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Opera and verismo: Regressive points of view and the artifice of alienation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
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Although the term ‘verismo” emerged in both literature and opera during roughly the same period (in novels and spoken theatre around the 1870s, in opera around the 1890s), the modern tendency has been to regard this as a coincidence of little consequence. However, it is perhaps worth returning to the question in light of recent studies in literary verismo, some of which offer new perspectives and even contribute to a re-definition of operatic verismo. I shall start, then, from the hypothesis that a new comparison between these two types of verismo may lead to a common definition.
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References
1 Egon Voss has rejected any important similarity, basing his argument primarily on Verga's letter/preface to ‘L'amante di Gramigna”; see his ‘Verismo in der Oper”, Die Musikforschung, 31 (1978), 303–13.Google Scholar Voss points out the prevalence of historical and exotic subjects, the absence of social criticism, the elevated language of the libretti, the lack of psychological development and the theatricality – all in his opinion important non-veristic elements of so-called verismo opera. See also Baldacci, Luigi, ‘Il libretto di Cavalleria rusticana”, in Pietro, and Ostali, Nandi, eds., Cavalleria rusticana 1890–1990: Cento anni di un capolavoro (Milan, 1990), 41–6Google Scholar; and Kelkel, Manfred, Naturalisme, vérisme et réalisme dans l'opéra de 1890 à 1930 (Paris, 1984), 235–51.Google Scholar
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37 Commentators have, in this respect, always found significance in composers’ predilection for subjects that had already proved their worth on the stage: original stage plays (Giordano's Mala vita, Tasca's Santa Lucia, Spinelli's A basso porto, etc.), or stories and novels that had already been converted into plays (L'Arlesiana, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Risurrezione, etc.).
38 ‘Malpelo got his name through having red hair; and he had red hair because he was a malicious, wicked boy, who promised to develop into a proper scoundrel’; Verga, Tutte le novelle (see n. 9), 187. In an alternative reading, the passage could, on the contrary, obviously be understood as one of the author's least successful, in its lack of ‘identification’, or the ‘dissonance’ between the two ‘ways of seeing’ (the implied author and the collective author); see Debenedetti, (n. 3), 413–22.Google Scholar
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