Verism

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The Verismo (Italian verismo , of vero 'true') originally referred to a flow of Italian literature in the 19th century, which is an exact description and with socio-critical dedicated commitment to the lives of farmers and fishermen. Based on this, the term became the name for a direction in Italian opera at the end of the 19th century. From the beginning of the 20th century, the veristic film had a tradition of its own in Italy. Since the 1920s, the term found its way into art criticism in Germany .

The veristic literature

As realism refers to a flow of Italian literature since about 1830 that conceptually the realism and naturalism is similar. It is about a turning of literature to the present and everyday life, to the vernacular and the lower social classes. The French naturalists like Émile Zola and the Russian realistic authors like Lev Nikolajewitsch Tolstoy had a great influence .

The main representatives of verism in Italy were Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana . The latter was also active as a theorist and defined the “poesia del vero”: In contrast to naturalism, verism does not endeavor to provide an as impersonal “objective” description as possible, but instead represents and explains its own point of view. While Verga and Capuana mainly dealt with Sicily - Giovanni Verga published the Sicilian Novellas in 1880 - there were veristic authors for other regions, such as Grazia Deledda for Sardinia.

The veristic opera

The hallmarks of veristic opera are increased realism , the people's actions determined by passion, wide-ranging melodies and refined orchestration, painterly portrayals of the scenes and often unvarnished portrayals of cruelty. The term veristic opera is also used for works with historical themes or an exotic ambience. Popular locations are the time of the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte , the Italy of the Renaissance and the Far East .

The veristic opera was preceded by La traviata (1853) by Giuseppe Verdi and Carmen (1875) by Georges Bizet , but the first “real” veristic opera is Cavalleria rusticana (1890) by Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945). In 1892 Pagliacci ( The Bajazzo ) by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) appeared, which is often performed together with the Cavalleria . Veristic elements can also be found in Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), especially in Tosca (1900), but also in Madama Butterfly (1904), La fanciulla del West ( The girl from the golden west ) (1910) and Il tabarro ( The Mantel ) (1918). Other Italian composers of Verism are Umberto Giordano (1867–1948) ( Andrea Chénier , 1896; Fedora , 1898), Francesco Cilea (1866–1950) ( L'Arlesiana , 1897; Adriana Lecouvreur , 1902), Alfredo Catalani (1854–1893 ) ( Loreley , 1890; La Wally , 1892), Alberto Franchetti (1860–1942) ( Cristoforo Colombo , 1892; Germania , 1902), Franco Leoni (1864–1949) ( L'oracolo , 1905), Franco Alfano (1875– 1954), Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948) ( I gioielli della Madonna ( The Madonna's Jewelry ), 1911; Sly , 1927) and Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944) ( Francesca da Rimini , 1914; I cavalieri di Ekebù ( The Lords of Ekeby ), 1925).

In France , verism influenced the works of Jules Massenet (1842–1912) ( La navarraise , 1894; Thérèse , 1907), Alfred Bruneau (1857–1934) ( Le rêve ( The Dream ), 1891, after Émile Zola ) and Gustave Charpentier (1860-1956) ( Louise , 1900). The main representatives of German verism are Eugen d'Albert (1864–1932) ( Tiefland , 1903; Die toten Augen , 1916) and Max von Schillings (1868–1933) ( Mona Lisa , 1915). In Austria Max Josef Beer composed the opera Der Strike der Schmiede , which premiered in 1897. Veristic influences are also encountered in the operas Der Evangelimann (1895) by Wilhelm Kienzl (1857–1941), A Florentine Tragedy (1917) by Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942), The Drawn (1918) by Franz Schreker (1878– 1934) and Violanta (1916) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957).

The veristic film

The veristic film is a movement of the Italian film around 1915. The realistic actions mostly take place in the milieu of lower classes of the population and had the claim to artistically implement social reality . Veristic writers such as Giovanni Verga and Grazia Deledda served as models . The expressive gestures of the actors, a stylistic device of the silent film, were typical . The outstanding films of this genre include:

After the Second World War, Italian neorealism resorted to the goals and means of veristic film and developed them further.

Verism in the fine arts

In 1920, Wilhelm Hausenstein first used the term verism in reference to the art of Heinrich Maria Davringhausen and George Grosz , referring to post-expressionist German art. Hausenstein defined verism as the "return of naturalism to intransigence ". As a result, the term verism came into literature as a designation of a mainstream of the New Objectivity and is usually applied to various artists of the Weimar Republic who dedicated themselves to the investigation and mapping of a new social reality, such as Otto Dix , George Grosz, Christian Schad , Rudolf Schlichter , Karl Hubbuch , Georg Scholz and Jeanne Mammen .

The Swiss Niklaus Stoecklin is considered a co-founder and main representative of the New Objectivity in the field of painting and graphics (poster design) .

With the catastrophic experience of the First World War and the subsequent political and economic difficulties, a new critical awareness emerged that encompassed all areas of music. An association of revolutionary visual artists was founded in 1928. The focus of the art was directed towards new pictorial themes: the Moloch big city, the social gap between war profiteers and the proletarian lower class, the role of the “new” woman, the dark side of society. The portrait gained a lot in importance. Verism in the visual arts is limited in time to the end of the First World War in 1918 and the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933.

The term verismo is also used for a countercurrent to classicism in Italian sculpture around the middle of the 19th century, which is assigned to realism . Main representatives of this direction are Lorenzo Bartolini and Vincenzo Vela .

literature

  • Ludger Alscher (Ed.): Lexicon of Art in five volumes. Architecture, fine arts, applied arts, industrial design, art theory. Volume 5: T - Z. Verlag Europäische Buch, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-88436-112-0 , p. 400 f.
  • Hans-Joachim Wagner: Foreign Worlds. The verismo opera . Metzler, Stuttgart et al. 1999, ISBN 3-476-01662-5 (also: Cologne, Univ., Habil. - Schr., 1997).
  • Anita Beloubek-Hammer: Feeling is a private matter. Verism and New Objectivity. Watercolors, drawings and graphics from the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett on loan. Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2010, ISBN 978-3-86568-585-8 .
  • Birgit Dalbajewa; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister (Ed.): Neue Sachlichkeit in Dresden Sandstein Verlag, Dresden 2011, ISBN 978-3-942422-57-4 .
  • Ferdinand Pfohl, The Verism and its Entourage, In: Ferdinand Pfohl, Die moderne Oper (pp. 190–315), 1894, Leipzig, Carl Reissner.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Hausenstein: The art in this moment . Munich 1920; quoted according to: Lexikon der Kunst Volume V (1981), p. 400