Italian Opera Singing at the Time of Verismo: The Invention of the Modern Voice

Connects discussions of vocality and operatic culture with broader aesthetic and cultural shifts in society.

In the decades that span the turn of the twentieth century, the Italian tradition of operatic singing became 'modern'. This book identifies and explores the formative elements of this multifaceted 'modernity', and its connections with the emergence of verismo, a realistic trend that affected every aspect of creative and intellectual life in fin-de-siècle Italy. Thisnovel approach to artistic representation meant that singers had to redefine the operatic voice, exchanging the bel canto ideal of 'pure' vocal quality with an irreversible gendered connotation and an erotically charged expressive force. Pivotal to this shift was the gradual development of a homogeneous vocal colour through the compass, an aesthetic principle that was alien to the voice culture of the previous centuries. Star singers such as Enrico Caruso, Titta Ruffo, Emma Carelli and Eugenia Burzio were instrumental in this radical transition.


The book explores how and why modern singers consciously pursued a new vocal expressivity, illuminating the ways in which the changes they introduced in their vocal techniques yielded novel stylistic gestures, and ultimately shaped operatic culture.Through a comparative analysis of early vocal recordings and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vocal methods and drawing on archival research in London, Milan, Rome and Buenos Aires, the book connects discussions of vocality and operatic culture with broader aesthetic and cultural shifts in society. Italian Opera Singing at the Time of Verismo, will be of interest to scholars and students of opera history, performance studies and recording history, as well as voice coaches and professional singers.

BARBARA GENTILI is Surrey Future Senior Fellow at the University of Surrey. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the Royal College of Music. She is also an accomplished soprano and opera singer.