Verismo (meaning "realism", from Italian vero, meaning "true") was an Italian literary movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and the authors of a verismo manifesto. Capuana published the novel Giacinta, generally regarded as the "manifesto" of Italian verismo. [1] Unlike French naturalism, which was based on positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuana rejected claims of the scientific nature and social usefulness of the movement.
Verismo is also employed by musicologists to refer to a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Giacomo Puccini. They sought to bring the naturalism of influential late 19th-century writers such as Emile Zola and Henrik Ibsen into opera.
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Internationally, the term is more widely understood to refer to a style of Italian opera that began in 1890 with the first performance of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, peaked in the early 1900s, and lingered into the 1920s.[2] The style is distinguished by realistic – sometimes sordid or violent – depictions of everyday life, especially the life of the contemporary lower classes. It by and large rejects the historical or mythical subjects associated with Romanticism.
On the other hand, the intimate psychological encounters in realistic settings which characterize an Austro-Germanic work like Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (1911) are not ordinarily discussed in terms of Verismo because of the self-conscious 'period-costume' setting of Strauss' opera—and because its elite and intellectually refined atmosphere are at odds with the earthy operatic melodramas being written in Italy during the same period, which are more typically associated with Verismo opera.
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 excised easily and performed in concert excerpts (as is the case with the operatic genres that preceded Verismo). This is not always true, however - Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, Tosca, and other verismo operas have arias, duets and choruses that are constantly excerpted in recitals, and Turandot (left incomplete at Puccini's death) marks a return to a 'numbers' style.[3]
It is interesting to note that Bizet's Carmen predated Cavalleria by 15 years. Carmen is essentially an archetypical Verismo opera: instead of kings and countesses the libretto features bullfighters, soldiers, factory workers and prostitutes embroiled in crime and violent passions.
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 may appear to have 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.
On the other hand, it has been claimed[4] that the use of the orchestra fundamentally differs between Wagner and Verismo, as follows: in Wagner, the orchestra needs not necessarily follow what the singers are presenting in emotion or even content (for instance, when the main character of Siegfried (Act 2) wonders who his parents are, a leitmotiv reminds us that we have already met them in the previous opera – a perception outside Siegfried's awareness which enhances our wider view of the plot). By contrast, in Verismo, Corazzol [2, p 263] claims that the orchestra merely "echoes and validates the voices" and thus the style offers "a regressive point of view": the orchestra can add nothing to the drama or to the audience's understanding, even if it can serve to deepen the music's emotionality, for example the use in Manon Lescaut of the Tristan chord. The reference to Tristan is emotionally illustrative, but offers no new salient plot detail until the 20th century.
Although worldwide Giacomo Puccini is generally accepted as the greatest Verismo composer, this claim is disputed by certain musical commentators in Italy who place him outside the Verismo school. Other critics consider Puccini to have had merely a partial Verismo involvement. The most accepted modern-day view is that at least a few of his operas (Tosca, for one) are classifiable as verist. And if one does not synonymize "Verismo" with "bloodshed", one could postulate that Puccini gave us the most perfect "realistic" opera in La Bohème.
Though Bizet's Carmen (1875) was the first gutsy slice-of-life opera, true Verismo came to the fore a decade and a half 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, (I gioielli della Madonna), and Riccardo Zandonai.
The Italian verismo composers comprised a musicological group known in its day as the giovane scuola ("Young School").
The term "Verismo" is also sometimes used to describe the highly 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, yet they are written in the same general musical style as his more quintessential veristic subjects. Thus context is extremely important in understanding the intended meaning of "verismo", as it is used both as a description of the gritty, passionate, working-class dramas that the term was coined to describe, and also as the musical movement in which the giovane scuola were participants.
In Italy, many opera singers became Verismo acolytes—rejecting the traditional tenets of elegant, 19th century bel canto in the process. The most extreme exponents of Verismo vocalism sang habitually in a vociferous fashion, often forfeiting legato to focus on the passionate aspect of the music. They would 'beef up' the timbre of their voices, use excessive amounts of vocal fold mass on their top notes, and often employ a conspicuous vibrato in order to accentuate the emotionalism of their ardent interpretations. The results could be exciting in the theatre but such a strenuous mode of singing was not a recipe for vocal longevity.[5] Some prominent practitioners of full-throttle Verismo singing during the movement's Italian lifespan (circa 1890 to circa 1930) include the sopranos Eugenia Burzio, Rosina Storchio and Adelaide Saraceni, the tenors Aureliano Pertile, Cesar Vezzani and Amadeo Bassi, and the baritones Mario Sammarco and Eugenio Giraldoni. Their method of singing can be sampled on numerous 78-rpm gramophone recordings. See Michael Scott's two-volume survey The Record of Singing, published in London by Duckworth in 1977/79, for an evaluation of most of these singers, and others of their Ilk, and a discussion of the adverse impact that Verismo music had on singing standards in Italy.
Such great early-20th century international operatic stars as Enrico Caruso, Rosa Ponselle and Titta Ruffo developed vocal techniques which harmoniously managed to combine fundamental bel canto precepts with a more 'modern', straightforward mode of ripe-toned singing when delivering Verismo music, and their example has influenced operatic performers down to this day (see Scott).
"Verismo" also refers to a 19th century Italian painting style. This style was practised most characteristically by the "I Macchiaioli" group of painters, who were forerunners of the French Impressionists.
In literature, Giovanni Verga mirrored the style of the Verismo painters. This famous, Sicilian-born writer of realist fiction lived in Florence during the same period as them—1865–1867—and his best known book, Cavalleria rusticana, contains certain verbal parallels to the effects achieved on canvas by the Tuscan landscape school of this era. "Espousing an approach that later put him in the camp of verismo (verism), his particular sentence structure and rhythm have some of the qualities of the macchia. Like the Macchiaioli, he was fascinated by topographical exactitude set in a nationalist framework"— to quote from Albert Boime's work, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento.