Verismo has long been disparaged by musicologists. Joseph Kerman’s famous snipe at Tosca, ‘that shabby little shocker,’ is merely the most prominent of these snubs, which can be found throughout current textbooks and reference works.Footnote ¹ Matteo Sansone sneers in his Grove article that verismo operas are ‘feeble stories with colourful vignettes’ drawn from ‘the scrapyard of romantic opera’.Footnote ² Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford History of Western Music, writes them off as creations of ‘a new generation of hacks’ who never escape the ‘single line of descent from the Verdi of Traviata, Trovatore, and Rigoletto’.Footnote ³ In their History of Opera, Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker elide verismo in favour of Puccini, whom (pace Kerman) they consider too great and too original to be verismo.Footnote ⁴ His contemporaries’ works are dismissed as a mere accretion of ‘urban blight and muddy peasants’.Footnote ⁵ These diverse expressions of disdain, and the occasional bursts of outright contempt, are all supported by an assumption that verismo is not really an autonomous style distinguishable from its predecessors. The blood and guts merely serve to paper over a fundamental continuation awaiting a better, name-brand composer. And it must be a composer to make a style; this is a verismo conceived strictly in terms of the work-concept, with no consideration of its performers or performance. Ridi, Pagliaccio: no one takes you seriously anyway.

No one, that is, except Barbara Gentili, whose Italian Opera Singing at the Time of Verismo is an able and methodologically sophisticated work on historical voice – and a welcome corrective to our overall verismo discourse. Gentili focuses on singers, and on composition in this style as essentially for singers. In this way she brings our hearing closer to that of turn-of-the-century Italian audiences, who took verismo seriously (if not always kindly) and on its own terms. Gentili conceives of verismo as the full, radical break her sources heard, characterized by a ‘new focus on reality. The raw material of human life,’ she continues, ‘came to occupy centre stage: visceral passions, sensual love, sexual desire’ (p. 3). Whether or not we agree with this much more positive assessment of verismo, musicology needs Gentili’s provocation to help us make our judgment according to more relevant, historically-informed criteria.

Gentili proposes that the central point of verismo lives in the voice. Singers of verismo opera, she writes,

The new voice, Gentili argues, spoke of sex, not merely in the sense of desire but also as a form of gendered difference that claimed to originate in the body. By the late nineteenth century sex in this sense was reified and policed by the state along recognizably modern lines.Footnote ⁶ Thus verismo performance was far from an inert, ‘shabby little shocker’ characterized by (lack of) literary quality alone; the racy plots and orgiastic orchestrations were not superficial, but essential components of how these operas demanded and displayed the new, sexed voice in its biological throes. We should look for this sex, Gentili suggests, in singers seeking to carry the full-bodied sound of their lower registers up to the very top of their range, and thus achieve ‘total timbral consistency’ (p. 3).

Gentili’s methodology may well be the most instructive part of the book, worthy of note even for scholars who have little interest in opera or in vocal technique. The heart of her method is the unapologetic use of acoustic recordings (made before the introduction of the microphone in 1925). This is a low fidelity technology that makes its mediation of the sound extremely audible, especially to ears accustomed to the greater clarity of the electric recording era. Gentili defends its use and points out that all recordings are ‘complex epistemological objects’ (p. 11). That is, all the hi-fi recording and playback equipment in the world cannot completely erase the space between recordings and ‘the “original” performance they purportedly present’ (p. 11). While this is true as a theoretical point, she nonetheless admits that this gap for acoustic recordings is particularly large and problematic for historical use: beyond surface noise, the lack of standardization for playback speed and orchestral pitch make the consideration of timbre an extremely fraught question (p. 12).

Gentili, however, argues convincingly for these recordings’ centrality to her work. The reader can easily listen to (or download) the recordings she cites on the publisher’s website.Footnote ⁷ Her own practice as a professional singer is obvious and invaluable; her ear is subtle and her technical reconstructions of the process that led to one sound rather than another are consistently convincing. Reading along with the examples is reminiscent of a high-quality voice masterclass: the instructor systematically fusses with the technique of a particular passage until a breakthrough is achieved. Her use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to discuss vowel quality is welcome for singers and not so intensive as to alarm strangers to that system.Footnote ⁸ The sheer weight of evidence Gentili provides is also a clear point in the book’s favour. Over and over, the verismo voice clearly behaves in the way she describes, in excerpts that are both appropriate to the point at hand and generally representative of the larger early-recording corpus. If anything, the evidence is almost too aptly selected. The book might have occasionally been enriched by a glimpse of the sheer number of recordings that confirm each of Gentili’s points, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the richness and size of her archive.

