ABSTRACT
The concluding half-hour of Francis Ford Coppola's 1990 film The Godfather Part III shows the Michael Corleone Family attending a performance of Mascagni's opera Cavalleria rusticana at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, Sicily. The literal level – the use of Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana – is limited to the concluding half hour of the film. Whilst superficially it appears to structure this section of the film, the role of ritual that Coppola claims for the opera is collapsed by a closer investigation of its use. Coppola's choice of opera is no coincidence; Cavalleria rusticana provides operatic parallels to the ritualism and violence of the Godfather films. The Preghiera sequence establishes arcs of interpretation both across Part III and to the earlier parts of the trilogy. The cultural level of opera in Part III is the smallest manifestation of the genre in film. The structural function of opera on the dramatic level can be observed in Coppola's use of crowd scenes.
