The Metropolitan Opera Presents: Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana/Leoncavallo's Pagliacci: Libretto, Background and Photos

Opera's most enduring tragic double bill of verismo masterpieces, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci share many common features, most noticeably their direct language, plot simplicity, common-folk characters, and themes of adultery, betrayal, revenge, and murder. Written within two years of each other, and both set in villages in southern Italy, they feature dramatic confrontations, turbulent emotions, and gritty realism.

Cavalleria rusticana takes place on Easter in a Sicilian village, wher...