Gentili’s methodology is at its most convincing when she integrates sound recordings with pedagogical works. The history and context of this written pedagogical tradition forms the topic of her first chapter. Treatises on how to teach singing are a rich source for historical vocal technique, but their authors inevitably protest that it is impossible to learn singing from a book alone and that the pupil must imitate and be coached by a trained master. Just as they recommend, Gentili has augmented the treatises with these critical sonic exemplars: the recordings. In turn, each pedagogical text ‘offers physiological, theoretical, aesthetic and empirical insight into what it is that we hear when we listen to early recordings’ (p. 11). To reconstruct a performance with a combination of written and sonic archives that can address each other’s major indeterminacies is not new, and Gentili cites her precursors amply.Footnote ⁹ She identifies and justifies this methodology exceptionally well, and her formulation should be a model for any field of musicological research facing similar challenges.

Most intriguingly, however, the recordings and treatises frequently contradict each other. Gentili contends that her verismo singers noticeably departed from the practice of their teachers, who had written their works largely in the 1870s and 1880s. The second chapter develops and explains the technical details of these two styles to a non-singing audience, since the rest of the book relies on this fine distinction. In the second half (chapters three through five) Gentili follows the shift in three different contexts: an explicit comparison between old and new styles, and then two investigations into the finer details of tenor and soprano verismo technique, respectively. In all three she gives lavish attention to the idiosyncrasies of the verismo voice and the many places in which the manuals of the older style flatly contradict the evident practice of the verismo recordings.

The fifth chapter is particularly admirable for its integration of technical vocal details into a broader historical context. In it, Gentili treats various discontinuities of timbre in verismo sopranos; she attempts to reconcile this evident ‘fragmented coloration of the middle and lower ranges’ with her earlier definition of veristic singing as characterized by ‘total timbral consistency’ (pp. 118, 3). The chapter is extensive, sympathetic and convincing. Gentili examines the careers of Eugenia Burzio (1882–1922) and Emma Carelli (1877–1928) holistically and with great care: their vocal training, aesthetic influences, political ties, institutional commitments and more are persuasively connected to the artistic choices on their recordings. The places where Burzio and Carelli break from timbral consistency, she shows, are ‘signs of their shared aspiration to an independent and free existence’ (p. 130). For Gentili, a chesty ‘Voi lo sapete’ (Cavalleria rusticana) directly signals a feminist ethic, a rejection of the ‘maidenly mode’ Roger Freitas has identified in Adalina Patti’s self-presentation.Footnote ¹⁰ Carelli’s exceptionally aggressive timbre, Gentili argues, rejects the languishing archetype of the abandoned woman and instead ‘roars the outrage … of a woman towards a deeply unfair society’ (p. 134). With Gentili’s careful interpretative work, the timbral deviances of Burzio and Carelli blossom into expressive ciphers of the singers’ feminist and anti-Fascist beliefs that Gentili traces in the biographical sections.

One caveat about Gentili’s excellent book is that she does not extend the same care and understanding she lavishes on the verismo singers to those who sang in the older style. Gentili calls the style of these singers, whose recorded technique does correspond to the vocal manuals of the 1870s and 1880s, bel canto. This term has been used in many ways, to describe very different styles of singing and composition, but is not generally accepted for anything in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ Gentili’s use of the term thus asserts that her 1880s ‘bel canto’ is essentially the same style as that practiced in the first half of the century, enough to share its name. She argues that the relatively well-known changes in vocal technique of the 1830s were merely ‘the starting phase of a long-term process’ that led to heavier singing; in her introduction she is explicit that this means verismo (pp. 101, 5). This argument is plausible. But it hardly squares with her assertion, in the same paragraph, that verismo also represents ‘a completely different aural universe’ from the bel canto tradition (p. 5). Gentili thus contradicts herself over just how similar the ‘bel canto’ singers (in her definition) were to the veristi.

Complicating matters is Gentili’s clear aesthetic partiality. Like a verismo heroine herself, she is deeply impatient with the niceties and convenienze of tradition that might hinder direct operatic expression. Upon reading her above-quoted paean to how verismo had turned to ‘the raw material of human life […] visceral passions, sensual love, sexual desire and, also, the negative sides of reality, its untidiness and even ugliness’ (p. 3), a reader might conclude that no one had bothered to put strong emotion or taboo topics on the Italian operatic stage prior to 1890. Of course Gentili is not obliged to mention (say) the infanticidal Norma or the incestuous Don Carlo: her book is about verismo, and asserting its stylistic independence is necessary to her point. But her aesthetic preference for verismo and her polemical requirement to treat it as a radical break from its precursors also skew Gentili’s treatment of her recorded evidence.

