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.

Staging Cavalleria and Pagliacci Now

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The last of the six new productions of the Met’s 2014-15 season, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, opened on April 14,  2015. In general, critical response to these recent investitures has weighed heavily on the side of disappointment. Not one of the lately unveiled stagings can be said to have enjoyed the enthusiastic consensus of reviewers. Briefly then: The reception of The Death of Klinghoffer was mostly positive, that of Le Nozze di Figaro, cool at best. The notices of Iolanta/Bluebeard’s Castle were mixed; those of The Merry Widow and La Donna del lago, negative; and those of Cavalleria and Pagliacci, primarily so. And only Mozart’s treasured comedy and the Mascagni/Leocavallo hugely popular double bill were reinvestitures of core repertoire favorites that often find themselves subjected to particular scrutiny, especially when they propose significant rereadings of the work.

In our previous post, we tracked the controversy over departures from conventional settings of the core all the way back to the 1951 Pagliacci. We argued that the heated operatic debate of the present day had its origins in the reception of a last-minute addition to Rudolf Bing’s inaugural season.

Not surprisingly, given that the April productions are new, staging was front and center in the reviews of Cav/Pag. And since the productions they replaced were signed by Franco Zeffirelli, the comparison with the Zeffirelli aesthetic, beloved by many of the public and detested by almost all critics, would inevitably come to the fore. “In the beginning, say 1970, there was Franco Zeffirelli. He turned Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, the eternal verist twins, into a pair of kitsch spectaculars. Audiences applauded the scenery” (Financial Times, April 15, 2015).

Zeffirelli’s long association with the Met began with his ecstatically received 1964 Falstaff and ended with his much derided 1998 La Traviata. Between the two, there were ten others, including his 1970 Cav/Pag. Managements have been wary of angering  Met patrons by shelving his sets with nonchalance. Only La Bohème and Turandot survive. As Peter Gelb put it some years ago:  “I promised the Met subscribers when I first came on board—well, I didn’t promise anything, but I did say that there were two iconic Zeffirelli productions, Bohème and Turandot, and that the other Zeffirelli productions are going to be replaced. A lot of these things are just sitting there like lead weights, so there is a lot of catching up to do” (New Yorker (Oct. 22, 2007).  He has been good to his word. The Zeffirelli Falstaff, Tosca, Traviata, and Carmen are history.

And now so too are Cavalleria and Pagliacci. Zeffirelli deployed much of the action of Cavalleria on a monumental church stairway that filled half the stage; realistic housefronts with balconies and views of the hill town framed this meticulous slice-of-life rendering of a bright, colorful Easter Sunday in Sicily. 

Eschewing the slightest hint of the picturesque that floods the Zeffirelli version, even in the religious procession, the David McVicar/Rae Smith production drains the stage of the specificity of the quotidian, of color and light.

 Cavalleria rusticana (model), Metropolitan Opera, 2015

Displacement here is not of place or date--the action transpires as is prescribed in a Sicilian village circa 1880--but of time. The artistic team turns day into night (some have observed that the darkness signals not mass on Easter morn, but midnight mass). A revolving platform repositions again and again a patriarchal community of subjugated women and swaggering, predatory men, the better to give  relief to the drama of individual betrayal. Santuzza, victim and ultimately avenger, is repeatedly set apart from the black-clad villagers whose codes she has broken.

Many of those glad to bid farewell to Zeffirelli’s obsessive pictorialism, including reviewers who missed few opportunities to put him down, were disappointed by its replacement, spare or not. The Times was irritated by the over-active platform, the New Yorker found the staging “relentlessly grim,” the Observer thought that it “bombed on just about every level.” Only the Wall Street Journal gave a thumbs up. With caveats about the lighting and the male dancers who mimed Alfio’s horses, we thought the show compelling in its abstraction, particularly as it transformed the lengthy genre scenes of village life into comments on the opera’s social/sexual politics.

For Pagliacci, McVicar and Smith moved the action forward from 1865 to 1950 and from Calabria to Sicily. We are alerted that the two operas take place in the same southern Italian town square by the imposing stone walls that enclose both narratives. There, the unity ends.

As it happened, the square, neon lights, and stalled truck of the McVicar/Smith Pagliacci turned out to be more naturalistic than Zeffirelli’s rocky outcroppings, stunted tree, and big sky. 

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 2015; Patricia Racette, George Gagnidze

The new version added a three-man vaudeville team. The intervention of the trio into the prologue (one of several inventions) violated the expository, deeply human and complex import of the baritone’s aria. While the press, in general, was amused by the antics, for us the slapstick of the play-within-a-play went too far in making the critical contrast between farce and melodrama. For this post, we have chosen two clips that demonstrate the power of music and text when the performer rather than the production is the primary site of meaning.

Lawrence Tibbett sings “Si può?” (If I may)” in this scene from Metropolitan (1935), the fifth of six feature films he made between 1930 and 1937. Tibbett, who had a successful career in Hollywood simultaneously with his Met stardom, is captured here at his extraordinary prime, reaching out to the audience with gestures as subtly inflected as his phrasing and the colors of his voice. The charisma of the singer and the purpose of the character are perfectly joined.

