Rural Honor is an opera by Pietro Mascagni with a libretto (in Italian) by Guido Menasci and Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, based on a play by Giovanni Verga, which is in turn an adaptation of his novel of the same name.
The name "Cavalleria rusticana" is usually translated as "Country honor". .
An all-consuming passion, openly expressed with great force - these are the qualities of the opera that immediately brought her incredible success. Of course, the literary merits of the libretto are also essential. Verga's short story was considered a small literary masterpiece.
Rural Honor was the first and perhaps the most significant triumph in both literature and music of a movement that came to be called verismo (verism), “a theory,” to quote Webster, “that in art and literature put at the forefront the image of everyday life, psychological experiences of the characters, attention to the dark sides of the life of the urban and rural poor.
This small work was the first of three that won a prize at the competition announced by the publisher E. Sonzogno, and in one night it glorified the then unknown composer, who was only twenty-seven years old. Even in New York, a struggle began for the right to first stage the opera. Oscar Hammerstein, a few years before he built his grand Manhattan Opera House, paid $3,000 just to beat his rival producer Aronson, who gave the piece a so-called "public rehearsal" on October 1, 1891. Hammerstein's performance took place that same evening. All this was less than a year and a half after the Rome premiere. But by this time, all of Italy had already heard it. In addition, it has already been in Stockholm, Madrid, Budapest, Hamburg, Prague, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Vienna, Bucharest,
For more than half a century, Mascagni lived on fame and profits from the productions of this little masterpiece. None of his other operas (and he wrote fourteen more) had a success that could even remotely compare with the success of Rural Honor, but even so, he died in 1945 in full glory and honor.
