Puccini's "Madama Butterfly"
Prior to the late 1800s, operas dealt primarily with mythical or historical events, monarchs or other famous people, or else broadly religious themes. Beginning with Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890, however, opera took on more “realistic” story lines. Works by Puccini, Leoncavallo and others (see below) portrayed everyday people, oftentimes members of the lower classes, in sordid or violent situations that could just as easily turn to (or devolve from) passion and longing. The music reflected this new way of looking at opera, with even more fluidity than the bel canto era evoked. There continued a greater blurring of lines between standalone arias and the material that linked one “song” to another, although every composer had his own way of presenting that concept to the public.
Giacomo Puccini [1858–1924] is generally considered to be the king of verismo opera, more because of the immense popularity of his works rather than the strict adherence of his writing to verismo methodology. Nonetheless, he did compose quite a few pieces that ably fit this mold. These include La bohème, a story about starving artists who share a Parisian garret, La fanciulla del West, which describes the life of a female bar owner in the Wild West, and Madama Butterfly, the tale of an American sailor and the Japanese woman he takes as a concubine. But Puccini also dealt with religious themes (Suor Angelica), mythology (Turandot), and famous personages (Tosca, a real-life opera singer), so he was not totally immersed in verismo stories—although his compositional style clearly exemplifies the era.
Other verismo composers include the aforementioned Ruggero Leoncavallo, whose I pagliacci—a one-act opera that portrays the tragic day in the life of a traveling drama troupe—is a masterpiece all out of proportion to its brevity, and Mascagni, who never seemed to match the popularity of his first opera (also a one-act work) with follow-on operas like Iris (set in Japan) or Parisina (a romance set in the Middle Ages). The Italians dominated verismo, and the composers (along with their most notable compositions) include Francisco Cilea (Adriana Lecouvreur), Umberto Giordano (Andrea Chenier), Alfredo Catalani (La Wally), and a number of others. The two French composers whose operas most closely exhibited verismo style—whether due to their use of characters, their musical formatting, or both—are Jules Massenet (Werther) and Gustave Charpentier (Louise).
Related posts: