Ave Maria (Cavalleria rusticana)

In July 1888 the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno announced a competition for one-act operas by Italian composers who had never had a work staged. Mascagni learned of it two months before the deadline, received the libretto in fragments — sometimes a few lines on the back of a postcard — doubted the result and set it aside; his wife posted the manuscript on the closing day. It was one of three winners out of seventy-three entries. The premiere at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 17 May 1890 brought forty curtain calls. A single Sicilian morning, ending in a killing, gave verismo its working model.