Pietro Mascagni

Pietro Mascagni was a baker's son from Livorno, on the Tuscan coast, who defied his father to study music. Broke and touring with small opera companies in his twenties, he entered a publisher's competition for one-act operas. His entry, Cavalleria rusticana, a jealousy-and-revenge story set in a Sicilian village, won, and its 1890 premiere in Rome made him famous at twenty-six practically overnight.

Nothing he wrote afterward came close in popularity, and he knew it, remarking that he had been crowned before he became king. He kept composing and conducting for another half century, and his reputation was later clouded by his accommodation with Mussolini's regime. He died in Rome in 1945.

Cavalleria rusticana is the essential piece, barely seventy minutes long, with an orchestral interlude in the middle you will probably recognize. The gentle comedy L'amico Fritz is the follow-up.