Cavalleria Rusticana

Few artists have had a greater impact on Met history than Franco Zeffirelli, the beloved director and designer who created 11 productions for the company over the course of an unrivaled 35-year career. Following his debut at the “old Met” on 39th Street and Broadway with a staging of Verdi’s Falstaff, he helped inaugurate the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in 1966 with an extravagant production of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, and four years later, he returned with a now-legendary double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. In this performance of Mascagni’s charged verismo masterpiece, acclaimed conductor Leonard Bernstein makes a rare appearance leading a Saturday Matinee Radio Broadcast. Grace Bumbry, whose illustrious Met career included both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles, stars as Santuzza, going head-to-head with extraordinary tenor Franco Corelli as her unfaithful lover, the callous Turiddu.