Calm Before the Duel in Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana Intermezzo
The Backstory

Teaching Band in the Middle of Nowhere

Back in late 1888, my pockets were completely empty after I had spent years travelling around with operetta troupes. I ended up settling down in Cerignola, a town in southern Italy where I scraped by as the local music teacher and led the town philharmonic society. It was a quiet life, though my bank account looked like a desert in the middle of August. I badly needed a break, and thankfully a new opportunity was about to knock on my door.

A Lottery Ticket for Hungry Musicians

That chance arrived when the Milanese publisher Edoardo Sonzogno announced an 1888 competition for young Italian composers who had never had an opera put on stage. He was asking for brand-new one-act operas, which sounded like the exact lifeline I had been waiting for. To build the story, my friends Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci wrote an Italian libretto based on a short story and play by Giovanni Verga. With their words in hand, I sat down between late 1888 and early 1889 to pour everything I had into the music.

Saved by the Post Office

Writing a whole drama when you are worried about buying groceries is not easy on the nerves. The story goes that I lost all faith in the opera, threw the score aside in frustration, and would have left it there to gather dust. According to that same tale, my wife Lina secretly rescued the manuscript and mailed it off to the competition right before the deadline closed. Whether or not it happened quite that dramatically, my entry beat out seventy-two others to take home first prize.

My Legs Got a Workout in Rome

Winning the prize meant my opera finally got its big premiere on May 17, 1890, at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, with Leopoldo Mugnone holding the baton. When the orchestra played the Cavalleria rusticana Intermezzo, the audience made such a joyful racket that it had to be played a second time right then and there. By the end of the night I had to walk out for forty curtain calls, though some accounts claim it was as many as sixty, which felt like running a marathon in evening wear. That single evening in Rome kicked off the whole verismo movement in Italian opera, and Edoardo Sonzogno published the score in Milan that very same year.

Keeping Count is Overrated

If you go digging through a library for this piece, you might notice that I never gave it an opus number or a standard catalogue code. I simply never bothered assigning opus numbers to any of my operas, preferring to let the titles do the talking. In the original score and orchestral editions, you will also see it called the Intermezzo sinfonico, which sounds a bit more dressed up for a night out. Whatever label gets printed on the program, it is the exact same three-quarter-time breathing space I wrote in Cerignola.

Staring at an Empty Stage

Because concert halls and movie directors love to play this music at the very start or end of a program, people often assume it is an overture or a finale. In truth, it shows up about two-thirds of the way through my one-act opera, and I ask the stagehands to leave the curtain wide open the whole time. Every single villager has just gone inside the church for Easter Mass, leaving the Sicilian town square completely deserted in the sunlight. Letting the audience stare at an empty street while the music plays is like taking a long, deep breath right before jumping into cold water.

No Wise Guys Allowed

There is another funny misunderstanding about what is actually about to happen in that quiet village square. Because Francis Ford Coppola used my music in the climax of his 1990 film The Godfather Part III, plenty of listeners think the opera is about the Sicilian Mafia. In reality, my characters are ordinary nineteenth-century villagers caught up in a domestic tragedy of love and betrayal that ends in a fatal knife duel. Martin Scorsese also borrowed the piece in 1980 for the opening credits and final scene of Raging Bull, proving that my gentle tune gets invited to some very rough neighborhoods.

Turning Drama into a Prayer

I marked the head of the score Andante sostenuto, asking the players to hold the notes out in a slow, sustained embrace. Because that melody climbs so warmly over the strings, singers eventually couldn't resist wanting a turn with it too. When people adapt the melody for a solo voice using sacred Latin words or Italian lyrics written by Piero Mazzoni, they usually call it Ave Maria. It always makes me smile to think that a piece I wrote to bridge the gap before a jealous village fight ended up becoming a favorite hymn.