VERIST MELODRAMA. CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA BY PIETRO MASCAGNI - TRADITION AND INNOVATION
VERIST MELODRAMA. CAVALLERIA RUSTICANA BY PIETRO MASCAGNI - TRADITION AND INNOVATION

Summary/Abstract: For three centuries, the opera series presented on the stages of musical theaters various subjects with noble characters (kings, queens, princes, princesses), passionate loves, battles between state rations, the sense of duty, while servants and peasants found their place only in opera buffa. With Verdi's La Traviata (1853) something began to change when the composer brought the courtesan Violetta Valery and her drama to the center of the opera's action. But the decisive turning point is Bizet's Carmen (1875), which assigns the main role to a gypsy woman, a worker in a cigarette factory, a smuggler, who practices and recommends the freedom of life and love, capable of defying even death for she stays true to her questionable lifestyle. Soon, the verist school, or the new school, will appear in Italy, made up of a group of young composers: Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano, Cilea, Puccini, very different from each other in formation, style and personality, but on which united his firm desire to revolutionize and renew the work in a realistic sense.

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