Both classes of singers, bel canto and verismo, have moments of clear timbral deviation on their recordings. In the fifth chapter, Gentili investigates the verismo side of this phenomenon admirably. In the third, by contrast, the timbral choices of Nellie Melba (1861–1931) and Mattia Battistini (1856–1928), a soprano and baritone of the older generation, are unfavourably compared with Carelli and her fellow veristo Titta Ruffo (1877–1953). It is a question of their high notes – for the sopranos the climax of ‘Vissi d’arte’ (Tosca), and for the baritones an interpolated high flourish to conclude ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ (Don Giovanni). For these high notes, Carelli and Ruffo carry up the fullness and power of their lower registers (and thus display Gentili’s ‘total timbral consistency’), while Melba and Battistini switch to a noticeably lighter sound. Yet Gentili treats this choice by Melba and Battistini very differently from how she approaches the idiosyncrasies of Burzio’s and Carelli’s low registers in Chapter 5: she assumes a priori that the older singers are not attempting to make expressive gestures and that the timbral shifts are inherent in their voices (pp. 73–74, 82). Her assumption is based on a few passages in the vocal treatises of the 1870s and 1880s that seem to stress developing distinct sounds in each vocal register (p. 63). But even in Gentili’s telling, this point is dwarfed by the mountain of evidence from the same sources that argue for imperceptible unification of the registers (pp. 50–65). This would seem to preclude each register from having a sharply distinct sound, especially in the way Gentili identifies it in the recordings – as a sudden timbral shock on a new pitch.

It is not that Gentili has invented this timbral shock. In Melba’s whole recorded œuvre, her extreme high notes always do seem to suddenly slip into an out-of-body, lightly registrated sound, which Gentili identifies in both the recordings and descriptions by Melba’s contemporaries (pp. 72, 73–74). Yet Melba did not always treat her upper passaggio in this way, and it is that area of the voice which dominates verismo roles in general and Gentili’s examples from ‘Vissi d’arte’ in particular (cf. pp. 21–22). In a recording of the Gounod/Bach ‘Ave Maria,’ for example, Melba takes her F5 and G5 much more heavily than in the ‘Vissi d’arte’ that Gentili analyses.Footnote ¹² Similarly, Gentili notes that Battistini backs off his interpolated G4 in ‘Deh, vieni alla finestra’ and concludes that the registral shift on that pitch is an inherent feature of his voice (p. 82). But Battistini was demonstrably capable of taking G4 – and, indeed, higher notes – in his chest; for example, he concludes his recording of ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’ from Macbeth with a thunderous, full-voice A♭4.Footnote ¹³ Neither singer, in short, needed to sing the way they did in Gentili’s examples. Both made a dramatic choice of discontinuity, switching to the lighter sound, just as the verismo singers chose to maintain the heavier. Yet Gentili does not acknowledge Melba’s and Battistini’s choices as choices at all.

Gentili’s reasons for disliking their timbres are understandable – to my ear, too, these recordings make the vivid characters of Tosca and Don Giovanni shyer, more decorous, less believable with a knife or a rape (pp. 74, 83). But they are choices and not necessities. If the timbral deviances of Melba and Battistini had been treated with the care extended to those of Burzio and Carelli, a new field of questions would have opened to the study. How did one set of timbral deviances replace the other? How did they do so to the degree that their predecessors threaten to become completely adramatic to modern ears? These are passed over in favour of stressing the verismo singers’ break from the bel canto tradition, but the omission overstates the significance of that break. Both groups of singers, not only the veristi, made expressive timbral deviations, and the story is more properly one of how a heavier, darker and less extreme set of inflections came to replace those that had been current around 1880.

One might also wish that Gentili were slightly less eager to compare timbres across recordings that may have been recorded, played back, or remastered very differently – or, at least, that she had provided information on the precise matrix and remastering of each example. The same recording can have a very different timbre depending on playback speed and other decisions of modern audio engineers, as Gentili herself observes (p. 12).

These sins are largely of omission rather than commission – the book is brief and will leave the reader with questions that Gentili could perhaps have found space to answer, in particular about the precise relationship of verismo singing to earlier styles. In the first act of Tosca, the titular heroine becomes jealous of her lover Cavaradossi’s painting of Mary Magdalene, modelled after a different woman; she insists he change its eyes to look like her own. In the same way, Gentili’s clear love of her period and protagonists subtly alters her portrait of their predecessors. Falle gli occhi neri – and the generation of the 1880s comes out of the process with a questionably deserved black eye.

Yet for all this, there is no disputing the core of the work: the existence and definition of an autonomous, distinct verismo vocal style. Gentili’s work offers an excellent, hitherto untrodden path into it. Her sophisticated methodology and vocal-technical expertise offer the reader a wealth of restored sound, its salient points now audible through the distortions inherent in early recording. Her gift for biographical analysis is remarkable and free of any reductive romanticization; instead, she pursues the active commitments and choices these singers made and expressed through their artistry. In its wealth of detail the book deserves to become the obvious first stop in English for research on most of the veristi it treats. On questions of a collective verismo vocal technique this should be the final word for some time.

And verismo, long the punching bag of opera studies, needs a Tosca who will go to extremes to defend the value of her love and her art. The defence perhaps goes too far, but so too have the decades of musicological scorn it is confronting. Gentili’s book is so suffused with its subjects that it takes on their forms, virtues and vices, in order to render them in the vibrancy of their own impassioned voices.