ABSTRACT
This chapter, in its tracing of the development of Italian music from Verismo to the Seventies, aims to locate the five composers to whom this study is dedicated within the context of experimentalism in Italian music, and to explicate the in the light of contemporary European and American influences. In 1888 the publisher and director Edoardo Sonzogno advertised a competition for a one-act opera to mark the occasion of the opening of his new opera house, the Teatro Costanzi, in Rome. Continuing in the vein of high drama and memorable melodies, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), in 1893, produced his first successful opera, Manon Lescaut. However, although his name is generally attached to Veristic opera, Puccini's material was far more wide-ranging than that of Verismo contemporaries; and his success lay largely in altering the Verismo genre by dispensing with its shock tactics and making echoes to the bel canto tradition.
