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Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overturehe avoids direct tonal centre in the first few bars of the piece, but also intentionally avoids firmly securing a cadence in the key of the tonic, B minor. long and constantly-ascending melodic line, continuing through the constant tonal change: very romantic indeed and Mendelssohn managed to make the lines sounds so natural. smart use of textural layering: voices slips in and out of the texture to create waves of intensity that grows and dies, supporting and underlining the never-ending melody line.Score: 

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Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overturehe avoids direct tonal centre in the first few bars of the piece, but also intentionally avoids firmly securing a cadence in the key of the tonic, B minor. long and constantly-ascending melodic line, continuing through the constant tonal change: very romantic indeed and Mendelssohn managed to make the lines sounds so natural. smart use of textural layering: voices slips in and out of the texture to create waves of intensity that grows and dies, supporting and underlining the never-ending melody line.Score: 

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http://imslp.org/wiki/Die_Hebriden,_Op.26_(Mendelssohn,_Felix)

Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcogD-hHEYs

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ZY: Mahler, Gieng Heut' Morgen über's Feld 

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ZY: Mahler, Gieng Heut' Morgen über's Feld 

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http://imslp.org/wiki/Lieder_eines_fahrenden_Gesellen_(Mahler%2C_Gustav)

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Mahler: "Ging heut' morgen über's Feld" / Gerhaher · Rattle · Berliner Philharmoniker

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2vLEQno9Ks

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Liszt and Chopin (Chopin un amor imposible) scenes

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Scriabin - piano concerto

Score:
http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/1/13/IMSLP03811-Scriabin_Piano_Concerto.pdf

youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F734PyD3NAw

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Score: http://ks.petruccimusiclibrary.org/files/imglnks/usimg/9/93/IMSLP18774-PMLP12183-Strauss_-_Don_Juan_(orch._score).pdf

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcBGsjPky0c

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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GauIMo8Manc
Score:
http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/c/cc/IMSLP465444-PMLP73121-elgar_sea.pdf

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Hector Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK6iAxe0oEc
2) http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphonie_fantastique,_H_48_(Berlioz,_Hector)

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Bela Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OidFaXxTP6U
2) http://imslp.org/wiki/The_Miraculous_Mandarin_(Bart%C3%B3k%2C_B%C3%A9la)

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Giuseppe Verdi's Messa de Requiem
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoyVfPcE3ks
2) http://imslp.org/wiki/Requiem_(Verdi,_Giuseppe)

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Mendelssohn

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Gustav Mahler's 8th Symphony
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSYEOLwVfU8
2) http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.8_(Mahler,_Gustav)

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Vaughan Williams Sonata for violin and piano in a minor

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yIyVwfBAQ0&t=99s

Score: http://petruccilibrary.ca/files/imglnks/caimg/8/88/IMSLP130822-PMLP254570-Vaughan_Williams_-_Violin_Sonata.pdf

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Leo Delibes: Flower Duet (from opera- Lakme)  

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Leo Delibes: Flower Duet (from opera- Lakme)  

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qx2lMaMsl8

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With an older colleague, the Philadelphia-based composer George Rochberg (see box, page 24), Del Tredici is in the vanguard of a movement that has come to be known as neo-Romanticism. Some indication of its importance can be drawn from the New York Philharmonic's decision to entitle this week's spring festival ''Horizons '83: Since 1968, A New Romanticism?'' The festival, which begins this Thursday, will run for nearly two weeks and include six Philharmonic concerts. There will be performances of works by John Harbison, Barbara Kolb, Lukas Foss, Peter Maxwell Davies and others. Del Tredici's ''All in the Golden Afternoon'' is the highlight of the opening program.

A bachelor, Del Tredici still lives in the same moderately sized loft in the West Village that he has occupied for 10 years. It is sparsely furnished, tidy but comfortable, the walls lined with bookshelves and photographs. An open score, cluttered with pen and pencil markings, lies on a draftsman's table. There are two upright pianos, covered with books on subjects ranging from James Joyce to bodybuilding.

