Word: verismo
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Last week the Metropolitan Opera offered a few clues as it staged a new production of Riccardo Zandonai's hot-blooded thriller Francesca da Rimini. First performed in 1914, Francesca was one of a number of works that attempted to transcend romantically the naturalistic action of verismo, using the more advanced harmonic language and orchestral technique of Wagner to create a new direction for opera. In La Fanciulla del West (1910), Puccini had pointed the way, and several younger men were eager to inherit his mantle: Italo Montemezzi, with L'Amore del Tre Re (1913); Ildebrando Pizzetti, with...
...everyone in Romero's Paisley pageant is so nice that no true conflict arises. The movie begins in a splash of delirious lyricism-King William (Ed Harris), naked, birching himself clean in a sylvan lake before mounting his trusty motorsteed-then bogs down in 145 minutes of psychological verismo. The writer-director wants to present rounded, sympathetic characters but never allows them to develop beyond the caricatures in Reel 1. Romero, whose early films displayed the carnographic brio of the E.C. horror comic books of the '50s, has gone classic-or, at least, Classics Comics. Even his talent...
...film dispenses with the machismo verismo of Luchino Visconti's 1942 Ossessione and the platinum-blinded glitz of the 1946 version starring John Garfield and Lana Turner to concentrate on a purposefully paced retelling of Cain's story. It means to calibrate every movement in the desperate mating dance of Frank and Cora, "these unspeakably stupid, very simple people, filled with guile and tenderness." That is Director Rafelson's phrase, spoken without contempt for his characters but with an understanding of their selfish, consuming needs. Though Nick's café is just a short drive from...
...with his spectacular philandering. In less amorous moments, he found time to compose three minor operas and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, a light, satirical tale about a flight to the moon and the Hussite wars of the 15th century. He also wrote one powerful but somber verismo work: Jenufa, the story of a village girl made pregnant by the local womanizer, whose formidable foster mother kills her baby...
Maybe you had to be there to appreciate it. Same as with the 1960s. All these books and movies dribbling out now about that fine old decade are so heavy, they lack the old ring of verismo. But this bright and mellow spring Sunday just might turn out to be, well, different, you know, together. Milos Forman, the Czech-born director (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), trying to turn the Aquarian Age stage hit Hair into a movie, needs an authentic circa 1968 "bein" as backdrop for crucial scenes. Those affairs having gone the way of peace...