Synopsis:

The National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) will present the Symphony Orchestra of India’s 12th Celebrity Season from February 18 to 26, 2012, featuring two Grand Operas. Following the stellar success of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in February 2008 and Tosca in September 2010, the NCPA brings you the classic duo, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci
Since they first burst onto the operatic scene at the end of the 19th Century, both these one act operas have performed together in several opera seasons worldwide, and have become euphemistically known as ‘Opera’s Heavenly Twins’. Both operas propelled their respective composers to instant fame, providing the high drama of verismo (true to life) opera. They present dramatic stories of love, jealousy, betrayal, murder and societal privation with such marvelously impassioned music that the exciting, harmonic and melodic structure of the music itself tends to impinge immediately on the audiences’ emotions.
Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) became his most performed work, and therefore, the most famous of his fifteen operas and one operetta. Theatre statistics show that by the time he died in 1945, the opera had received more than 14,000 performances in Italy alone, and by the turn of the century it had been heard in every major operatic centre across Europe, Russia, and America.
Ruggero Leoncavallo’s(1858-1919) Pagliacci performed frequently with Cavellaria Rusticana, as a curtain raiser, has remained one of the most popular of operas world over, ever since its premiere in 1892. Stimulated by Mascagni`s enormous success with Cavalleria Rusticana, Leoncavallo – not only a composer but also a librettist, decided to write an opera in the same vein and called it Pagliacci(Clowns). It was also the great tenor Enrico Caruso’s signature role.