(It.: ‘realism’; Fr. vérisme).
A movement in Italian literature, and subsequently in opera, which developed in the 1870s. Its major literary representatives are the Sicilian writers Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), Luigi Capuana (1839–1915) and Federico De Roberto (1861–1927).
Although sharing certain characteristics with naturalism – an impersonal narrative style, an interest in the lower social strata, a true-to-life approach in dealing with contemporary reality – verismo developed distinctive traits. The veristi gave a markedly regional character to their works; they reassessed the link between art and reality, established by Zola as a fundamental aesthetic premise, to allow greater freedom to the imagination; and they arrived at an objectivity that implied total consistency of form and content.
Verismo entered opera through ‘scene popolari’, such as Verga’s Cavalleria rusticana (1884), which was the first text to be turned into an opera. In 1888 the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno advertised a competition for a one-act opera by a young Italian composer. Mascagni had no innovatory intentions in his choice of Verga’s popular one-act play. The libretto preserved the vivid dialogue and the rapid pace but the operatic version was distanced from the veristic play by a distortion of its social characteristics and a dilution of its down-to-earth language with traditional high-flown libretto jargon. The opera’s success, however (1890, Rome), led to Cavalleria rusticana becoming the prototype of a new genre. The term verismo was adopted, to designate the subject of the libretto and the work's musico-dramatic structure. The 1890s witnessed a brief flowering of operas on veristic subjects, both in Italy and abroad.
A ‘Neapolitan’ brand of operatic verismo was launched with Giordano’s Mala vita (1892, Rome). The libretto marked an appreciable advance on the Cavalleria prototype: Nicola Daspuro treated Di Giacomo’s ‘scene popolari’ with scrupulous respect for layout, characterization and environment. The sordid conditions prevailing in the alleys of a big city and the mala vita (‘wretched life’) of a prostitute were transposed without softening their crude reality. The work was, however, a failure in Naples (1892), where the display of the miseries of the urban proletariat raised outraged protests. The second most famous veristic opera was Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892, Milan), a sensational and more complex work. Leoncavallo wrote both libretto and music. The operatic ‘slice of life’ he so skilfully contrived is the result of a subtle blending of various ingredients: a village murder, the device of the play-within-a-play with commedia dell’arte masks, the Pierrot pantomime as revived in Paris in the 1880s, and the open-air revels associated with a religious festival as exemplified by the Easter celebrations in Cavalleria.
In the following years, the customs of Italy’s poor regions were exploited by the opera industry for the production of plebeian stage works, and there was a tendency to lapse into picturesqueness and sensationalism, inherent in the veristic theatre. Popular songs accompanied by guitars and mandolins, tarantellas, saltarellos or other local dances, drinking songs, litanies and religious hymns, were inserted on the slightest pretext. The vocal style and the musico-dramatic structures had three main references: the scrapyard of romantic opera, the contemporary ‘veristic’ manner of the giovane scuola, and the drawing-room song style. Feeble stories with colourful vignettes were inflated and sustained by violent vocal outbursts, heavy orchestration, big unison climaxes, agitated duets and mellifluous intermezzos, a tendency that culminated in Wolf-Ferrari’s I gioielli della Madonna (1911, Berlin).
The veristic fashion spread. In France, Massenet composed La Navarraise (1894, London), a two-act opera closely modelled on Cavalleria. In Germany, Eugen d’Albert wrote Tiefland (1903, Prague), a two-act opera set in Catalonia. Frédéric d’Erlanger composed Tess, a four-act ‘dramma’ by Illica after Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1906, Naples). Bretón’s La Dolores (1895), Janáček’s Jenůfa (1904) and Smyth’s The Wreckers (1906), should also be mentioned. The constant presence of low-life subjects and the high concentration of quotations (popular songs, dances, street cries) in Italian operas following Cavalleria have been taken to justify the general designation ‘operatic verismo’ for this genre. The genre itself petered out in the early years of the 20th century, leaving Cavalleria and Pagliacci as its best contributions to the musical theatre.
Verismo is misleading and inadequate as a term for turn-of-the-century Italian opera. It may, however, serve as a general description of the musical style of the giovane scuola as characterized by a new emotional rhetoric influenced partly by Massenet and, to some degree, by Wagner: passionate tension alternates with sentimental languor, and delicacy with violence, especially in the vocal lines; recitatives, solo pieces and ensembles enjoy equality of status, textural cohesion being supplied by the use of orchestral motifs; and there is a total absence of bel canto coloratura. Such features need to be viewed in the context of a steady trend in late 19th-century opera towards dramatic continuity, in which the canons of musical and spoken drama draw closer, allowing the possibility of Literaturoper such as Mascagni’s Guglielmo Ratcliff (1895), Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re (1913) and Zandonai’s Francesca da Rimini (1914), settings respectively of plays by Heine, Sem Benelli and D’Annunzio; hence, too, a new rapidity of action, especially notable in Act 1 of Giordano’s Fedora (1898) and in Mascagni’s Il piccolo Marat (1921). It was left to Puccini in his operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) onwards to achieve the most satisfactory synthesis and, by enriching a highly personal idiom with elements derived from his younger European contemporaries, to lead Italian opera into the 20th century.
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M. SANSONE/R