María del Carmen María del Carmen María del Carmen is an opera in three acts composed by Enrique Granados to a Spanish libretto by José Feliú i Codina based on his 1896 play of the same name. It was Granados's first operatic success and although largely forgotten today, he considered it to be his best opera. At the end of its initial run in Madrid where it premiered in 1898, Queen Maria Cristina awarded Granados the Charles III Cross in recognition of his work. The opera, sometimes described as a Spanish version of Mascagni's "Cavalleria rusticana" with a happy ending, is set in
Cavalleria rusticana in Chicago on 30 September 1891. The opera premiered in New York on 1 October 1891, with two rival performances on the same day: an afternoon performance at the Casino, directed by Rudolph Aronson, and an evening performance at the Lenox Lyceum, directed by Oscar Hammerstein. The opera received its first performance at the Metropolitan Opera on 30 December 1891 in a double bill with a fragment of Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice", and has since received over 700 performances there. Before the action takes place, the young villager Turiddu had returned from military service to find that his fiancée Lola