Giovanni Martinelli sings “Vesti la giubba” in this 1926 Vitaphone short. The aria is forever associated with Enrico Caruso, the tenor who holds the Met record for performances of Pagliacci. Martinelli became the company’s Canio after Caruso’s premature death. As you will hear, he favors an unusually slow tempo. Sustaining astonishing tension with astonishing vocal energy, the tenor gives the tragic density of the short piece its full due. 

Setting Pagliacci Then

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The Metropolitan’s new productions of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci will be simulcast “Live in HD” the day after tomorrow, Saturday, April 25; they had their premieres on April 14. (See our previous post, “Cavalleria rusticana all’italiana). By the time the screen audience takes its turn, the inseparable pair will have been reviewed in print and on-line. And the lion’s share of the critical response will have been given over, not surprisingly, to the staging rather than to the performances. The focus on design and direction will astonish no one. Here, after all, are two new productions. And, again after all, staging is the topic of the operatic day, the principal site of debate--and excitement--in the lyric theater, especially as it impinges on the core repertoire. As concerns the Met, it is Pagliacci, above all, that sixty-five years ago set off the now all-consuming controversy.

The season was 1950-51, the first of general manager Rudolf Bing’s long tenure. A month after opening night, Bing announced that Don Carlo and Der Fliegende Holländer had come in under budget (imagine that!) and that the surplus would support a new Cav/Pag for later that season. Bing tapped director Hans Busch for Cavalleria, Max Leavitt, the director of Greenwich Village’s intimate Lemonade Opera, for Pagliacci, and Horace Armistead, who had designed the “Broadway operas” of Gian-Carlo Menotti and Marc Blitzstein, for both. Busch set Mascagni’s one-acter in the present with the intention of stripping it of “meaningless routine.” For Pagliacci, Armistead adopted a more radical scheme. He leeched the surrealism of his oil paintings onto a Calabrian village reduced to a bare central platform and tracings of withered trees flanked by high walls of crumbling buildings.

Cavalleria rusticana, Metropolitan Opera, 1951; Martha Lipton (Lola), Richard Tucker (Turiddu), Zinka Milanov (Santuzza); photo Sedge LeBlang

Pagliacci, Metropolitan Opera, 1951; Delia Rigal (Nedda), Leonard Warren (Tonio); photo Sedge LeBlang

Looking back, Cavalleria rusticana’s mid-twentieth-century southern Italian hill town reflects only a timid departure from tradition. On the other hand, Pagliacci’s minimalist platform and flats define an authentically experimental, somewhat Brechtian playing space. But audiences were accustomed neither to experimental stagings nor to marginal productions. Belatedly, Bing himself called Cav/Pag “a bargain-basement, inadequate production.” The two together had come in at a paltry $22,400. Under his watch, no subsequent new production would present the Met’s patrons with so cheap a scenic display nor so provocative a slant on the core repertoire.

The invectives hurled at the stagings by Olin Downes in the Times and Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune drowned out the mixed notices of newspapers of lesser clout. But more significant than the contemporary critical response was the dispute that has been its legacy. The rereadings of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci called into question for the first time in Met history the legitimacy of altering the temporal, spatial, or cultural framework of the sacred cows of the genre. Ironically, the counter-attacks on Downes and Thomson were invited by these same reviewers. In trashing Armistead et al., the two powerful journalists had positioned themselves as conservatives, Downes in taking on the label of “poor old moss-back,” and Thomson by moving from the particular of this Cav/Pag to the general issue of reinterpretation: “Modernizing operas like these is not a rewarding effort. They are rigid; they have a style of their own; they do not lend themselves to indirection, to added poetry, and intellectual embellishment.” To his credit, Downes was open to engaging with those who disagreed with him. He devoted three columns to the question, first countering a young operagoer who complained that “Rudolf Bing’s slightest variation from any time-honored methods of dramatizing these operas has been belabored by the traditionalists as heresy” (Jan. 28), then quoting reader responses, pro and con (Feb. 4), and finally debating the distinction between “tradition” and “routine” with playwright Robert E. Sherwood (Feb. 11). Under Bing, the quarrel would simmer primarily over the 1951 Cav/Pag. He would not again be tempted to champion conspicuous deviations from the middle ground. The polemic on rereadings would pick up steam under Joseph Volpe. It has come to a boil, to the distress of many Met faithful on both sides, under Peter Gelb. 

 

We cannot end this post without including clips of two of the extraordinary artists in the roles they sang in Bing’s much-maligned Cav/Pag. It was as Santuzza that Zinka Milanov returned for the second and far longer phase of her Met career. A principal in the Italian dramatic soprano repertoire from 1937 to 1947, she was let go by general manager Edward Johnson. Bing, Johnson’s successor, brought her back to star in Hans Busch’s production of Cavalleria, and in the new investitures of Verdi operas that were the glory of his regime. Her farewell to the stage on April 16, 1966 coincided with the company’s farewell to the old house on 39^th Street. Here is a 1945 studio recording of the aria “Voi lo sapete.” We catch the Yugoslav soprano at her peak; her refulgent voice pours out unstintingly and without blemish, her grandly shaped phrases and her unaffected interpretation chart the emotional trajectory of Santuzza’s shame.

