Verism'

From DIMA

Author : Elena Andrieş

According to the history of music, and with the history of the opera in particular, we notice, at the end of the previous century, the emergence of a new school – the Verism.

The Verism is a new aesthetic movement, emerged in the second half of the 19th century. One of its promoters was the writer Giovanni Verga, who wrote: “the piece of art will look as it came by itself, bearing the seal of the real event […]”

The Romantic literary movement: Manzoni, Cataneo, Carlo Foscolo etc. pleaded for the inspiration from the immediate reality of the social, daily life. After 1870, motifs are introduced which are based on powerful, “verist” conflicts. This inspired idiom, adopted by almost all musicologists, is ethimologically derived from “il vero”, a noun which signifies in Italian “truth”. The copy the truth has nothing in common with art. The artist’s imagination draws on the daily event that passes this way, transfigured, from the reality of life into the reality of art: it remains true, it exists, but in a different universe.

In the sphere of music, the Verist school, also called the Young School, brought together at first a group formed of five composers: Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Giordano and Cilea, similar with the preceding one of the five Russian composers, and later, when Franchetti joined them, it became the group of the six, similar to the one of French origin.

The Verism determines alterations in conceptions, gradual transformations of the dramaturgic context. We noted earlier that the source of inspiration was taken from the social, daily facts. This way the libretto, more than the music, justifies the label of Verist. Verist music disputes its aesthetic value: it will be conceived of onomatopoeia, will reproduce the sounds existing in nature.

The theatre form preferred in Italy is the one built on the melodramatic schemes of the 19th century, Italian and French, with a more accentuated articulation of the motifs and a free liberty of expression.

The products of this movement are the harvest of a sincere emotion. They do not constitute the accurate reproduction of the outer human behaviour, but express a feeling or another. We may notice language, style features that were also encountered in the previous epochs, but one may notice that there also survived echoes, some Romantic and Neo-Romantic aspects.

The musical drama of the 20th century and implicitly, the musical drama of Puccini, is without doubt a Romantic drama, but the Romantic impetus is tempered constrained by the convulsions that accompany a society on the threshold of transformation; the Romanticism renounces the exuberance that enlivened it, retaining only the cover, the decoration that serves as background canvas for the evocation, maybe, of the most peaceful and mediocre existence.

This decadent Romanticism, of bourgeoise descent, is one of the most important traits that dominate the compositions of the era. It is found in the pseudo-historical poem of Pierro Cossa, in the medieval theatre of Giacosa, in the bourgeois drama of Paolo Giacometti and, later, in the bourgeois comedy and novels of Gerolamo Rovetta.

The Romantic heroes fall, descend from the heights on which their creators placed them, mingle among ordinary people, abandon the declamation, moderate their gestures, temper the beats of their generous hearts; apparently, nothing makes us distinguish them from the others, except maybe their incorrigible mania of unselfish love, of sacrificing themselves for love, of wanting perfection from their fellow beings, of punishing the bad ones until they have atoned for their crimes, of accomplishing all these noble actions in a well individualized frameworks, which marks out each of his attitudes and highlights them. This character possesses a Romantic temperament, but also bourgeois, which is affirmed and revealed throughout and in support of the dramatic action; it satisfies fully the taste of the Italian audience of the last quarter of the 19th century. this type of character gains in popularity on the background of the diminishing echoes of the fight for independence and unity and the increase of the wealth of the younger generations, in the comfort of this easy life, grace to the riches secured. The sound of the brass bands, playing patriotic tunes is but a far memory that already belongs to the legends, the very operas of Verdi does not resonate in the audience the same echo it produced some forty years before. The Verdian musical drama leaves way to the Puccinian drama, in which the peaceful man in the audience can, if he wants, find himself identified with one character or another.

The counterpart of Verism in literature was the Realism, represented by Balzac, Stendhal, and afterwards by Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, especially in its Naturalist form, as well as by the determinism of Hypolyte Taine in philosophy.

The Verist tendency and doctrine was to replace the idealist librettos with plots inspired from the reality of everyday life. They were grounded on observation and truthfulness, on analysis and the removal of differences between beauty and ugliness, good and evil. The peacefulness and serenity of action in the classical opera were replaced in the Verist operas by dramatism and despair. The arias and recitatives caught on a melodramatic tinge of a strong Naturalism. Before Mascagni wrote Cavaleria rusticana and Leoncavallo Pagliacci, the Verism was foreshadowed by Verdi in Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Falstaff. A comparison can be drawn between the Verism proper and the manner in which Alban Berg wrote his operas Wozzeck and Lulu, intensifying the inner emotions of the characters. In the Verist operas the audience is conquered by the beauty of the songs, the novel timbre of the orchestration which stirs the senses as if tactile touches.

The eloquent and passionate songs breathe the atmosphere of the Italian folk song, and the turns of phrase, the succession of intervals, the shape of the cadences with sudden falls from the dominant on the tonic, evoke the Northern way of musical expression. The air is filled with the unbounded freedom of the feelings expressed directly, which do not make use of pre-established patterns when they want to reach a new expression. In the Cavelleria rusticana, Mascagni uses alternate dynamic degrees with sudden decreases in sonorous intensity as if following passionate cries the composers seeks to find out the sense in the halted breath. The melody is pathetic and declamatory, full of vitality and of a suggestive sonority. Verism is much influenced by Wagner, who asked for great carefulness in the choice of librettos and unity in the musical drama. The music must adapt to the drama, must be incorporated in it and express it as suggestive as possible – says Wagner. From the organic unity of the scenes results the continuity of the opera. There can be no discussion on splitting the action by its division in musical numbers foreign to the drama, so that by taking any page from the piece one may get pieces of their own. The musical pieces express minutely the subtle transformation of the feelings and emotions, with all the fluctuations, by using the leitmotif and by merging the music and the text in a single discourse, continuous, that bestows relevance on the characters and conflicts.

With a new use of the dramatic recitative new paths are opened for the lyrical art, richer, of rendering emotions, joys, suffering, restrained anger and disappointment. The main features of the opera librettos of the Verist trend are: employing contemporary plots, without stylistic artifices, the rapid development of the plot determined by an extremely strained game of passions. The stage action is heavily supported by the symphonic elaboration of the drama, and the orchestra does not have the role to accompany, but to participate in and comment on the dramatic action. The pace of the plot development, the manner of portraying the characters, the authentic nature of the librettos, denotes a special dramatic force, as well as the deepening of the laws specific for the theatrical performance.

The aria loses completely its concert character. Virtuosity consists in maintaining the dramatic tension, in the moments of maximum emphasizing of the characters’ subjective feelings: Cio-cio-san’s aria, Floria Tosca’s aria, Santuzza’s aria. The aria becomes the main way of connecting the characters, being radically different from the monologue-aria.