for Lensky's more excitable private temperament.
- To A. P. Lensky, 27 September 1889. Moscow. §5 What does Masaniello mean?
Chekhov immediately undercuts his own erudite joke by asking, in mock innocence, what the reference he has just made even means -- a bit of characteristic self-deflating humor with theater friends.