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27-442: Wolf-Ferrari: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948), Italian composer and teacher List of operas by Wolf-Ferrari Manno Wolf-Ferrari (1911–1994), Italian conductor, and a nephew of Ermanno Teodoro Wolf Ferrari (1878–1945), Italian painter See also [ edit ] Wolf (name) Ferrari (disambiguation) [REDACTED] Surname list This page lists people with

54-405: A chamber symphony ), various pieces of chamber music including a piano quintet and two piano trios , three violin sonatas and a number of works for the organ amongst others. In recent years, a recovery of his instrumental music has been underway by the pianist Costantino Catena , who has recorded his piano works, sonatas for violin and piano, sonata for cello and piano and piano quintet for

81-612: A painter like his father; he studied intensively in Venice and Rome and traveled abroad to study in Munich . It was there that he decided to concentrate instead on music , taking lessons from Josef Rheinberger . He enrolled at the Munich conservatory and began taking counterpoint and composition classes. These initially casual music classes eventually completely eclipsed his art studies, and music took over Wolf-Ferrari's life. He wrote his first works in

108-708: A pastoral comedy ( L'amico Fritz ), a symbolist work set in Japan ( Iris ), and a couple of medieval romances ( Isabeau and Parisina ). These works are far from typical verismo subject matter, yet they are written in the same general musical style as his more quintessential veristic subjects. In addition, there is disagreement among musicologists as to which operas are verismo operas, and which are not. (Non-Italian operas are generally excluded). Giordano's Andrea Chénier , Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur , Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana , Leoncavallo's Pagliacci , and Puccini's Tosca and Il tabarro are operas to which

135-565: A play by the same author, became the source for what is usually considered to be the first verismo opera: Cavalleria rusticana by Mascagni, which premiered on 17 May 1890 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Thus begun, the operatic genre of verismo produced a handful of notable works such as Pagliacci , which premiered at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on 21 May 1892, and Puccini's Tosca (premiering at

162-467: Is different from Wikidata All set index articles Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was born in Venice in 1876, the son of German painter August Wolf and Emilia Ferrari, from Venice. He added his mother's maiden name, Ferrari, to his surname in 1895. Although he studied piano from an early age, music was not the primary passion of his young life. As a teenager Wolf-Ferrari wanted to be

189-693: Is variable, being based on text that usually does not follow a regular strophic format. The most famous composers who created works in the verismo style were Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano and Francesco Cilea. There were, however, many other veristi : Franco Alfano , Alfredo Catalani , Gustave Charpentier ( Louise ), Eugen d'Albert ( Tiefland ), Ignatz Waghalter ( Der Teufelsweg and Jugend ), Alberto Franchetti , Franco Leoni , Jules Massenet ( La Navarraise ), Licinio Refice , Spyridon Samaras , Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari ( I gioielli della Madonna ), and Riccardo Zandonai . There has long been some confusion over

216-1139: The Brilliant Classics label. Wolf-Ferrari's work is not performed very widely (with the exception of several of his overtures and his Jewels of the Madonna intermezzo) although he is generally thought of as probably the finest writer of Italian comic opera of his time. His works often recall the opera buffa of the 18th century, although he also wrote more ambitious works in the manner of Pietro Mascagni , which are thought of less well. Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno by John C G Waterhouse, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980) ISBN   0-333-23111-2 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno by John C G Waterhouse, in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera , ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1992) ISBN   0-333-73432-7 Verismo In opera , verismo ( Italian for 'realism'), from vero , meaning 'true',

243-507: The surname Wolf-Ferrari . If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name (s) to the link. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wolf-Ferrari&oldid=1189189796 " Categories : Surnames German-language surnames Italian-language surnames Compound surnames Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description

270-414: The verismo literary movement sought to portray the world with greater realism . In so doing, Italian verismo authors such as Giovanni Verga wrote about subject matter, such as the lives of the poor, that had not generally been seen as a fit subject for literature. A short story by Verga called Cavalleria rusticana  [ it ] ( Italian for 'Rustic Chivalry'), then developed into

297-401: The 1890s. At age 19, Wolf-Ferrari left the conservatory and traveled home to Venice. There he worked as a choral conductor, married, had a son called Federico Wolf-Ferrari, and met both Arrigo Boito and Verdi . In 1900, having failed to have two previous efforts published, Wolf-Ferrari saw the first performance of one of his operas , Cenerentola , based on the story of Cinderella. The opera

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324-761: The Shrew . In 1939 he became professor of composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg . In 1946 he moved again to Zürich before returning to his home city of Venice. He died in Venice at Palazzo Malipiero and is buried in the San Michele cemetery on Island of San Michele . As well as his operas, Wolf-Ferrari wrote a number of instrumental works, mainly at the very beginning and very end of his career. Only his violin concerto has ever been performed with anything approaching regularity, though he also wrote Idillio-concertino (essentially

351-562: The Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900). The genre peaked in the early 1900s, and lingered into the 1920s. In terms of subject matter, generally "[v]erismo operas focused not on gods, mythological figures, or kings and queens, but on the average contemporary man and woman and their problems, generally of a sexual, romantic, or violent nature." However, three of the small handful of verismo operas still performed today take historical subjects: Puccini's Tosca , Giordano's Andrea Chénier and Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur . In Opera After

