Cilea's reputation rests on two operas and on the tenor arias in them. L'arlesiana, after Daudet's play, was staged in 1897 with the twenty-four-year-old Enrico Caruso in the cast and failed; Cilea revised it repeatedly without success, and it survives chiefly for Federico's lament, È la solita storia del pastore, in which a young man rebels against the marriage his family has arranged for him. Adriana Lecouvreur of 1902 supplied the other, La dolcissima effigie. Daudet's play itself is now remembered mainly for Bizet's incidental music.