Chronologically, Del Tredici might be categorized as middle-aged, but the adjective that immediately comes to mind is ''boyish.'' The composer is athletically trim, neither tall nor short. His brown hair is cut short, his engaging smile rather mischievous, and the laughs come easily. More than that, he has endless enthusiasm, and when he talks about his music in a twangy voice, he conveys the impression that he is a man doing exactly what he was put on earth to do.

''Listen to this!'' Del Tredici runs to a piano, where he zestfully pounds out a passage from ''Final Alice.'' ''These are such simple chords, you know, but it was so thrilling to write them. I felt liberated, like I had discovered a whole new musical world. I found such life in these chords!

''Music is not a religion, nor is it a duty,'' he goes on. ''It is an entertainment. All that a composer really does is realize his own particular musical fantasy with a certain selection of notes, rhythms and timbres. But some of my colleagues were very upset by this new direction of mine. To them, writing within a tonal framework was more than eccentric. It was somehow wrong - decadent, even immoral. And, like most 20th-century composers, I was writing for my colleagues.''

Like most such appellations, neo-Romanticism is an easy catch phrase, but it may have more validity than most. Jacob Druckman, the New York Philharmonic's composer-in-residence and the artistic director of its spring festival, notes that much of the 20th century's serious music has been shaped by a rather cold ''Apollonian'' logic, but that lately one can discern a steady reemergence of more passionate ''Dionysian'' elements in various idioms.

ARALLELS MAY BE DRAWN between modernism and Marxism, whose followers envision history as an irresistible and logical flow. Modernists have the same breathless faith in progress -Bach led to Mozart, to Beethoven, to Wagner, and on to Schoenberg, who, despite his disclaimer, struck what seemed to be a death blow to tonality sometime around 1912. A true musical modernist believes that although audiences have systematically rejected atonal music for 70 years, eventually they will catch up to it, and composers have a duty to proceed accordingly.

Despite the claims of social and cultural clairvoyants, the future hasn't worked out quite as planned. A loss of faith in benign, rational man-made progress has sparked a re-evaluation of ideals. For their part, composers, freed from believing themselves subject to a preordained continuum, are finding inspiration in modes declared obsolete by a previous generation.

This same libertarian spirit is apparent in other artistic fields: One need only enter a SoHo gallery or breeze through a small-press catalogue for abundant proof. Artists who were raised on 20th-century pronouncements - representational painting is finished, there is no such thing as an omniscient narrator, etc. - are discovering that such strictures apply only if you want them to.

Some musical observers see neo-Romanticism as a sellout to popular taste. Specifically, not all have liked Del Tredici's neo-Straussian flamboyance. The composer Ned Rorem, who admires Del Tredici's ability to express humor in music - ''not even Beethoven could do that!'' - feels that the later Alice works are too long and overwrought. The conductor Erich Leinsdorf, quoted by John Rockwell, a New York Times music critic, in his recent book ''All American Music,'' dismisses ''Final Alice'' as ''totally without merit, parlaying the major sixth chord into a 58-minute work.''

The conductor Leonard Slatkin, who recorded ''In Memory of a Summer Day'' with the St. Louis Symphony, disagrees: ''David is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing audiences back to new music. To the average listener, David's music seems simple and charming, but for the musician, it's a technical and emotional challenge of the highest order.''

''Child Alice,'' which comprises ''In Memory of a Summer Day,'' ''All in the Golden Afternoon'' and two other sections entitled ''Happy Voices'' and ''Quaint Events,'' is even longer than ''Final Alice'' - and more conservative in its harmonic language to boot. Die-hard modernists, such as the organized claque of disgruntled composers which disrupted a 1980 San Francisco Symphony performance of ''Happy Voices'' in Ann Arbor, Mich., are bound to disapprove.

