"Intermezzo" from Cavalleria rusticana
Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945)
By his mid-twenties Mascagni had already written three unperformed full-length operas. He composed Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) in response to a publisher's competition for a new one-act opera. It was one of the winners, and its first performance, in 1890, made the young man famous overnight. He never managed to repeat that success through a long career of operatic composition, but his stormy, passionate masterpiece of love, jealousy, and murder on a sunny Easter Sunday in a small Sicilian town is constantly with us. The Intermezzo provides a brief respite from the tensions of the plot between the two scenes of the single act.