Stridono lassù from I Pagliacci (1892)

Deliberately directed at the same audience as Cavalleria rusticana, I Pagliacci is also set in the south of Italy and is based on another story – devised by Leoncavallo himself from a real-life event – of jealousy and violently executed revenge. At this early stage, however, in the second scene of the first act, Canio, the leader of a group of travelling players is unaware of his wife Nedda’s affair with a villager called Silvio. Although she is afraid of being found out by her brutal husband, Nedda casts such thoughts aside and, moved by a flight of chattering birds in the August sun, sings to herself a song her mother taught her. Except in a brief encounter with stormy adversity towards the end, Stridono lassù flies as freely and effortlessly on its bouyant orchestration as the birds themselves in the cloudless sky.