Naturalism and Verismo

Operatic Naturalism, most often associated with Italian Verismo, was the culmination of straightforward dramatic narrative and musical language: thereafter both started to fragment and develop more complex experiences. Until the later nineteenth century, the history of the arts presents a relatively clear development. From thereon, under a number of pressures, they began to fragment into a series of alternative, vying and often simultaneous movements. These ‘isms’ of the early twentieth century are most clearly seen in painting with several of them (highlighted in Table 13.1) paralleled in opera.

Naturalism is a philosophical movement that emerged in the mid nineteenth century as a response to growing industrialisation, urbanisation and the Darwinian scientific view of man. This responded to a view of the the human condition as completely determined by the material forces of the market and the social and physical environment this created. To Victor Hugo's emphasis on ‘exactness in the matter of locality’, Zola now added specific period, saying that his Rougon-Maquart novels would have been impossible before 1889: ‘I shall show this group at work, participating in an historical period…And thus the dramas of their individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire, from the ambuscade of the Coup d’Etat to the treachery of Sedan’ (Zola, ‘General Preface’ to the Rougon-Maquart novels).