Opera Background
Puccini, Verismo, and La Bohème
The life of Giacomo Puccini (1858 - 1924) spans a period frequently known as the age of verismo, or realism. The term realism primarily refers to the artistic and literary movements in which artists and writers focused on common everyday subject matter and treated it in a "realistic" or "true to life" manner. Opera, however, is an art form that had its roots first in myth or religious mystery, and traditionally it boasts superhuman heroes, grand affluence and emotional excess. Verismo (Italian for realism) is an operatic style that arose in the 1890s in Italy and which emphasized literary naturalism, contemporary settings, lower-class subjects and violent passions and actions. La Bohème, a realistic opera, depicts bohemians who practice arts that are either fanciful or fraudulent; they are rich only in feelings. La Bohème is about those who cannot afford to live operatically.How did this realism become imposed on opera? Realism was not only a movement in the arts; it was also a philosophical attitude and a response to the unprecedented scientific and social changes of the 19th century, specifically the industrial revolution and scientific discoveries and their influences on society.
The industrial revolution resulted in the tremendous growth of cities and so was responsible for bringing artists in contact with all kinds of people, including the lower classes. This destroyed the former assumptions that the lower classes were too uninteresting as subjects for art. The industrial revolution also produced many technological improvements that improved the standard of living for all classes in society: for example, typewriters (1868), telephones (1876), electric lamps (1879), and motion pictures (1879).
Developments in science, philosophy and the social sciences resulted in a revival of determinism, the idea that individuals have no control over their fate. Scientific discoveries doubted religious ideals, and discredited idealism in general. Materialism became the compelling attitude, replacing idealism. Charles Darwin and Spencer proposed that life evolved from strictly materialistic causes: the accidental variation of species and the natural selection of the fittest. In philosophy, human developments were ascribed material causes by Karl Marx and Hegel. In the social sciences, the behavior of individuals and societies was explained to be the result of concrete, materialistic influences, those of heredity and environment.
The arts were influenced by the industrial revolution and other developments and reflected the attitudes of materialism and determinism. Literature avoided the heroic or dramatic presentation of characters and plots; instead they told stories which presented the plain, unornamented material of ordinary people's lives. Consequently, the main characters in novels became much less heroic and much more like everyday people, as in Maurice Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), Giovanni Verga's Country Life (1880) and Emile Zola's Nana (1880).
Music was perhaps the last of the arts to be affected by realism because music is, after all, unrealistic by nature. Song instead of speech and continuous music has the effect of heightening, not downplaying, the importance of the drama and the people represented, something quite opposite to realism's basic idea. Therefore, realism perhaps was not as effective in music as in the other arts because composers still needed formal and stylistic methods that were the opposite of the principles of literary realism.
Puccini was shrewd; he wanted to become rich and famous. So he chose operatic subjects that reflected the realistic, deterministic attitude of his day. Also, he preferred presenting "human" situations for their dramatic effect, as opposed to the mystical and metaphysical ones. He portrays his heroines especially as figures who lack the power to control or change their fates. In La Bohème, for instance, Mimi's love for Rodolfo is doomed by her ill health and his poverty.
But realism was a short-lived movement. The idea that events can be portrayed realistically or objectively, limited artistic style, both for Puccini and art in general. By the turn of the century, discoveries in theoretical physics by Albert Einstein, Max Planck and others, contradicted this tenet; the new developments argued that time and place were not objective facts, but a matter of relative perspective. Artists in all fields then began to reflect this scientific overthrow of realism with a wide variety of new, non-objective, non-representational approaches. Post-realism includes such diverse figures as writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann; painters Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian; and the opera composer Benjamin Britten.
Puccini, too, in his final opera, Turandot, turned away from verismo and the deterministic attitude towards life that it implied. Turandot is a richly symbolic setting of an ancient Chinese legend.
Realism, however, did not die with the challenges of science in the early 1900s. In fact, realism continues to be a major force in commercial art today; its influence can be felt in advertising, in films and on television programs, and in virtually all popular fiction.
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