Word: verismo
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...Verdi's venture into what might be called upper-class verismo-he set it in the drawing rooms of his own time-the work cries out for an elegant musical approach and superior acting on the part of the heroine. Both were in ample supply last week. At long last, Conductor Sarah Caldwell (TIME cover, Nov. 10) made her debut at the Met, and Soprano Beverly Sills sang her first Met Violetta-her second role there since her successful debut last April in The Siege of Corinth...
Rimmed World. Though it can be placed well enough among turn-of-the-century verismo works, Jenufa is an elusive opera in some ways. The setting is a Moravian village, and the composer knew its inhabitants with detachment and compassion. He creates no heroes, but a world of people working, flirting, taking naps, worrying about saving face or avoiding the draft. The plot, however, concerns deadly primal emotions: love, jealousy and ambition. Jenufa is pregnant by števa, a wastrel who chases every girl in town. Jenufa still hopes to catch him, but her world is invisibly rimmed...
...Masks. None of the characters are very believable, even by opera's standards. Menotti's style, as always, is symbolic verismo, and his principal theme in The Most Important Man is that whites, despite frequent good intentions, are unable to live up to their promises to blacks. "We have made the gesture, but we have not accepted blacks emotionally," Menotti explains. Musically, The Most Important Man is blatantly eclectic. Strains of Richard Strauss float from the pit during one interlude. By the final duet between Toime and his white girl friend Cora (Soprano Joanna Bruno), Menotti is unashamedly...
...Verismo Revisited "When they asked me if I could come to the Metropolitan Opera at the last moment, I said it was out of the question, of course I couldn't do it, so just forget it. But Franco pleaded, so I said 'Let me look at the scores.' And 1 really fell in love with Cavalleria...
...Peculiar Magic. Much of the trouble lay with the operas. Verdi's Falstaff, with its quicksilver score and its well-drawn characters, is a director's and a conductor's dream. Cav and Pag are genre pieces in a style known as verismo (truthful) to distinguish their homely subject matter from the myths and legends fashionable at the time...