“A Slice of Life:” Cavalleria rusticana 
By Cori Ellison

Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892), written just two years apart, are the ham and eggs of opera. Each are short operas that have almost always been presented as a double bill, affectionately called ‘Cav/Pag’ by opera professionals, since their first joint performance in Rome in 1893. Cavalleria and Pagliacci have made a natural pair, as both are operas portraying a humble Southern Italian working-class community on a Roman Catholic feast day, and both concern love triangles that turn violent and deadly. Yet it is fascinating to separate these twins now and again. Boston Lyric Opera presented the circus of Pagliacci on its own exactly two years ago, and now, with the Company’s return to live opera following the pandemic, shines the spotlight on Cavalleria rusticana.

In 1889, the young Tuscan composer Pietro Mascagni decided to enter a competition for one-act operas sponsored by the Milanese music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno, open to young Italian composers who had not yet had an opera performed on stage. When Mascagni asked his long-time friend Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, a poet and professor of literature, to write a libretto for him, Targioni-Tozzetti suggested basing it on “Cavalleria rusticana,” a popular short story by the Sicilian realist author Giovanni Verga. Targioni-Tozzetti enlisted his colleague Guido Menasci to help him. In all, 73 operas were entered in the competition, but in March 1890, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana was selected as one of the final three.

The premiere of Cavalleria rusticana at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in May 1890 is the stuff of legend, with Mascagni taking forty curtain calls and capturing First Prize. The opera’s phenomenal popularity began immediately, and it easily remains the best known of Mascagni’s fifteen operas. Striving for a frank, intense, swift, and economical musical language in which to tell this turbulent tale, Mascagni and his librettists gave birth to the short-lived but wildly popular and endlessly influential operatic style called verismo in Italian opera.

Like Hip hop, Gospel, Salsa, Klezmer, Country Western, Beat poetry, Magic realism, Op art, or any musical style or cultural movement, verismo sprang directly from a community and its responses to its social and economic conditions.

Verismo—Italian for “realism”—was a powerful literary, theatrical, and musical genre that expressed the circumstances, passions, and preoccupations of Southern Italians at the turn of the twentieth century. In the Prologue to Pagliacci, Tonio states that the author has sought to portray “uno squarcio di vita,” (“a slice of life”). The immediate influences of verismo lie in naturalisme, or naturalism, a late nineteenth-century literary movement kindled by French novelists Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. After centuries of literature revolving around the upper classes, naturalism spotlighted the common people and la vie quotidien. It strove to look at the world with a cold, objective eye, focusing on the dark, harsh, violent side of life, often with the goal of social reform. Naturalist writers tried to realistically portray the current era of political, industrial, and social revolution that caught Europeans off guard and created an atmosphere of uncertainty and alienation, especially among the lower classes.

This French naturalist movement strongly influenced the literature of other nations, especially Italy, where this style was called verismo or realism. Verismo brought new prominence to southern Italy, where masses of artists rose to depict the hardships of life in the Mezzogiorno—the traditional name for the sunny south of Italy, encompassing the southern portion of the familiar boot-shaped Italian Peninsula, including the regions of Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia, and the two large islands of Sicily and Sardinia. One of the major figures of Italian verismo literature was Giovanni Verga, whose short story, “Cavalleria rusticana” (1880) or “Rustic Chivalry,” was purportedly based on an actual event. So great was its impact that the famous Italian actress Eleanora Duse asked Verga to dramatize it so that she could play the female lead. The resulting play, Cavalleria rusticana, was then adapted for the opera stage not only by Mascagni, but also by the Italian composers Stanislao Gastaldon (Mala pasqua!, 1890, premiered a month before Mascagni’s version, at the same theater!) and Domenico Monleone (1907).

Verismo permeated Italian literature, art, theatre, and film from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, but perhaps its most lasting embodiment has been in the immensely popular operatic works of Puccini, Giordano, Cilea, and others, whose earthy plots and characters, violent action, swift pace, declamatory vocalism, and colorful and emphatic orchestration still pack opera houses. Though pure verismo was relatively short-lived and soon challenged by the artistic movements that followed, many hallmarks of its style lasted well into the twentieth century, most notably in the films of Italian neorealist directors such as Vittorio di Sica and Roberto Rossellini and, remarkably, in American operas by such composers as Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, and Carlisle Floyd.

Cavalleria rusticana and verismo also made their way into American popular culture. In the climactic scene of The Godfather: Part III (1990) a performance of Cavalleria rusticana in Palermo, Sicily, with Michael Corleone’s opera-singer son Anthony as Turiddu, provides an ironic counterpoint to Vincent Corleone’s vengeance against his family’s enemies and an assassination attempt on Michael Corleone. The opera’s symphonic Intermezzo is also heard in the final scene as a backdrop to Michael’s lonely death. A decade earlier, director Martin Scorsese had also used the Intermezzo in the opening of Raging Bull (1980).

It’s not surprising that Cavalleria rusticana, a succinct opera with the tone and impact of a fast-moving popular thriller, still packs theaters today. And the moral questions it leaves in its wake—the dangerous effects and deadly consequences of infidelity and jealousy—will never cease to feel timely.

— Cori Ellison has served as staff dramaturg at New York City Opera, Glyndebourne Opera, and Santa Fe Opera, and is a member of the Vocal Arts faculty at The Juilliard School