"Pagliacci" was, in a way, a fruit of the same competition.

Three years before "Cavalleria Rusticana" had started the universal conflagration Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who at sixteen years of age had won his diploma at the Naples Conservatory and received the degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Bologna at twenty, had read his dramatic poem "I Medici" to the publisher Ricordi and been commissioned to set it to music.

For this work he was to receive 2400 francs.

He completed the composition within a year, but there was no contract that the opera should be performed, and this hoped-for consummation did not follow.

Then came Mascagni's triumph, and Leoncavallo, who had been obliged meanwhile to return to the routine work of an operatic repetiteur, lost patience.