Verismo - Relationship With The Music of Wagner

Relationship With The Music of Wagner

The purpose of each bar of a Verismo score is to convey or reflect scenery, action, or a character's feelings. In this approach, Verismo composers may appear to have followed Richard Wagner's method. Indeed, Wagner's influence on Verismo is obvious. Act One of Die Walküre and Act Three of Siegfried contain the seeds of many future Verismo fragments and melodies.

On the other hand, it has been claimed that the use of the orchestra fundamentally differs between Wagner and Verismo, as follows: in Wagner, the orchestra needs not necessarily follow what the singers are presenting in emotion or even content (for instance, when the main character of Siegfried (Act 2) wonders who his parents are, a leitmotiv reminds us that we have already met them in the previous opera – a perception outside Siegfried's awareness which enhances our wider view of the plot). By contrast, in Verismo, Corazzol claims that the orchestra merely "echoes and validates the voices" and thus the style offers "a regressive point of view": the orchestra can add nothing to the drama or to the audience's understanding, even if it can serve to deepen the music's emotionality, for example the use in Manon Lescaut of the Tristan chord. The reference to Tristan is emotionally illustrative, but offers no new salient plot detail until the 20th century.