Back to the Beauty of Reality 
The Winland Christmas Opera Gala has been held since 2006 and has become a tradition. It is known as the "artistic calling card" of Finance Street. On December 31, 2010, the New York Timesreported, “Across town in the financial district, elegantly turnedout financiers and diplomats flooded the atrium of Winland International Finance Center which is decorated with a 10-story mural of the Puccini princess Turandot for a private performance of Viennese operetta given by the China National Symphony Orchestra and singers who were flown in for the event. The gift bag de rigueur at such events contained a lavishly illustrated history of Viennese operetta written by the building’s opera-loving developer, Adam Yu.” Yet, all was brought to a halt in 2020. Today, we are excited to its return.

The theme of this year’s concert is Verismo Italian Operas for which we choose Cavalleria Rusticanaby Pietro Mascagni and a selected repertoire from Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo.

he late 19^th century saw the twilight of the Romantic era and its two leading composers, Verdi and Wagner, dominated the European opera scene for almost half a century. A gradual decline of Romantic music set in, and the verismo school represented by Mascagni and Leoncavallo pioneered a new chapter in Western opera history.
Realism emerged around 1870, during the wide-spread influence of the naturalistic theories and experimental science of the French writer Zola, which fermented the emergence of realism works in literature. Italian critic and writer Luigi Capuana pointed out in an Italian magazine that “Verismo’s overriding aim was the objective presentation of life,” This marked the shift from Romanticism to Realism; from heroic legends and mythologies to the more Dickensian social struggles, drawing characters from everyday life using direct, descriptive detail, and raw dialogue. The original short story I Malavoglia, by Italian novelist Giovanni Verga, published in 1881, inspired Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, set in his hometown of Sicily. The writing was simple, natural, and vivid; he pioneered a new style of realism and simplicity.
The influence of the literary world radiated to the musical stage, and realist operas were born. There were no lengthy and exaggerated sounds, distant mythical stories, magnificent epics, and majestic "feelings of family and country,” completely different from the legacy of Verdi or Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk(‘total work of art’) philosophy.
Verismo is like a fresh breeze brought in with a new style of opera in the last ten years of the 19^th century, focusing on the depiction of ordinary people, their the daily lives, their passions and mistakes, even if it leads to disasters, it is part of human nature. It is a reflection of ourselves, the beauty of reality, which is far from perfect, but touches the heart.