Verismo (music)

In opera, verismo (meaning "realism", from Italian vero, meaning "true") was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini.

Verismo as an operatic genre had its origins in an Italian literary movement also called 'verismo' (see Verismo (literature)). The Italian literary movement of verismo, in turn, was related to the international literary movement of Naturalism as practised by Émile Zola and others. Like naturalism, the verismo literary movement sought to portray the world with greater realism. In so doing, Italian verismo authors such as Giovanni Verga wrote about subject matter, such as the lives of the poor, that had not generally been seen as a fit subject for literature. A short story by Verga called Cavalleria rusticana ("Rustic Chivalry"), then developed into a play by the same author, became the source for what is usually considered to be the first verismo opera: Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni, which premiered on 17 May 1890 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Thus begun, the operatic genre of verismo produced a handful of notable works such as Pagliacci, which premiered at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on 21 May 1892, and Puccini's Tosca (premiering at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900.) The genre peaked in the early 1900s, and lingered into the 1920s.

In terms of subject matter, generally "[v]erismo operas focused not on gods, mythological figures, or kings and queens, but on the average contemporary man and woman and their problems, generally of a sexual, romantic, or violent nature." However, two of the small handful of verismo operas still performed today take historical subjects: Puccini's Tosca and Giordano's Andrea Chénier. "Musically, verismo composers consciously strove for the integration of the opera's underlying drama with its music." These composers abandoned the "recitative and set-piece structure" of earlier Italian opera. Instead, the operas were "through-composed," with few breaks in a seamlessly integrated sung text. While verismo operas may contain arias that can be sung as stand-alone pieces, they are generally written to arise naturally from their dramatic surroundings, and their structure is variable, being based on text that usually does not follow a regular strophic format.

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