Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 4 - Cavalleria

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 Cavalleria premiered on May 17, 1890, with the glamorous husband and wife team Gemma Bellincioni and Roberto Stagno creating the roles of Santuzza and Turridu. The opera caused a sensation. Here was the unbridled passion and narrative approach that was to define a newly-emerging operatic style; the orchestral interlude following the opening Siciliana could not evoke anything but a sun- drenched Sicilian square on Easter Sunday. Even Verdi was impressed. “He has invented a most effective genre,” the venerated composer recorded, “short operas without pointless longueurs.” Cavalleria swept Italy, and by the end of 1891 had premiered in Berlin, London, Philadelphia, and Chicago, arriving at the Metropolitan Opera on December 30. Bellincioni later re-created her Santuzza for a 1916 silent film, and in 1953 Anthony Quinn mimed to Tito Gobbi’s voice in another filmed version, marketed in the United States under the steamy title Fatal Desire . Cavalleria ’s success was duly noted by ambitious musicians, among them a young Neapolitan, Ruggero Leoncavallo. Like Mascagni, Leoncavallo had despaired of receiving an operatic commission, and was resigning himself to a career in academia; now with Cavalleria ’s shining example before him, he set about composing Pagliacci . The source inspiration for the libretto has never been definitively verified. Popular legend has long held that Leoncavallo’s police magistrate-turned judge father brought home the story of the jealously deranged clown who so confuses actual and theatrical reality he murders his wife onstage. On at least one occasion, Leoncavallo also claimed to have witnessed the events personally (a suspect version, given he was responding to a plagiarism lawsuit; his storyline’s similarity to Catulle Mendes’s La Femme de Tabarin had caught attention). Whatever the truth, Leoncavallo’s libretto is a veristic dream come true, its earthy appeal heightened by his setting the action in Calabria, one of Italy’s more impoverished provinces. Pagliacci premiered in Milan on May 21, 1892, with a cast including Fiorello Giraud, Adelina Stehle, and the great French baritone Victor Maurel as Tonio. Like Cavalleria , Pagliacci was an immediate hit. The opera was first performed in North America at the Grand Opera House, New York, in June of 1893 and came to the Met the following December 1. In 1907, Pagliacci became the first opera to be recorded in its entirety, and in 1931 the first to be filmed complete with sound, in a now rarely-seen document starring Fernando Bertini and the San Carlo Opera company. The initial pairing of the operas as a double bill may have occurred at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in 1893. The Met first performed the “Cav/Pag” amalgam on December 22 of that year, though both works have subsequently been strange bedfellows there to such disparate partners as Salome , La traviata , and Gluck’s Orfeo ; Lyric performed Pagliacci in 1982 alongside Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine . Beyond these occasional anomalies, the operas have rarely been disjoined, and neither has slipped from the permanent repertory. After more than a century of shared billing, “Cav and Pag” have developed something of a dyadic identity. “Opera’s Castor and Pollux,” they have been called and, more irreverently, “opera’s ham and eggs.” There is a sensible history behind the humor, however, for though not conceived as the ubiquitous duo they became, the two works inadvertently poured the musical foundation for a burgeoning artistic movement known as verismo , or “realism.” As the 19th century neared its end, Italian opera found itself surrounded by a rapidly evolving cultural consciousness. A gritty naturalism had crept into the visual arts through the paintings of Antonio Mancini and Francesco Paolo Michetti, and particularly into literature as manifested by the works of Giovanni Verga and the Frenchman Émile Zola. Theatrical writing eased away Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) in Pagliacci , in 1908. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images