Verismo Opera and Andrea Chénier: Performance Analysis

Introduction: Giordano, Puccini, and the Shadow of Comparison

Though Umberto Giordano's work has often been overshadowed by that of his rather more famous contemporary Giacomo Puccini, Giordano's Andrea Chénier offers the ideal site for a critical examination of nineteenth-century opera and the various thematic and stylistic currents popularized at the time, as well as the complications that arise from modern interpretation and performance. In particular, examining the critical history of verismo alongside the historical context of Andrea Chénier serves to demonstrate how fully a modern performance of the opera can subsume and dissolve any revolutionary character that might have been present in the original text — reproducing the story of doomed love during the French Revolution as a gaudy, ahistorical spectacle.

Before conducting an analysis of a modern performance of Andrea Chénier, there are a few key topics one must investigate in order to place the subsequent analysis in its proper context. As a means of historicizing this investigation, one may note that Andrea Chénier was first performed in 1896 and was one of Giordano's earliest works, composed when he was one of the "youngest composers of the generation dominated by Giacomo Puccini in Italian opera" (Holland, 2010, p. 173). Puccini must be mentioned here not because of any inherent connection between the two composers — other than their contemporary nature — but because Puccini's shadow looms so large over nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century opera that critics seemingly feel obligated to invoke him at every turn, no matter how tenuous the connection.

This study will continue that tradition only to point out its unproductive nature, because there is ultimately little to be gained from statements such as "if Giordano were Puccini, with Puccini's power of writing terse, vivid, trenchant musical prose, and his still more valuable power of writing impassioned and not too subtle musical poetry, there might have been a different tale to tell" (Gilman, 1915, p. 443). Gilman's criticism — if it can even be called that — represents the most egregious example of the tendency to examine all nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian opera by explicitly and exclusively comparing it to Puccini. It is worth noting this tendency precisely as a means of exercising this specter of sycophantic adulation from what should otherwise be a critically reasoned analysis.

Defining Verismo: Origins, Controversies, and Critical Reductions

Andrea Chénier debuted in 1896 and represented something of a high-water mark for the verismo movement in Italian opera. The opera is almost exclusively referred to as an example of verismo, but "verismo, a term originally applied to nineteenth-century art and literature of various degrees of realism, has been the subject of controversy when applied to opera." This is because "while literary scholarship has come to measure verismo against the narrowly defined models provided by the theories, novels, and short stories of Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga," in the case of opera "these same theories" have simply been transferred onto "the dramatic genre of the libretto," or else operatic scholarship "has constructed concepts of questionable historical foundation" in place of preexisting literary theories (Giger, 2007, p. 271). In either case, the utility of verismo as a descriptive and analytic term is reduced, because to deploy it effectively one must first understand the historical and ideological background of the term.

Verismo may generally be interpreted as a kind of realism, but to simply equate the two largely misses the point. The verismo movement began as an explicit rejection of and "reaction to the idealism and conventionality of earlier artworks," and in particular of "Romantic Italian opera, with its conventional forms of both libretto and music" (Giger, 2007, p. 271). In literary theory, the accepted parameters of verismo that developed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century emphasized "the regional character and inherent pessimism of the stories; the blind passion of the protagonists; a quasi-scientific and detached approach to describing both the social, cultural, and political climate in which the characters function and their psychological thought processes; and the importance of a language appropriate to the social and geographical situation of the characters" (Giger, 2007, p. 272). In some ways verismo may be seen as an Italian counterpart to Charles Dickens' interest in how social and cultural standards serve to corrupt or otherwise destroy the individual, although "it is important to keep in mind that a focus on the weak is not equivalent to a focus on the lowest social classes" — and indeed, in Andrea Chénier the lower classes, as represented by Gérard, are not generally any better than the aristocracy (Giger, 2007, p. 273).

The particular areas of emphasis noted above — "meticulous observation of culture, politics, and language; logical development of the story toward a tragic ending; and impersonality" — were not actually considered constituent parts of verismo art at the time the term was coined; they represent a definition subsequently formulated by critics over the intervening years (Giger, 2007, p. 278). This is not to say that many of these features are absent from verismo works. One could easily identify these traits in Andrea Chénier. The danger, rather, is that focusing on a particular "checklist" of necessary elements risks reducing verismo to the very thing it was reacting against.

Verismo was not a movement focused necessarily on "low" characters and themes or a dispassionate, "scientific" conception of society, but instead was oriented "against idealism, classicism, and — most importantly for our purposes — conventional content, form, and language" (Giger, 2007, p. 283). Thus, the thematic and stylistic consistencies that arose from verismo works, and which were subsequently seized upon by critics in order to produce a simple, comfortable definition of the term, can in many ways be seen as mere afterthoughts — or at least as representing nothing more than the fact that enough people rebelling from the same source will therefore produce roughly similar acts of rebellion. This fact is crucial to recognize because it helps explain not only the apparent motivation behind Andrea Chénier, but also the conflict that arises from the fact that a rebellious artistic movement was almost paradoxically encoded within something as traditional as opera, "inscrib[ing] the difficulty of a tradition-bound, 'irrational,' art form entering a self-consciously objective aesthetic order" (Schwartz, 2008, p. 231).

The Revolutionary Ideology of Andrea Chénier

Furthermore, appreciating how much verismo as a concept depends on what previous aesthetics it is oriented against leads one to a crucial question that must be answered in any analysis of a modern production of Andrea Chénier: can this opera, having been so fully integrated into a stable of popular productions, actually cease to be verismo? Its performance is no longer oriented against an earlier movement but is instead contextualized within the larger corpus of "verismo" art by a modern audience. Put another way, has criticism, inaccurate use of the term "verismo," and popular reception rendered inert any of Andrea Chénier's rebellious or revolutionary impulses?

While Andrea Chénier undoubtedly represents "a nostalgia for revolutionary heroism," this nostalgia does not come in the form one might expect (Schwartz, 2008, p. 738). Chénier's revolutionary inclinations serve to highlight a dichotomy seemingly missed by the violent vanguards of the French Revolution: in much the same way that verismo opera sought to reject traditional notions of the ideal in favor of a more accurate representation of human experience, so too does Chénier reject the use of violence and brutality in the service of political aims, instead opting to use his artistic ability in the service of the powerless.

If one regards the history of human experience as a continual opposition between the powerless and the powerful — with the powerful deploying coercive violence in order to remain so — then the revolutionary movement must always be toward equality and the rejection of violence in favor of intellectual or artistic power. If one considers Andrea Chénier to be a verismo text, interested in rejecting earlier artistic standards and aesthetics, then one may view its nostalgia for revolutionary heroism not as a nostalgia for the violent revolution that characterized much of the French experience, but rather as a celebration of the kind of artistic and intellectual revolution made possible when, in 1791, the revolutionary government "abolished the traditional legal associations between particular opera houses and particular operatic genres; composers and librettists were now free to combine the effects of the opera seria and the boulevard theaters in a single work" (Meyer, 2002, p. 481). This strain of revolutionary thought celebrated by Andrea Chénier rejects the constraints of generic or stylistic convention, ultimately providing the critic with a means by which to judge any performance of the opera on its own terms.

Conclusion: Verismo Neutralized

By examining the development of verismo as a movement and subsequently as a critical genre, one is able to see how the process of cultural consumption in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has transformed what was previously a reaction to established norms into a norm itself. The critical reduction of verismo's definition into a list of constituent thematic and stylistic elements serves to undermine the very revolutionary work verismo texts were attempting in the first place, and nowhere is this more clear than in the case of Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier.