Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 4 - Cavalleria

19 | Lyric Opera of Chicago It all started with a contest. In 1888, the Milanese music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno, hoping to encourage emerging compositional talent, invited interested young Italian composers to submit a one-act opera to a panel of prominent critics and musicians. Three entries would receive fully-staged performances at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Just two months before the deadline, the competition came to the attention of Pietro Mascagni, a young Tuscan who had dabbled in opera with little success. Mascagni seized his opportunity aggressively, requesting that poets Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci provide a libretto. As source material, Mascagni’s librettists made the inspired choice of Cavalleria Rusticana , a novella and play about a toxic love triangle in a rural Sicilian village, by Italy’s master of the realistic school, Giovanni Verga. The title (“ Rustic chivalry ”) contains a twist of intentional irony and may confuse those who associate “chivalry” with an idealized code of masculine honor; Verga was a writer who rendered his affection for his countrymen through a warts-and-all examination of their flaws, faith, and often overpowering passion. His vision is that of the common chivalry of the streets. Katherine Lerner as Lola,Carlo Ventre as Turiddu,and Guang Yang as Santuzza in Lyric’s 2008/09 Cavalleria rusticana .