Michael Keplinger

MUSI 5233
Intro to Music Research
Tuesday, July 12

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Verismo Wikipedia Article!

Most of the information of verismo from Wikipedia seems relevant and accurate,

although it could be more detailed in regard to the origins of verismo. The paragraph entitled
Verismo Singers does not seem to use scholarly references, but instead uses a website article as
its reference. And in the same paragraph, I cannot tell where the rest of the information is coming
from since there are no citations. I assume all the information in the paragraph might come from
the website article.

The Notes and References section does not share the same sources as Groves

bibliography, and these sources also date from a much more recent time period. I would like to
see Wikipedias references cover a wider time span in terms of sources. Previously mentioned,
one of the references direct the reader to a website article which is not scholarly. The information
found in the article may be valid, but it does not feel like with the way it is organized. There are
also no references.

What I will edit from the original wiki article is the Note and References and Verismo

Singers section as well as add a paragraph. I will completely take out the Singers section since
the information is coming from a unscholarly source and since the second half of the section is
not related too much of the topic at hand. The Notes and References section will no longer have
the website article in it. Below will show screenshots from the original article, then following
will show the copied, edited version in which the edits will be highlighted in yellow.

Original Article

Edited Article

Verismo (music)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia!

"Verismo" redirects here. For other uses, see Verismo (disambiguation).!

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 and Giacomo Puccini.!
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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 mile 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.[1]!
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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."[2] However, two of the small handful
of verismo operas still performed today take historical subjects: Puccini's Tosca and Giordano's
Andrea Chnier. "Musically, verismo composers consciously strove for the integration of the
opera's underlying drama with its music." These composers abandoned the "recitative and setpiece structure" of earlier Italian opera. Instead, the operas were "through-composed," with few
breaks in a seamlessly integrated sung text.[3] 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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The most famous composers who created works in the verismo style were Giacomo
Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea. There
were, however, many other veristi: Franco Alfano, Alfredo Catalani, Gustave Charpentier
(Louise), Eugen d'Albert (Tiefland), Ignatz Waghalter (Der Teufelsweg and Jugend), Alberto
Franchetti, Franco Leoni, Jules Massenet (La Navarraise), Licinio Refice, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
(I gioielli della Madonna), and Riccardo Zandonai.[4]!
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The term verismo can cause confusion. In addition to referring to operas written in a
realistic style, the term may also be used more broadly to refer to the entire output of the
composers of the giovane scuola ("young school"), the generation of composers who were
active in Italy during the period that the verismo style was created.[5][6] One author (Alan
Mallach) has proposed the term "plebeian opera" to refer to operas that adhere to the
contemporary and realistic subject matter for which the term verismo was originally coined. At
the same time, Mallach questions the value of using a term such as verismo, which is
supposedly descriptive of the subject and style of works, simply to identify an entire generation's
music-dramatic output.[7] For most of the composers associated with verismo, traditionally
veristic subjects accounted for only some of their operas. For instance, Mascagni wrote a

pastoral comedy (L'amico Fritz), a symbolist work set in Japan (Iris), and a couple of medieval
romances (Isabeau and Parisina). These works are far from typical verismo subject matter, yet
they are written in the same general musical style as his more quintessential veristic subjects. In
addition, there is disagreement among musicologists as to which operas are "verismo" operas,
and which are not. (Non-Italian operas are generally excluded). Giordano's Andrea Chnier,
Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci,[7] and Puccini's Tosca and Il tabarro[8]
are operas to which the term verismo is applied with little or no dispute. The term is sometimes
also applied to Puccini's Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West.[9] Because only three
verismo works not by Puccini continue to appear regularly on stage (the aforementioned
Cavalleria rusticana, Pagliacci, and Andrea Chnier), Puccini's contribution has had lasting
significance to the genre.!
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Neapolitan brand of operatic verismo was launched with Giordanos Mala vita (1892,
Rome). The libretto marked an appreciable advance on the Cavalleria prototype: Nicola
Daspuro treated Di Giacomos scene popolari with scrupulous respect for layout,
characterization and environment. The sordid conditions prevailing in the alleys of a big city and
the mala vita (wretched life) of a prostitute were transposed without softening their crude
reality. The work was, however, a failure in Naples (1892), where the display of the miseries of
the urban proletariat raised outraged protests. The second most famous veristic opera was
Leoncavallos Pagliacci (1892, Milan), a sensational and more complex work. Leoncavallo wrote
both libretto and music. The operatic slice of life he so skilfully contrived is the result of a subtle
blending of various ingredients: a village murder, the device of the play-within-a-play with
commedia dellarte masks, the Pierrot pantomime as revived in Paris in the 1880s, and the
open-air revels associated with a religious festival as exemplified by the Easter celebrations in
Cavalleria.!
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Some authors have attempted to trace the origins of verismo opera to works that
preceded Cavalleria rusticana, such as Georges Bizet's Carmen, or Giuseppe Verdi's La
traviata.[2] Modest Moussorgsky's Boris Godonov should not be ignored as an antecedent of
verismo, especially because of Moussorgsky's focus on peasants, alongside princes and other
aristocracy and church leaders, and his deliberate relating of the natural speech inflexions of the
libretto to the rhythms of the sung music, different from, for example, Tchaikovsky's use of
Pushkin's verse as a libretto.!

(NO VERISMO SINGERS SECTION)

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Notes and references[edit]

! 1
^ "Verismo" in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians,
London: Macmillan/New York: Grove, 1980, vol 19 p.670, ISBN 1-56159-174-2!
! 2!

a b

Schoell, William (2006). The Opera of the Twentieth Century. Jefferson North
Carolina: McFarland and Co., Inc. ISBN978-0-7864-2465-8.!
! 3
^ Opera Journeys' Guide: Opera at Movie Theaters - 2014 - 2015 Season. Opera
Journeys Publishing. 2014. p.33.!

! 4
^ "Verismo" in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians,
London: Macmillan/New York: Grove, 1980, vol 19 p.671-2, ISBN 1-56159-174-2!
! 5

^ Mallach, Alan (2007). The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890
- 1915. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press. p. 42 et seq.!

6!
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! 7!

^ "Cio' che prepara e pensa Umberto Giordano". La Stampa. February 6, 1905.. Verismo
composer Umberto Giordano told an interviewer in 1905: "The meaning of these words
(vero and verismo) needs to be defined once and for all" ("Bisognerebbe adunque
definire una buona volta il valore di questi vocaboli.")!

a b

! 8!

Mallach, Alan (2007). The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism,
1890 - 1915. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press. p. 42 et seq.!

^ Fisher, edited by Burton D. (2003). Puccini's IL TRITTICO. Miami: Opera Journeys

Pub. ISBN0-9771455-6-5.!

! 9
^ Carner, Mosco (1985). Giacomo Puccini, Tosca (Reprinted ed.). Cambridge
[Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press. p.6. ISBN0-521-22824-7.!

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(NO WEBSITE ARTICLE)
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Matteo Sansone. "Verismo." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford
University Press, accessed July 12, 2016, http://
www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/
29210.

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