Del Tredici coudn't care less: ''I remember standing on a corner, sometime before I turned 5. I looked up at the flowers and the sky, and suddenly had this overwhelming sensation of happiness that I would never truly grow up. I want to trap the ecstasy of life within my music; I want to create sounds so beautiful that time will stop.''

For many exalted listeners, it does.

David Del Tredici was born in Cloverdale, Calif., near San Francisco, in 1937. He was the son of an Italian accountant and his German wife, and was raised in what he calls a ''Catholic, nonmusical, supportive'' environment. Del Tredici's first close exposure to music came when one of the nuns in the private school he attended taught the boy to play ''Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'' on the piano. Soon Del Tredici was taking private lessons, and practicing two or three hours every day.

''My first public performance was with Liberace,'' Del Tredici remembers. ''He used to tour the fashionable hotels, just before his big success on television, and he came to San Francisco's Fairmont. I won a local audition and played with him. I still own the souvenir toy piano he signed and gave to me.''

At 16, Del Tredici was studying piano with Bernard Abramowitsch, and made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony. During his brief career as a virtuoso, Del Tredici played Liszt and Tchaikovsky concertos with Arthur Fiedler, and won an award for instrumental performance in 1955.

But shortly afterward, the young man had a discouraging experience at the Aspen Music Festival. ''I had an absolute ogre of a teacher. Suddenly, all the joy went out of playing. It became drudgery. I lost all interest in the piano. Deciding that a change was necessary, I sat down and wrote my first composition.

''I found that I already knew how to compose. I had played a lot of Schoenberg and Berg and loved their music. It was this whole new musical world, and it thrilled me. And so, when I started to compose, I just created my own version of German expressionism.''

This first composition was entitled ''Soliloquy,'' and it is the most dissonant work Del Tredici ever wrote. ''A friend of mine was studying with Darius Milhaud at Aspen,'' he says, ''and asked me to play my piece for Milhaud, who was a certified Great Man. I was scared to death. When I had finished playing, he looked at me and said, in that taciturn way of his, 'My boy, you are a composer.' That's all it took. From then on, I resolved to study seriously.''

Del Tredici did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied with the composer Seymour Shifrin, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1959. After graduation, the budding composer accepted a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to do graduate work at Princeton University.

Princeton was then the center for the American atonal avant-garde. A form of mathematical, ultrarational serialism was in the air, and many young composers reduced music to a collection of formulas and academic in-games. The image of the composer as Faustian, ivory-tower experimenter was not new, but it was nurtured and institutionalized at Princeton.

Some fine music came out of this hothouse - especially the wonderfully lucid work of Milton Babbitt, the most outspoken of the American serialists - but there was also much that was arid and pedantic, extolling complexity as the highest musical value. One didn't just listen to a new piece of music; one dissected it. And there was a general embarrassment about tonality among young composers: One was atonal or one was out of the revolution.

Although Del Tredici studied with two of the least doctrinaire professors - Earl Kim and Roger Sessions - and looks back on his piano studies with Robert Helps as ''immensely important,'' he was unhappy at Princeton: ''I was there at the height of the serial movement, with these structural autopsies being passed off as fully realized music. The Princeton group seemed to be trying to take the expressionist element out of German expressionism - trying to make a code out of what had been a wild and mercurial emotion.''

So Del Tredici dropped out. After a year in Cali- fornia, he came to Manhattan: ''I did the classic New York thing - played dance classes, got a job in Jersey City conducting a choir, taught one day a week at a neighborhood school in New Haven, and composed during my free time.''

In 1963, ''in a more resilient frame of mind,'' Del Tredici returned to Princeton, where he received his M.F.A. the following year. At the suggestion of his friend the composer Stanley Silverman, Del Tredici sent a tape of his music to Aaron Copland, and was subsequently invited to participate in the prestigious Fromm Foundation concerts at Tanglewood. ''I Hear An Army,'' to a text by James Joyce, was given its first performance at Tanglewood. The soprano was Phyllis Bryn-Julson, who is still working with Del Tredici today, nearly 20 years later.

