Verismo
Verismo is one of those operatic terms that can lead to confused interpretations. One might mention it in the same breath as works by Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Giordano, Cilea and Puccini with regard to subject matter, brevity of compositional style and shocking dramatic impact, but to the purist, verismo is a very specific intellectual ideal.
Realism and naturalism dominated artistic thought from the middle to the latter part of the 19 th century, marking a departure from the formal emphasis of Classicism and fantastic imagination of Romanticism. France seemed to be the forerunner of the new genre ? already by 1845 Henry Murger had begun writing his Scènes de la vie de bohème, a truthful portrayal of his life as a starving artist. In 1848 Alexandre Dumas fils wrote La dame aux camélias, detailing his personal affair with the notorious courtesan Marie Duplessis ? this would become Verdi's La traviata five years later. Visual artists Jean-François Millet, Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet broke with the official Academy's predilection for the heroic and the mythic by painting ordinary people in their daily milieu, paving the way for the Impressionists, who were realist in choice of topic and point of view.
Inspired by this trend in realism and Bohemianism in France , during the 1860s the artistic avant-garde of Milan became known as the Scapigliatura. Taking their name from an 1858 novel, La Scapigliatura e il 6 Febbraio by Cletto Arrighi, the ?disheveled ones? counted among their numbers Emilio Praga, Camillo and Arrigo Boito, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, Carlo Dossi, Tranquillo Cremona and Franco Faccio. In response to the chaotic aftermath of the Risorgimento, the scapigliati revolted against established bourgeois values and subjugated Victorian sexuality, taking their cue from Charles Baudelaire's highly sensational poems Les fleurs du mal and Gustave Flaubert's scandalous novel Madame Bovary (both published in 1857). Their high-minded approach translated into a slap in the face of Alessandro Manzoni, one of Italy's most popular writers of the 19 th century and in music, Giuseppe Verdi, its foremost composer (Arrigo Boito's infamous comments debasing Italy's stagnant cultural life dates from this period and would be remembered by Verdi for years to come ? they were only able to mend the fence years later when Boito was engaged to write the libretti for Verdi's final works, Otello and Falstaff; brother Camillo would eventually design Verdi's final legacy, the Casa di riposo, a rest home for retired musicians). The works of the scapigliati would impact the operatic world through Boito's Mefistofele (1868, to his own text) and Faccio's I profughi fiamminghi (1863, to a text by Praga) and Amleto (1865, to text adapted by Boito), as well as inspiring verismo opera later in the century. Scapigliatura writings, tended to explore the darker side of the human psyche and lent themselves to later fin-de-siècle decadent literature. Several of its members led dissolute lives, subject to drinking, amorality and short mortality ? Praga died at age 36, Tarchetti at age 28.
The next generation, the giovane scuola, whose members included Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana and Federico de Roberto, emphasized a naturalist writing style in which the author's personal style should not be conspicuous and which featured contemporary stories and settings, the very ?truth? verismo's literal translation would seem to indicate. Devoid of any political message (unlike their French counterparts), the Italians focused on country life and elemental passions. Cavalleria rusticana, an opera based on one Verga's stories that involved a peasant village racked by jealousy and murder, was an instant hit when it premiered in 1890, drawing attention from Verdi as ?a new genre?without pointless longueurs.? It was almost by accident ? its composer, Pietro Mascagni, had submitted the opera to Edoardo Sonzogno's competition sponsoring the composition of one-act operas, and concision was a key requisite. Eager for success, other composers quickly followed suit. Ruggero Leoncavallo, who had spent his early adulthood in Paris and was also familiar with the naturalist trend, premiered Pagliacci two years later. The two operas frequently appear as a double bill.
Giacomo Puccini would also tag along, albeit in a different direction. Though both he and Leoncavallo would create operas after Murger's Scènes, Puccini's subsequent work, Tosca, was decidedly set in the Napoleonic past. Yet he still drew from the verismo style's base passions ? jealousy, torture, suicide ? as well as its characteristic musical shorthand. The composer also began to meticulously research his subjects for realistic accents: the morning bells of Tosca 's Rome , authentic Japanese melodies for Madame Butterfly, American popular tunes for La fanciulla del West. In the latter two works, he caught up with David Belasco, then a leading proponent and innovator of naturalist theater. Then there are all the possibilities that never made it to the stage. While looking at Verga's La lupa, Puccini consulted with the author and visited the countryside to get a sense of rustic local color. And while at the same time considering Butterfly as a potential opera, he also seriously explored the adaptation of Zola's La faute de l'Abbé Mouret, a typically sordid novel suitable for verist interpretation.
It is interesting that Puccini only composed one opera, Il tabarro, which meets the absolute criteria set forth by Pagliacci and Cavalleria. This brings us to the term as it continues to befuddle musicologists, who employ the word inconsistently. All of these composers wrote works with more traditional themes ? Leoncavallo's I Medici, Giordano's Andrea Chénier, Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur and the later works by Mascagni (who would eventually turn his back on the style) ? which don't have quite the same sensational impetus and hardly feature a primary tenet of verismo, a whiff of lowborn criminality fueled by common people reacting violently to their irrepressible emotions. These works are often lumped with the others by nature of musical economy and period of composition, yet in its strictest sense true verismo remains isolated to only a handful of works, of which Leoncavallo and Mascagni's peasant dramas best exemplify.
Courtesy of Minnesota Opera
