Tragedy at the Margins: Exploring Verismo in Opera
April 25, 2022, 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
An in-person lecture on 19th century opera composers turning their gaze to the social implications of injustice.
Opera has dealt with injustice and political conflict since its inception around 1600. It is towards the end of the nineteenth century, though, that composers – in conjunction with the blossoming of a new musical style traditionally known as Verismo – turn their gaze towards the social implications of injustice and to characters, who were normally left at the margins of the genre. If Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) – a tragedy about peasants in deep rural Sicily – is commonly considered the foundational example of “opera verista”, the ramifications of Verismo go well beyond artistic realism and naturalism. In fact, whereas numerous Verismo operas bring on stage dramatic situations that resonate with concurrent developments in literary and artistic realism, it is as a musical language that Verismo powerfully overrides previous operatic traditions. This talk will look at the ways in which social injustice and the representation of marginalized characters came to the fore in opera between 1890 and WWI, while also addressing the specificity of the operatic aesthetics vis-à-vis other mediums of artistic expression in the period.
General Admission: $15. Members and Students: Free.
About the lecturer:
Eugenio Refini (PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2010), is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. Prior to joining NYU, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick (2010-2013) and he taught at Johns Hopkins University (2014-2019). His interests include reception, translation, and the intersections of music and literature, with a focus on vocal music and opera. Among his recent publications, the monograph The Vernacular Aristotle: Translation as Reception in Medieval and Renaissance Italy(Cambridge UP, 2020) and articles on Renaissance Quarterly, The Italianist, and Romance Quarterly. Refini’s next monograph, Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy, is forthcoming with Legenda (2022). He has received fellowships from Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, the Bodleian Library, the Warburg Institute and he has recently been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome for the academic year 2021–22. His current book project studies the reception of the myth of Ariadne across poetry and music from 1600 to 1900.
Public Programming at CIMA is made possible with the generous support of Christie’s.