The soprano vividly recalls the young composer's difficulties with the musical establishment: ''Everybody else was working on gloomy tracts about the Vietnam War or existential despair, shot through with fashionable pessimism, filled with mathematical complexities you couldn't hear. David was different; he was writing gentle, lyrical music with a sense of humor.''

Del Tredici has always needed the impetus of words to inspire his best work, and James Joyce's writings provided the momentum for a series of compositions in the 1960's. ''Joyce appealed to me,'' he says, ''because of his inventive wordplay and his renegade Catholicism - an intriguing combination.''

N 1968, DEL TREDICI LEARNED OF an opening at Harvard, and quickly took the teaching job. ''I gave up my wonderful $50-a-month apartment on Third Avenue and moved north.'' He enjoyed the job for a while - one of his students was John Adams, whose ''Grand Pianola Music'' will be heard at the Philharmonic's festival this week - but soon found that academic concerns were hampering his composition. Although Del Tredici spent his summers at art colonies, he felt ''creatively dead'' for nine months of every year, and produced very little.

Opting for a complete change, Del Tredici moved to a one-room schoolhouse in New Hampshire, to devote himself to composition full time. ''It was a disaster,'' he recalls. ''Within two months, I wasn't sleeping, and I couldn't compose.'' Striking a happy bargain, Del Tredici moved back to New York, but took a professorship at Boston University for one semester a year.

The young composer Steven Mercurio, a former teaching fellow at the Juilliard School, studied with Del Tredici in Boston four years ago. ''David taught me the most important thing a composer can learn,'' he recalls, ''to have the courage of my convictions, and to write the kind of music I enjoy, without caring about what others will think.''

Del Tredici continues to spend summers in the country. ''The nice thing about MacDowell or Yaddo or Tanglewood is that it's a bounded, very finite package of time. You can be absolutely monastic for a while, get a lot of work done, and then return to the real world.''

When Del Tredici is in New York, his day begins at 8 A.M., when he immediately turns on the television set. As he eats a small breakfast, he watches the ''Today'' show and looks over yesterday's sketches. ''The television helps remove the tension of working,'' he explains. ''I trick myself into creation. After I have digested yesterday's music, I go to the piano, where I do most of my composing. I feel like I'm in a trance when I go to the keyboard, like a pure fool. I free-associate and inevitably it leads to something, which I play with for the rest of the day.''

Del Tredici composes un-til 1 P.M., when he takes a break and enjoys his favorite soap opera, ''All My Children.'' After that, he works until 5, and follows this with physical activity - running a few miles, or a workout on Nautilus equipment. At 10, Del Tredici has dinner, may visit with friends, and then usually turns in around midnight.

''I need to work for seven or eight hours a day, for two-week stretches,'' the composer says. ''I can't compose if I don't have time to think. I leave the phone unplugged a lot of the time.'' Why not get an answering machine? ''Because then I'd have to call everyone back.''

Del Tredici explains why all of his post-1968 compositions have concentrated on the ''Wonderland'' books: ''I've always said that I liked the combination of wit and whimsy and mathematical exactitude in Carroll. But I also like the hard edge to the nostalgia. The Alice books are friendly, but just a little bit violent. There are all sorts of possibilities for the composer.''

There are now six Alice pieces, each one progressively less dissonant: ''Pop-Pourri'' (composed in 1968, revised 1973); ''An Alice Symphony'' (1969); ''Adventures Underground'' (1971, revised 1977); ''Vintage Alice'' (1972); ''Final Alice'' (1976); and ''Child Alice (1977-81). Currently, Del Tredici is setting ''The Spider and the Fly,'' by a Victorian writer named Mary Howitt -''Lewis Carroll without Carroll,'' as he puts it.

Del Tredici is often asked if he would like to write an opera. ''Well, it would be a natural thing for me,'' he says. ''I'm already writing concert pieces for voice that last longer than many operas. But I've never started an opera because the right text hasn't come along.''