The highlight of the 1951 Pagliacci was Leonard Warren’s rendition of “Si può,” the “prologo” that defines the relationship between theatre and life, the crux of the drama. This recording, which also dates from 1945, conveys the splendor of the baritone’s richly resonant instrument, consistent throughout its range, capped by high notes that would be exceptionally brilliant and secure were they those of a tenor. Warren possessed a wide dynamic palette. He filled the auditorium with his burnished fortissimos, but was also capable of spinning a thread of pianissimos, as in the phrase “Un nido di memorie.” Here, Tonio the clown evokes the reservoir of feeling that nourishes the actor’s art.

Please watch for our discussion of the staging of the recent Pagliacci in our next post.

Cavalleria rusticana all’italiana

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On April 25, 2015, the Metropolitan will present the most indissoluble of all operatic double bills, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, “Live in HD.” First performed in Rome in 1890, Mascagni’s one-act melodrama had its Met premiere the very next year when it was paired incongruously with Gluck’s neo-classical Orfeo. In 1893-94, the company coupled Cavalleria with Gounod’s Philémon et Baucis, later that same year with one act of Mascagni’s own L’Amico Fritz and with two acts of La Traviata. Toward the end of that season, Cavalleria was wed with its near contemporary, Pagliacci (1892), and has held fast to that eminently fitting partner ever since.

A decade later, in 1902, 39^th Street and Broadway was the first stop on Mascagni’s projected three-month U.S. tour. His company was to play Cavalleria rusticana with another of his one-act operas, Zanetto, and his three-act Iris. Things got off to a rocky start in New York and went from bad to worse. One influential contemporary critic, Henry Krehbiel, called Mascagni’s visit the “most sensational fiasco ever made by an artist of great distinction in the United States.” The composer had contracted to prepare and conduct “not more than eight operas or concerts a week,” including the three performed at the Met and his full-length Guglielmo Ratcliff. This last never saw American footlights. When he moved on to Boston, he was arrested for breach of contract. Krehbiel continued, “It was foolishly reckless in the composer to think that with such material as he had raked together in his native land and recruited here he could produce four of his operas within a week of his arrival.” Mascagni countersued for damages. Krehbiel concluded, “The scandal grew until it threatened to become a subject of international diplomacy, but in the end compromises were made and the composer departed to his own country in bodily if not spiritual peace.” Needless to say, Mascagni never returned.

At close to 700 repetitions, Cavalleria rusticana stands tenth in the frequency of Met performances after La Bohème, Aïda, Carmen, La Traviata, Tosca, Rigoletto, Madama Butterfly, Faust, and Pagliacci. Since its company premiere, more than eighty singers have poured out the woes of Santuzza, spurned by the two-timing Turiddu. The earthy Sicilian protagonist has been portrayed at the Met by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos of many, many nationalities, but surprisingly, only rarely by Italian artists. We have chosen clips that feature two Italian sopranos, Giannina Arangi-Lombardi and Carla Gavazzi who, like numerous others of their compatriots, centered their careers in the vital opera scene of their homeland during the inter-war and post-war periods. The two tenors you will hear sang at the Met, Mario Ortica briefly in 1955-56, Beniamino Gigli, as the primary successor to Caruso, from 1920 to 1932, then for a few appearances in 1939.

Arangi-Lombardi, a principal dramatic soprano at La Scala in the late 1920s, when the theatre was under the directorship of Arturo Toscanini, headed the casts of early complete recordings of Cavalleria, Aïda, and La Gioconda. Unlike many interpreters of Santuzza, who ignore Hamlet’s advice and tear “a passion to tatters,” she invests her feelings with the weight and density of her tone and the unaffected line of her phrasing, the better to render the character’s dignity as well as her humiliation.

In this 1957 broadcast, the Santuzza-Turiddu duet emerges with immediacy, despite the artifice of lip-synching to pre-recorded music, the deplorable practice of Italian television in its studio productions of opera. Mario Ortica delivers an incisive, particularly nasty version of Sicilian machismo. The Santuzza is Carla Gavazzi who, to our knowledge, never appeared outside Europe. In the early 1950s, she became known in the U.S. through recordings of Pagliacci, Adriana Lecouvreur, and most memorably, La Fanciulla del West.Gavazzi’s timbre, pungent rather than plush, gives compelling vibrancy to the conversational speech patterns of verismo. We discover through this video that her acting is as richly inflected as her singing.

Here is Gigli, the preeminent Italian tenor of his time, in the “Addio alla madre.” The contrite Turiddu, filled with forebodings of his death in the upcoming duel with Alfio, the husband he wronged, begs his mother to watch over Santuzza. This 1927 Vitaphone short, a very early sound film, captures Gigli’s rudimentary stagecraft along with his ineffably sweet timbre and unerring tonal control over a wide dynamic range. When he bows to his virtual public at the end, it is easy to imagine the roar of approval.