Verismo

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Verismo was an Italian literary movement born approximately between 1875 and 1895. It was mainly inspired by French naturalism, and Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and writers of a verismo manifest ^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}. Unlike French Naturalism, that was based on positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuano rejected claims of scentific nature and social usefulness of the movement. Italian verists were pessimistic, and based their work on the premise of impersonality, meaning that the writer should not impose any personal meaning or point of view to his works, which should seem as if 'written by themselves'.

Internationally the term is more widely known as a style of Italian opera that started in 1890 with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and went further in ther twentieth century. The style is distinguished by realistic—sometimes sordid or violent— depictions of contemporary everyday life, especially the life of the lower classes, rejecting the historical subjects of Romanticism, or mythical ones, such as Mascagni's Iris. Verismo works aimed at realism (hence the name "verismo," or "realism"). By contrast, the intimate psychological penetration in realistic settings of natural social chatter of a work like Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier is not ordinarily discussed in terms of verismo, simply because of its "costume" setting.

The “realistic” approach of Verismo extends to music in that the score of a Verismo opera is for the most part continuous and is not divided into separate “numbers” in the score, which can be exerpted easily and performed in concert (as is the case with the genres preceding Verismo). No Verismo melody, fragment, or leitmotif is composed simply because it sounds pretty. The purpose of each bar of a Verismo score is to convey or reflect scenery, action, or a character’s feelings. In this approach, Verismo composers followed Richard Wagner’s method. Indeed, Wagner’s influence on Verismo is obvious. Act One of Die Walküre and Act Three of Siegfried contain the seeds of many future Verismo fragments and melodies.

Although worldwide Giacomo Puccini is generally accepted as the greatest Verismo composer, this claim is widely disputed by musical critics in Italy. Even if some critics do view him as part of this style, others merely accept a partial involvement. The most accepted claim is that at least a few of his operas (e.g. Tosca) are classifiable as verist. He composed no overtures for his operas, since an overture, in his view, had nothing to do with the dramatic action on the stage. By the time of Puccini, opera audiences had become disciplined to settling into silence when the house lights dimmed, a virtue afforded by gaslight and electricity.

Though Bizet's Carmen (1875) was the first Realistic opera, Verismo came to the fore fifteen years later in Italy, with the historic premiere (1890) of Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. The most famous composers of Verismo opera, discounting Puccini, were Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo (whose Pagliacci is often coupled with Cavalleria), Umberto Giordano, and Francesco Cilea. There were, however, many other veristi: Franco Alfano best known however for completing Puccini's Turandot, Alfredo Catalani, Gustave Charpentier (Louise) Eugen d’Albert (Tiefland), Ignatz Waghalter ("Der Teufelsweg" and "Jugend"), Alberto Franchetti, Franco Leoni, Jules Massenet (La Navarraise), Licinio Refice, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and Riccardo Zandonai.

Of the aforementioned composers, the Italians comprised a group that was called the Giovane Scuola ("Young School"). Don Lorenzo Perosi is included in the Giovane Scuola, even though he wrote almost exclusively sacred music.

In the late 1990s, a journalist in a major Boston newspaper made the absurd claim that Verismo "began with Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890 and pretty much ended with Pagliacci two years later." This is patently incorrect. Puccini's Il Tabarro was written in 1918. Later still (1921) was Mascagni's Il Piccolo Marat, an archetypical Verismo opera. An opera does not need bloodshed to be a Verismo opera. Perhaps the most truly "realistic" opera of them all -- real people to whom every one of us can relate -- is Puccini's 1896 masterpiece, La bohème.

Other usages

The term verismo is also sometimes used to describe the very recognizable musical style that was prevalent among Italian composers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For most of the veristi, traditionally veristic subjects accounted for only some of their operas. Mascagni himself wrote a pastoral comedy (L'amico Fritz), a symbolist work set in Japan (Iris), and a couple of medieval romances (Isabeau and Parisina). These works are far from typical verismo subject matter, and yet they are written in the same general musical style as his more purely veristic subjects. So context is very important in understanding the intended meaning of the term verismo, as it is used both as a description of the gritty, passionate, working class dramas that the term was coined to describe, but also as the musical movement in which the giovane scuola were participants.

Verismo

Other usages

See also