Such concert pieces as ''In Memory of a Summer Day'' and ''Final Alice,'' with their overripe orchestrations and high tessitura for soprano, remind many listeners of Richard Strauss's operas. The comparison amuses Del Tredici. ''I never knew Strauss's music, because I was a pianist,'' he says, ''and he wrote very little for the piano. And they certainly weren't holding up the conservative Strauss as a model for young composers at Princeton! But I've learned a lot from him recently, and it's been a real discovery. Strauss was probably the master orchestrator of all time. And so much more.''

Del Tredici's musical tastes are eclectic. Although he used a rock band in some of the early Alice pieces, he is not fond of much popular music (''I used to like the Beatles'') and despises jazz (''It's never meant a thing to me, with its endless regularity and suggestions of smoke-filled rooms'').

''I love Schumann,'' he adds, ''for his quirky eccentricity and utterly spontaneous feeling - those crazy fantasias, which the pianist has to re-create. I also used to enjoy playing Liszt, because it was a challenge to make all that bombast and rhetoric have a meaning.''

Among the recent American composers, Del Tredici deeply admires the late Samuel Barber: ''He was a great artist - underrated and sneered at, a victim of totalitarian modernism. Barber's music manages to be luxurious, decadent, austere and deeply felt at the same time. From the beginning, he seemed perfectly formed.''

Del Tredici's turning to a tonal idiom does not preclude respect for men such as Roger Sessions, Leon Kirchner and Aaron Copland, all of whom have continued to write in a thornier, more dissonant style. The respect is mutual; Copland, whose later, less frequently played music is often atonal, believes that ''Del Tredici is that rare find among composers - a creator with a truly original gift. I venture to say that his music is certain to make a lasting impression on the American musical scene. I know of no other composer of his generation ... who composes music of greater freshness and daring, or with more personality.'' Leon Kirchner concurs: ''In our desperation to be predictive and scientific, composers involved themselves with silly numbers games. Bach and Beethoven never had to talk about their formal command; they had it in spades. In David's work, the technique is similarly assured.''

But there may be some surprises in store for the audience Del Tredici has won. After six Alice pieces, and the similarly spirited ''Spider and the Fly,'' the composer is thinking of setting the words of another writer, possibly William Burroughs, the avant-garde author of ''Naked Lunch,'' among others. ''I like the crazy electricity of his work,'' Del Tredici says. ''A Burroughs cycle would have to be hard-edged, modern, dirty, raunchy, urban - the exact opposite of the Alice compositions.''

Does this mean that his neo-Romantic period is coming to an end? Del Tredici, finishing off a can of Coors beer, leans back in his chair with a grin, saying, ''Maybe it's time for something new. My tonality is not historically inevitable, you know. Remember, there are still a lot of good pieces waiting to be written with 12-tone rows!'' APOSTATE MODERNIST he ''neo-Romantic'' contemporary music to be featured in the New York Philharmonic's spring festival signifies, in the composer Jacob Druckman's words, a ''gradual change of focus, of spirituality and of goals'' on the part of today's composers. Their music, Druckman notes, reveals ''a steady re-emergence of ... sensuality, mystery, nostalgia, ecstasy, transcendency.''

The festival offers works by many composers - among them, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino and Toru Takemitsu - who are decidedly not neo-Romantics. But in nearly every case, one senses a lessened fascination with formal considerations and a new desire to communicate. Wuorinen, a die-hard atonalist, without compromising his formal rigor, has managed to make the result more palatable for a general audience. On the other hand, the hypnotic, repetitive minimalism of Steve Reich has grown beyond an obsession with structure into a near-symphonic lushness. Content before form - an old idea revitalized. ''Wherever we are going,'' concludes Druckman, ''we know we are in an era of fascinating change.''

