The literary source of the works of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Montemezzi, Zandonai, Giordano, Cilea and Ponchielli is relatively easy to locate. It is the movement that appeared originally in France stimulated by the works of such novelists as Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. It was called naturalisme, naturalism, and it was an attempt to look at the world with a cold, objective eye watching human beings act and react within the society in which they found themselves. Naturalistic works emphasized the dark side of human life, the harshness of it, and in 19th century France, particularly among the so-called lower social classes, there was much to report that was violent, deadly and pessimistic. (See Thérèse Raquin in Operapaedia for short discussions of the Zola novel upon which Tobias Picker based his opera). The naturalist authors attempted to realistically portray this period of profound change, of political as well as industrial revolutions that caught so many people in Europe off guard and created an intense feeling of insecurity and disenfranchisement, especially among the poor.
The naturalistic movement was extremely influential in the literature of other countries, especially Italy where the style was called verismo or realism. It affected Italian literature, theatre and opera in the late nineteenth century, and became a stylistic tendency that lasted well into the twentieth century. After the success of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci audiences were demanding more ‘realistic’ stories in opera and begging to see more works that dealt with real people in real situations particularly in the small towns and villages of Southern Italy where life was hard.
The most important examples of verismo in Italian literature come from the works of Giovanni Verga. It was his short story Cavalleria rusticana or ‘Rustic chivalry’, based on an actual event that took place in the Sicilian countryside, that three composers, Mascagni, Gastaldon and Monleone set as operas. The story was originally a part of Verga’s novel I Malavoglia but was eventually published separately. It was so powerful that the great 19th century actress Eleanora Duse asked Verga to dramatize it so that she could play the principal female role.
Puccini came close to writing an opera based on a Verga subject, La lupa or The Wolf. The source was recommended to the composer by his publisher Giulio Ricordi and Puccini had great enthusiasm for it at first, even traveling south to Catania to meet with the author. But, as was often the case in Puccini’s search for subjects, he soon lost his excitement for the story and used some of the music that he’d composed for La lupa in his masterpiece, La bohème. There is some discussion amongst opera-lovers and even music scholars about whether Puccini’s Tosca could be considered a verismo work. It certainly has elements of the style: melodramatic declamation, violence onstage, detailed musical descriptions of torture, an ironic switch at the end. But the characters are all aristocrats, definitely not from the lower social classes that populate the best of the verismo works.