Word: verismo
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...face-front arias. Bellini (1801-35) and Donizetti (1797-1848) thought Gluck's characters were insufficiently real-so they created the stylized Norma and Lucia. Wagner (1813-83) avowed the same sentiment-and created Lohengrin and his swan. Puccini (1858-1924) proclaimed a brand of truthfulness he called verismo -and created Turandot, the princess of a China that could never have existed anywhere...
...exception: Gian Carlo Menotti, who, says a friend, "found his Bergamo in America"). The two new works at this year's festival displayed the extremes of two warring contemporary Italian styles. The Admiral, by Arturo Andreoli, 58, a longtime coach at La Scala, was a typical example of verismo (an operatic movement comparable to literary "realism"), made popular in the late igth century by Mascagni, Leonca--vallo, Puccini. Based on a one-act play by Chekhov, the opera had to do with a )': drunken bum masquerading as an admiral at a wedding party. Exposed when he fails...
Talented Local. In the opinion of Bindo Missiroli, an insurance broker who founded the Bergamo festival in 1937 (it was interrupted by the war), post-Puccini Italians of both the verismo and the twelve-tone school are "still the world's greatest opera composers. In Germany the modernists use the voice as another instrument, seldom giving importance to the word. Italians want to under stand what's going on." The biggest hit of the festival last week was the world première of a 143-year-old one-acter titled Pygmalion, composed not by a modern twelve...
...plot, with a little rearrangement, might easily serve for an Italian opera of the verismo school. It resolves around a second-rate traveling strong man and his strange, dull-witted assistant and concubine. A tightrope walker laughs at the strong man and is kind to his slave, and the strong man kills him. In the end the girl dies, and the strong man is left groveling in remorse on a deserted beach reminiscent of the one where he found...
...also knew where his genius lay, wisely rejected both the Wagnerian influence and the broader version of the Italian verismo style as practiced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Instead, he clung to his own romantic, melodious, bittersweet tales shot through with a uniquely warm lyricism and underscored with lushly singing strings. A painstaking workman who admired clarity ("The black scores," he said, "are the easiest to fake"), he left as his legacy only eleven operas. But 34 years after his death, the world of opera has not found a composer who can speak to the universal audience Puccini commands...