Many composers have worked in an idiosyncratically conservative style for most of their careers -Gian-Carlo Menotti, John Corigliano, Peter Mennin and Ned Rorem, among others. Rorem, in particular, is annoyed by the publicity given to recent converts to tonality: ''Everybody makes a fuss over somebody who quits smoking, but never over the person who is smart enough never to have started.''

But the neo-Romanticism espoused by David Del Tredici and George Rochberg is a reaction to the strictures of modernism - it is a style they have consciously adopted, not something they have been doing all along, ''naturally.''

Rochberg is often paired with Del Tredici as the best known of the full-fledged neo-Romantics. But there are many differences between them; Del Tredici's new idiom came about through a bubbling enthusiasm, while Rochberg's later work springs directly from personal pain.

Rochberg, a tall, gray-haired gentleman, whose abundant sense of humor never interferes with his urgent seriousness, was born in 1918 and studied at New York's Mannes School of Music and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Rochberg will retire this summer from the University of Pennsylvania after teaching there for 23 years. When he arrived, he was one of the foremost American exponents of atonality. By the mid-1960's, he had begun to re-evaluate his esthetic, and he will leave Penn as modernism's most articulate apostate.

''Modernism ended up allowing us only a postage-stamp-sized space to stand on,'' as he puts it. ''We cut the rest away.'' Rochberg's opinions are strong and expressed with quiet conviction: ''I remember my discussion with the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola in 1963. I asked him, rather offhandedly, what he thought would happen after the 12-tone school had run its course. The question visibly shocked him. 'Nothing,' he said. 'We're here. This is our language. I see no reason to wonder about it.' ''

However, after the long illness and premature death of Rochberg's son in 1964, the composer found he could no longer continue writing serial music. ''It was finished, empty, meaningless,'' he recalls. And so began his quest for a musical language that would better suit his creative needs. During the next few years, Rochberg made many experiments, including some ''collage'' pieces, featuring quotations from different composers from the past and present, as well as original music in different styles and from various perspectives.

With the Quartet No. 3 for Strings (1971), Rochberg broke ranks. The work contained a genuine late-Romantic, Mahlerian adagio: the harmonies diatonic, the mood languorous and the melody presented in a fashion that was straightforward, passionate and unembarrassedly tonal. Rochberg's move shocked many of his colleagues, inspiring much commentary in conservatories and music journals.

In recent works, such as the fourth, fifth and sixth string quartets, Rochberg's stylistic variants are more homogeneous. These works are Romantic in many ways, but there is no sense of self-conscious synthesis, facile quotation or reactionary throwback. One listener compares the quartets to ''extremely late Beethoven.'' Others may be reminded of Bartok, Mahler, Haydn, Schoenberg and Mozart, but the final product has an intensity that is entirely Rochberg's own.

Yet Rochberg has not become a strict proselytizer for tonality: ''Everyone must find his own voice. I reserve the right to compose 12-tone music in the future -or any other music I choose. I've tried very hard to rid myself of that stultifying conception of historical line, and if I want to contrast dissonant chromaticism cheek by jowl with a more accessibly tonal style, I will do so. All human gestures are available to all human beings at any time.'' - T.P.

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With an older colleague, the Philadelphia-based composer George Rochberg (see box, page 24), Del Tredici is in the vanguard of a movement that has come to be known as neo-Romanticism.

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Respighi, "Feste Romane"
Score: http://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/2/27/IMSLP31713-PMLP72122-Respighi_-_Feste_Romance_(orch._score).pdf
Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u1oT7QtQp4

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Verismo

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Few words in the operatic lexicon have been misused as regularly as . Often used as a blanket term for all Italian operas written between the 1890s and the 1920s, verismo more properly denotes a type of opera with very specific musical and dramatic characteristics.

Operatic verismo was a response to a succession of late 19th-century literary movements: particularly the naturalistic French novels of Émile Zola and his contemporaries and - more directly - the literary verismo movement that sprang up in the early 1880s, led by the Sicilian authors Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana. Where French naturalist novels tended to be urban in setting and were driven by a desire for social change, their Italian counterparts were often rural and far less idealistic in motivation.

