Opera North

Cavalleria Rusticana

The craze for the short and sharp thrills of grittily intense verismo opera was launched by Mascagni’s wildly popular Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), which shares both its shock value and its core themes of betrayal, jealousy and vengeance with Pagliacci, the opera it is most often paired with.

Set at Easter, Cavalleria rusticana tells the tale of Turiddù, a soldier, who has returned from the army to find his lover, Lola, has married another man. In consolation, he has seduced Santuzza, leaving her desperate, while still nurturing his obsessive desire for Lola.

Trouble In Tahiti

The American Dream turns suffocatingly sour for an unhappily married couple in this one-act opera by Leonard Bernstein, whose prolific output in opera and musical theatre includes Candide, On The Town and West Side Story.

A darkly witty satire on married life in suburbia, written while he was on his own honeymoon, Bernstein’s first opera was heavily influenced both by the syncopated rhythms of jazz and the distinctive American vernacular of Hollywood movies and Broadway musicals. Sam and Dinah appear to have the perfect 1950s life – it’s a sunny morning in their “little white house” – but their growing failure to connect exposes a collective sense of entrapment. Refusing to see their son star in the school play, Sam escapes to the competitive, hyper-masculine world of work and the gym, while Dinah loses herself in “Island Magic” at the movies, where the hit picture of the day is the ominously titled Trouble in Tahiti.