Verismo: Origin, Corruption, and Redemption of an Operatic Term

Abstract

Verismo, a term originally applied to nineteenth-century art and literature of various degrees of realism, has been the subject of controversy when applied to opera. While literary scholarship has come to measure verismo against the narrowly defined models provided by the theories, novels, and short stories of Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, operatic scholarship has either superimposed these same theories on the dramatic genre of the libretto or it has constructed concepts of questionable historical foundation. Drawing mainly on a large corpus of neglected nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of verismo, this article uncovers the original meanings of the termand outlines how we have come to adopt a view of verismo that is problematic in regard to both literature and opera. Contrary to this view, verismo was seen in the nineteenth century primarily as a reaction to the idealism and conventionality of earlier artworks; in this sense it had already been applied to opera before 1890, and it is, in fact, a perfectly appropriate designation for opera in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In comparison to Romantic Italian opera, with its conventional forms of both libretto and music, verismo opera reacts to idealism in any combination of categories ranging from plot to vocabulary, verse, harmony and melody, performance practice, and production.

The Birth of ‘Modern’ Vocalism: The Paradigmatic Case of Enrico Caruso

“…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.…”