Italian composers had started to become interested in depicting the experiences of comparatively ordinary people in the mid-19th century: Verdi's 1853 opera La traviata paved the way for the verismo movement in portraying a heroine who was not only humble, but of questionable morality. However, the type of everyday life we find in verismo operas was of a considerably more gritty brand than anything in mid- or late Verdi and its typical characters were prostitutes and criminals for whom the audience was expected to care little. Operas about 'real people' and verismo operas are not, therefore, always the same thing.

In the verismo aesthetic, relationships were presented in their crudest manifestations: sensationalist tales of lust, jealousy and revenge invariably culminated in a gruesome crime of passion. The subject matter of verismo operas was matched by music that was appropriately violent, moving away from the dominance of the 'beautiful voice' of bel canto and at times blending singing with shouting. Shrieks, laughs and sobs also contributed to the distinctive sonic fabric of verismo, the latter exemplified most memorably in 'Vesti la giubba' from Ruggero Leoncavallo 's .

The musical texture of the verismo aesthetic as exhibited in the most famous opera of the genre, Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, was not in fact particularly 'realistic', nor particularly modern by the standards of the day. It represented a return to a rather traditional pattern of arias and choruses, linked by simple recitative, and was a move away from the far more conversational style of through-composed writing that we find in late Verdi and that would reach its culmination in Puccini 's operas.

The history of verismo opera is closely tied up with that of the Sonzogno music publishing house. The Sonzogno firm was always keen to find ways of marking itself out from Ricordi, the market leader in Italian 19th-century music publishing. In the 1890s the promotion of verismo also became a Sonzogno speciality. Put cynically, the move towards this new genre of opera was driven more by economic factors than by visionary aesthetics, let alone any sort of political conviction.

In 1883, Sonzogno announced the launch of a series of opera competitions. The winner of the second Sonzogno competition was Cavalleria rusticana, which swiftly took the international operatic world by storm. The entrepreneurial Edoardo Sonzogno was extremely keen to capitalize on this enthusiasm and started to scout around for other young composers who could write similar works. He spotted some potential in a young Umberto Giordano. Sonzogno commissioned Giordano to write a verismo opera; the work he composed, Mala vita, would provoke a scandal upon its premiere in 1892 with its tale of a labourer who vows to reform a prostitute if his tuberculosis is cured.

So where does Giordano's Andrea Chénier fit into this landscape? Andrea Chénier is often referred to as a clear-cut example of a verismo opera but it was in fact a conscious turn away from the excesses of Mala vita. Andrea Chénier is certainly 'realist' in terms of the way in which Giordano pays attention to details of atmosphere and local colour, but the opera lacks the contemporary focus that characterized many works in the verismo genre. What we find instead is a juxtaposition of aesthetics: the spectacle of grand opera combined with the visceral emotion of verismo.
This is an extract from Alexandra Wilson's article 'The Verismo Aesthetic' in The Royal Opera's programme book for Andrea Chénier, available during performances and from the ROH Shop. Discover more about the history of opera in the exhibition Opera: Passion, Power and Politics, at the V&A Museum 30 September 2017-25 February 2018.

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A blanket term misused: What is (and isn't) verismo?

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Few words in the operatic lexicon have been misused as regularly as . Often used as a blanket term for all Italian operas written between the 1890s and the 1920s, verismo more properly denotes a type of opera with very specific musical and dramatic characteristics.

