The title Cavalleria rusticana is usually translated as Rustic Chivalry. This is half ironic, as the behavior of most of the characters is anything but chivalrous. In fact, as Giovanni Verga originally wrote the story, it is downright barbarous-far more violent than in Mascagni's opera.
 

It is this quality—stark, naked passion, expressed in unabashed violence—that may partly account for the immediate success of the work. It is essentially, of course, a literary quality. Verga’s novelette is regarded as a minor literary classic, and Duse and other actresses used to have great success with the tale given as a spoken drama. It was one of the first and most prominent successes, in both literature and music, of the school of verismo—“the theory that in art and literature the ugly and vulgar have their place on the grounds of truth and aesthetic value,” to quote Webster.
 

The little work was the first of three winners in a prize contest held by the publisher Sonzogno, and it catapulted its completely unknown composer, then aged twenty-seven, into overnight fame. It was not a local fame. Even in New York there was a bitter fight for its premiere performance. Oscar Hammerstein, years before he built his great Manhattan Opera House, paid $3000 for the rights only to be anticipated by a rival manager named Aronson, who gave a so-called “public rehearsal” of the work on the afternoon of October 1, 1891.

Hammerstein’s performance took place the same evening. That was less than eighteen months after its Roman premiere. But before that all Italy had heard it, not to mention Stockholm, Madrid, Budapest, Hamburg, Prague, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Vienna, Bucharest, Philadelphia, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, and Chicago, in the order named.
 

For well over half a century Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) lived on the fame and royalties won by this little masterpiece. He never composed another opera remotely approaching the success of Cavalleria, but he died in 1945 full of fame and honors.