378-673: The Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany, the music historian Emily Richmond Pollock writes that verismo's musical language reflects an aesthetic that emphasizes "the power of moment-by-moment emotional expressiveness that requires harmonic and formal flexibility, muscular but relatively unornamented vocal lines, and a fully developed orchestration full of high-contrast timbres." "Musically, verismo composers consciously strove for

405-466: The contemporary and realistic subject matter for which the term verismo was originally coined. At the same time, Mallach questions the value of using a term such as verismo , which is supposedly descriptive of the subject and style of works, simply to identify an entire generation's music-dramatic output. For most of the composers associated with verismo , traditionally veristic subjects accounted for only some of their operas. For instance, Mascagni wrote

432-659: The emotionalism of their ardent interpretations. Some prominent practitioners of verismo singing during the movement's Italian lifespan (1890 to circa 1930) include the sopranos Eugenia Burzio , Lina Bruna Rasa and Bianca Scacciati , the tenors Aureliano Pertile , Cesar Vezzani and Amadeo Bassi, and the baritones Mario Sammarco and Eugenio Giraldoni . Their method of singing can be sampled on numerous 78-rpm gramophone recordings. Great early-20th century international operatic stars Enrico Caruso , Rosa Ponselle and Titta Ruffo developed vocal techniques which harmoniously managed to combine fundamental bel canto precepts with

459-445: The genre. Some authors have attempted to trace the origins of verismo opera to works that preceded Cavalleria rusticana , such as Georges Bizet 's Carmen , or Giuseppe Verdi 's La traviata . Modest Moussorgsky 's Boris Godunov should not be ignored as an antecedent of verismo , especially because of Moussorgsky's focus on peasants, alongside princes and other aristocracy and church leaders, and his deliberate relating of

486-465: The great Polish soprano Rosa Raisa made it a celebrated vehicle. Maria Jeritza (and, later, Florence Easton ) triumphed in it at the Metropolitan Opera , in an all-out spectacular production in 1926. World War I, however, was a nightmare for Wolf-Ferrari. The young composer, who had been dividing his time between Munich and Venice, suddenly found his two countries at war with each other. With

513-438: The integration of the opera's underlying drama with its music." These composers abandoned the "recitative and set-piece structure" of earlier Italian opera. Instead, the operas were "through-composed," with few breaks in a seamlessly integrated sung text. While verismo operas may contain arias that can be sung as stand-alone pieces, they are generally written to arise naturally from their dramatic surroundings, and their structure

540-439: The meaning of the term verismo . In addition to referring to operas written in a realistic style, verismo may also be used more broadly to refer to the entire output of the composers of the giovane scuola ("young school"), the generation of Italian composers who were active during the period that the verismo style was created. One author (Alan Mallach) has proposed the term "plebeian opera" to refer to operas that adhere to

567-404: The natural speech inflexions of the libretto to the rhythms of the sung music, different from, for example, Tchaikovsky's use of Pushkin's verse as a libretto. The verismo opera style featured music that showed signs of more declamatory singing, in contrast to the traditional tenets of elegant, 19th-century bel canto singing that had preceded the movement, which were purely based on markings in

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594-528: The outbreak of World War I, Wolf-Ferrari's operas were among the most performed in the world. In 1902 he became professor of composition and director of the Liceo Benedetto Marcello . In 1911 Wolf-Ferrari tried his hand at full-blooded Verismo with I gioielli della Madonna ; a story of passion, sacrilege and madness. It was quite popular in its day and for a period after, especially in Chicago, where

621-474: The outbreak of the War, he moved to Zürich and composed much less, though he still wrote another comedy, Gli amanti sposi (1916). A new melancholy vein appeared in his post-war work; his operas grew darker and more emotionally complex. He did not really pick up his rate of output until the 1920s, when he wrote Das Himmelskleid (1925) and Sly (1927), the latter based on William Shakespeare 's The Taming of

648-400: The term verismo is applied with little or no dispute. The term is sometimes also applied to Puccini's Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West . Because only four verismo works not by Puccini continue to appear regularly on stage (the aforementioned Cavalleria rusticana , Pagliacci , Andrea Chénier and Adriana Lecouvreur ), Puccini's contribution has had lasting significance to

675-418: The written music of authors preceding this "era". Opera singers adapted to the demands of the "new" style. The most extreme exponents of verismo vocalism sang habitually in a vociferous fashion, were focusing on the passionate aspect of music. They would 'beef up' the timbre of their voices, use greater amounts of vocal fold mass on their top notes, and often employ a conspicuous vibrato in order to accentuate

702-660: Was a failure in Italy, and the humiliated young composer moved back to Munich. German audiences would prove more appreciative of his work; a revised version of Cenerentola was a hit in Bremen in 1902, while the cantata La vita nuova brought the young composer international fame. Wolf-Ferrari now began transforming the wild and witty farces of the 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni into comic operas. The resulting works were musically eclectic, melodic, and utterly hilarious; every single one became an international success. In fact, until

729-424: Was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni , Ruggero Leoncavallo , Umberto Giordano , Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini . Verismo as an operatic genre had its origins in an Italian literary movement of the same name . This was in turn related to the international literary movement of naturalism as practised by Émile Zola and others. Like naturalism ,

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