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Scriabin - Le poème de l'extase

youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOjQ4j9bLvg
score
http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.4,_Op.54_(Scriabin,_Aleksandr)

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Wagner:

Tristan und Isolde (Prelude and Liebestod)

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/4/48/IMSLP82601-SIBLEY1802.13070.dd36-39087009481773score.pdf

Recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wpR_SwEbBo&t=11620s
( 2015 Bayreuth Festspiele, Conductor: Thielemann)

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Richard Strauss: Salome (Dance of the Seven Veils and the final scene-

Ich habe deinen mund geküsst

)

Score: http://imslp.org/wiki/Salome,_Op.54_(Strauss,_Richard)

Recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2hovVkovFY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYNHOiEFBs
(Conductor: Daniele Gatti
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra)

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Gustav Mahler: Adagio from Symphony No. 10

Score: https://www.universaledition.com/composers-and-works/gustav-mahler-448/works/adagio-aus-der-10-symphonie-1041

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H8XcPs7Foc
(Abbado · Wiener Philharmoniker)

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Sibelius: symphony no.2 in D major op.43  

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Sibelius: symphony no.2 in D major op.43  

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Recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sSFVvF7-W0
Score:
http://imslp.org/wiki/Symphony_No.2%2C_Op.43_(Sibelius%2C_Jean)

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Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 4 "Romantic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gljRZ-3BlcM (Link) 

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Anton Bruckner - Symphony No. 4 "Romantic" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gljRZ-3BlcM (Link) 

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Smetana: ma vlast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4NKzmfC-Q (Link)  

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Smetana: ma vlast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4NKzmfC-Q (Link)  

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Franz Liszt - Les préludes, symphonic poem No.3, S.97

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Franz Liszt - Les préludes, symphonic poem No.3, S.97

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=SG&v=5j5zY-h7gOg&hl=en-GB

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Liszt - Legendes

Score
http://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/2/20/IMSLP105670-PMLP11042-Liszt_NLA_Serie_I_Band_10_01_Legendes_S.175_scan.pdf

Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1DK0MLxZQQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpIu5vEE-OM

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Alban Berg: Violin Concerto (Dem Andenken eines Engels)

Score:http://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/8/88/IMSLP03937-Berg,_Alban_-_Violin_Concerto_Score.pdf

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA7O-TX7QuE
(Isabelle Faust)

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Richard Strauss: Vier Letzte Lieder

Score: http://imslp.org/wiki/4_Letzte_Lieder,_TrV_296_(Strauss,_Richard)

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5xFL-iFh0Q&t=1243s

(Claudio Abbado - conductor
Renée Fleming - soprano

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Mahler - Rückert-Lieder : Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Score: http://imslp.eu/files/imglnks/euimg/e/e7/IMSLP112612-PMLP47682-Lieder_nach_Texten_von_Friedrich_Rückert.pdf

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzJyIWxjX9o
(Claudio Abbado | Magdalena Kožena, mezzo-sopran)

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Carmen Fantasy
http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/7/79/IMSLP106730-PMLP10681-Carmen_Fantas%C3%ADa.pdf

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Carmen Fantasia ( Gil Shaham y Claudio Abado )

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Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5MJDd8zEOM

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/d/dc/IMSLP81778-PMLP48685-Berlioz_-_Romeo_et_Juliette_FS.pdf

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Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5MJDd8zEOM

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/d/dc/IMSLP81778-PMLP48685-Berlioz_-_Romeo_et_Juliette_FS.pdf

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Sibelius: Finlandia

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOSaT6U4e-8

Score :http://ks.petruccimusiclibrary.org/files/imglnks/usimg/f/fc/IMSLP15894-Sibelius_-_Finlandia,_Op.26_No.7_(orch._score).pdf

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Puccini: O mio Babbino caro (from Gainni Schicchi)

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6bSrGbak1g

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/d/d6/IMSLP172348-PMLP60082-O_mio_babbino_caro.pdf

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Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano concerto No.2

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w&t=140s

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/8/85/IMSLP03631-Rachmaninov-Op18fs.pdf

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Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hX8Ms0FwE

Score: http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/7/7e/IMSLP33282-PMLP06033-Debussy-L109FSmuz.pdf

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Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcN1iLMIStk

Score: https://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/1/13/IMSLP101491-PMLP09270-Rachmaninov-Op27m4fsGD.pdf