What Is Verismo?

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Verismo (trans. Realism) was and remains the brand affixed to a style adopted by a generation of Italian composers of opera from 1890 to the first decades of the twentieth century. The movement was an outgrowth of late nineteenth-century French literary Realism and Naturalism and their expression in the fiction of the Sicilian Giovanni Verga, infused as it was with local color, the regional vernacular, and the quotidian of impoverished folk.

This long-standing brand, however handy, is widely acknowledged as problematic. True, its several attributes adhere easily to Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890, see our posts of April 17, April 23, and May 2, 2015), the first and emblematic opera of the manner. Based on a Verga short story, the rural southern Italian characters and locale, the rapidity of action and violent denouement, carry the signs of the new style. But Cavalleria’s successors, with the exception of Pagliacci (1892), Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s short opera often paired with Mascagni’s one-acter, rarely subscribe to the plots and sites of Realism/Naturalism. In fact, veristic operas fit uncomfortably under a single narrative umbrella. Verismo applies fittingly to the plebeian mezzogiorno of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, but not at all well to the ancien régime of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (1893), to the classist orientalism of his Madama Butterfly (1904), or to the contemporary European nobility of Umberto Giordano’s Fedora (1898).

Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur (1902) provides us another salient example. This title, too, strays far from the geographic, temporal, and socio-economic boundaries of Verismo’s foundational meaning. The opera’s libretto first situates the drama of the historical 18^th-century tragedienne, Adrienne Lecouvreur, backstage at the Comédie Française. A sumptuous ballroom is the arena for the Act Three face-off between Adriana and the Principessa di Bouillon, her rival in love. As you will see and hear in this excerpt from a 2000 La Scala performance, the composer melds a neo-Classical ballet pastiche and his leading lady's spoken monologue from Racine's Phèdre with a contrasting orchestral comment and violent vocal interjections typical of Verismo. Adriana is Daniela Dessì; the Principessa is Olga Borodina.



A far less ambiguous label than Verismo is la giovane scuola (the young school), a contemporary term that defined the group of these post-Verdi Italian composers: Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Cilea,
Umberto Giordano, and most significantly, Puccini. They favored the short aria, the arioso. To the relief of singers and record companies, Verismo embraced excerptable pieces designed to invite applause and timed to the capacity of early records. The two-part structure of the bel canto aria, the slow cavatina capped by the fast cabaletta embellished with intricate fioritura and stratospheric high notes, and the grand statements of Verdi’s late period gave way to a shorter-breathed and shorter-ranged solo. Loris’s declaration of love in Act Two of Giordano’s Fedora, “Amor ti vieta” (Love forbids), lasts less than two minutes. The piece calls for a range under an octave and no agility at all. Mario Lanza’s way with this memorable melody turns the arioso into a showstopper.



The greater informality in musical structure advanced by la giovane scuola was joined to passages of colloquial, quasi-conversational exchange between and among characters. In the final minutes of Act Two of La Fanciulla del West, Puccini provides an unforgettable instance of just such rhetoric. In Gold-Rush California, Minnie plays poker for the life of her beloved Dick Johnson. Her opponent is the lustful sheriff Jack Rance. Puccini invests everyday vocabulary and brief utterances with the high drama of desperate love.

Here is a sample of the rapid-fire dialogue:

Rance: I’m ready. You cut.

Minnie: Two hands out of three.

R: How many cards?

M: Two.

R: But what about him makes you love him so much?

M: What do you see in me? What have you got?

R: A king.

M: A king.

R: Jack.

M: Queen.

R: You won. Play the next hand.

     Two aces and a pair.

M: Nothing

At the end of the act, Minnie, who has cheated at cards in a last-ditch effort to save Johnson, revels in her triumph.

Here is the poker scene from a November 1982 performance at Covent Garden. Carol Neblett, the recently deceased American soprano, is Minnie; Rance is the Italian baritone Silvano Carroli.

Rossini and the Stars

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It has been the stars above all who have charted the fortunes of Gioacchino Rossini’s legacy at the Metropolitan, sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, and lately tenors as well. The exception has been Il Barbiere di Siviglia, first staged in the company’s inaugural season, 1883-1884, and since then the recipient of six new productions. Il Barbiere has been on the calendar in roughly half of the Met’s by now 130 seasons and ranks thirteenth in the list of works most often performed on 39^th Street and then at Lincoln Center.

The quickening of interest in Rossini in particular and in bel canto in general--the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and, of course, Rossini—was sparked by singers who could flaunt the virtuosity of florid music, Maria Callas in the 1950s, followed soon after by Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, and Montserrat Caballé.  Since then, a veritable torrent of belcantists has been enlisted in the annual Rossini Festival held each summer in Pesaro, the composer’s Italian birthplace. 

At the Met, the Rossini era was launched in 1974 by Marilyn Horne’s assumption of the role of Isabella in L’Italiana in Algeri. And with Olga Borodina and Jennifer Larmore the title has persisted in the repertoire.  In 1975, it was the turn of L’Assedio di Corinto (The Siege of Corinth), a vehicle for the debut of Beverly Sills. Horne, once again, was the spur for the 1990 Semiramide. Cenerentola was mounted for Cecilia Bartoli in 1998; it has been revived five times with Borodina, Elina Garanca, Joyce DiDonato, and twice simulcast live in HD.  In 2009-2010, the Met put on Armida for Renée Fleming and the next year Le Conte d’Ory for Juan Diego Flórez, the first male star to lead the Rossini parade. Which brings us to La Donna del Lago. It premiered at the Met on February 16, 2015 and will be simulcast “Live in HD” on March 14.

And the feast will continue beyond this season. William Tell is on the schedule for 2016-2017 when it will be heard, at last, in the original French, in its first revival at the Met since the 1930s. Looking ahead, here is a glimpse of the splendors of this Rossini masterpiece, the transcendent ensemble that constitutes the opera’s finale. Tell, his family, and the Swiss patriots hail the rising sun that smiles on their triumph over the Austrian tyranny. The clip is from a 2003 Paris performance with Thomas Hampson and Marcello Giordani.

Rossini’s operas demand singers with virtuosic command of the bel canto style. This technique is founded on the most rigorous control of the breath, essential to the free and even use of fioritura (embellishment): melismatic trills, turns, appoggiature (grace notes), scales, arpeggios, and other figures of the bel canto rhetoric. Marilyn Horne was master of it all. We were present at a performance of Semiramide with Horne and Sutherland in Boston in the early 1960s that was a spectacular demonstration of the opera’s viability. As the Babylonian general Arsace, a bearded Horne entered and conquered with an exhibition of vocal pyrotechnics. Here she sings her first aria in a 1980 concert in Washington, D.C.

Another of Horne’s warrior roles was the title character of Tancredi. In one of Tancredi’s arias, here is countertenor David Daniels as he poaches on the dramatic mezzo’s turf. In this 1997 New York concert, Daniels traverses the three contrasting sections of the piece brilliantly, the opening dramatic recitative “O Patria,” the sweetly lyric cavatina “Tu che accendi questo core,” and the lilting cabaletta “Di tanti palpiti” whose coiling melody was the rage of Europe in the 1820s.

Watch for our next post on Rossini’s La Donna del lago.