“…In recent years, Andreas Giger, building on the wider perspective of late nineteenthcentury criticism, has proposed an entirely new view of musical verismo, advocating its existential 'autonomy' as a long-term movement which promoted a complete renovation of Italian opera through its departure from the structures of Romantic melodramma. 60 From the 1860s, literary and art criticism linked the term verismo with the introduction of new subject matters (low-life, vulgar, trivial subjects, whose representation in artistic forms had traditionally been rejected), to which veristi were in no way exclusively committed, and a consequent renewal of linguistic styles. More importantly, the representation of both contemporary subjects and historical ones must be the expression of a methodological or 'concrete' observation of reality, which is the result of an attentive depiction of the environment in which the recounted stories take place.…”