Composer of the Month
Alexandra Wilson explores Giacomo Puccini’s adventurous side
How hard the history books have been on Puccini. ‘Moderately interesting in the history of opera; a mere footnote in the development of western music’ is essentially how the story goes. Countless writers have argued that Puccini was a composer who knew his limits: capable of pleasing a crowd but with nothing more interesting to say. And there has even been considerable reluctance to accept him as a 20th-century composer, despite the fact that he was compositionally active for almost the full first quarter of that century.
In actual fact, Puccini was a composer who was both forward-looking and outward-looking. Having developed a successful formula for writing a box-office hit by the 1890s, he might have been tempted to rest on his laurels. Instead, he constantly sought to reinvent himself, taking on board new musical influences that were emerging both in Italy and abroad at a time of great artistic change. This was a composer who wanted to be up to date in his music just as much as to style himself as the dapper gent and indulge his penchant for fast cars and speedboats.
This appetite for modernity was perhaps in part a reaction against a weighty burden of tradition. There had been seven generations of musical Puccinis, a Tuscan dynasty that was often compared locally to the Bachs. Our Puccini ultimately broke free of the family tradition of church music but, nevertheless, received a training at the Milan Conservatoire that was steeped in archaic Italian compositional methods. As he emerged as a fledgling opera composer, huge pressure was placed upon him by his publishing house, Ricordi, to step into the shoes of the ageing Verdi. The musical establishment expected Puccini both to uphold a glorious tradition and to fly the flag for his nation. One doesn’t really get the impression he wanted to do either.
Like other members of the so-called giovane scuola – the generation of Italian composers born in the 1850s and ’60s – the young Puccini (born in 1858) was attracted to the foreign musical innovations of the later 19th century. He attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1888 and ’89, and
Huge pressure was placed upon Puccini to step into the shoes of the ageing Verdi
Wagner’s influence is unmistakeable in Manon Lescaut (1893), with its rich orchestral writing, use of motifs and chromatic harmony. The British press noted the nod to Wagner, and also to the contemporary French school, but back at home in Italy, critics were less keen to draw attention to such features, lest there be any suggestion that the Italian operatic ‘brand’ was being diluted.
Puccini built on the success of Manon Lescaut with an even more popular work that consolidated his international reputation. The much-loved La bohème (1896) might seem at first sight to be one of the least challenging operas in the canon, but it contained many significant innovations for its day. Puccini cultivated a restless, energetic musical language for the Bohemians and juxtaposed it with moments of exquisite lyricism
for the lovers. The combination of these two styles was perfect for an opera that is simultaneously trivial and profound. Puccini’s organisation of scenes as a sequence of snapshots was imaginative for its time and the ways in which the music underpins the action was something from which early film music composers would learn a great deal. Even the treatment of death was groundbreaking: how many operatic leading ladies expire silently, unnoticed by the rest of the cast?
Many turn-of-the-century critics thought Puccini was getting rather too experimental by the time he wrote his next opera, Tosca (1900). Indebted to the Italian verismo aesthetic but also to the French dramatic school of Grand Guignol, the opera was a violent, sexually charged thriller, which many felt to be pushing the boundaries of taste. (That squeamishness hasn’t entirely gone away: Joseph Kerman’s dismissive comment from the 1950s about the opera being a ‘shabby little shocker’ lives on in a still much-read textbook.) Early critics heard the opera as ‘mere noise’, constructed out of fragmented phrases, exclamations, shouts and cries. Where oh where, they asked, was that hallmark of the 19th-century operatic tradition, the beautiful voice?
It is hard to imagine people hearing an opera such as Tosca as ‘tuneless’ – just listen to ‘Vissi d’arte’. But it was the same story with the first version of Madam Butterfly, whose premiere in
1904 was described by one contemporary commentator as ‘not just a failure … what one might frankly call a disaster, a catastrophe’. It’s probable that the performance was deliberately sabotaged by a claque hired by Puccini’s rivals, but there was no disguising the press’s muted reception. In a classic case of the shock of the new, they heard the work as disconnected, too long, and lacking in Italianate melody. A devastated Puccini set to work on a revised version and the opera would, of course, go on to become central to the popular operatic repertoire.
There then followed a lengthy period of lying low, as Puccini licked his wounds, trying out and abandoning ideas as he worked out which way to go next. When his next opera, La fanciulla del West, finally reached the stage in 1910, it signalled a decisive change of direction. Here we see Puccini’s forward-looking and outward-looking impulses working handin-hand. American gold-rush miners made for unusually modern-seeming operatic protagonists, no less ‘exotic’ to Italian audiences than those of Madam Butterfly. Musically speaking, the opera was unapologetically adventurous in its harmonic language, its orchestration and its Debussyisms. And the fact that the opera was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York seemed itself to make a statement about Puccini’s symbolic border-crossing. (The composer had already become an enthusiastic globetrotter, travelling as far afield as Buenos Aires and Alexandria to supervise productions of his operas.)
The rest of the 1910s were rather difficult years for Puccini. He would long feel the ramifications of a 1909 scandal in which a family servant committed suicide after being falsely accused by Puccini’s wife of having an affair with her husband. A young critic called Fausto Torrefranca published a vitriolic book attacking Puccini’s music in 1912. And during World War I, the composer’s refusal to commit himself politically – guided by a reluctance to alienate his German and Austrian fans – led to charges that he was lacking in patriotism. There were personal sorrows too: the death of his sister; concerns about his son at the Front; enforced separation from his long-term German mistress, Baroness Josephine von Stengel.
Musically, meanwhile, Puccini continued to keep up with the latest trends. He was a member of the audience at the riotous first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913. In his own works, he continued with a course of stylistic eclecticism, producing a frothy operetta (La rondine, 1917) and experimenting with contrasting approaches to the one-act opera genre
in the three works that collectively form Il trittico (1918). Reviewers found Il tabarro too modern in its music, ‘aggressively realistic’ in its subject matter, too reminiscent of Debussy and Stravinsky. The all-female Suor Angelica was a bit of an oddity that was, as time went on, comparatively rarely performed. Gianni Schicchi, by contrast, cheered everyone up and was roundly praised for reviving the great Rossinian tradition of comic opera. But more interesting were the work’s novelties: its deployment of a diverse array of musical styles (including the foxtrot) and the way in which Puccini gently poked fun at his own earlier sentimental works.
Cut short as it was by his death from a heart attack after an operation for throat cancer, Puccini’s career concluded with Turandot (1924). It’s his most harmonically advanced work, and one that can take the listener who knows only ‘Nessun dorma’ by surprise. It was also very much an opera for its times, its choreographed crowd scenes and public, ritualised violence seeming to speak to the idea of violence as national regeneration that the Italian Fascists were beginning to promote by the mid-1920s. Puccini’s musical curiosity endured to the end of his life: it is intriguing to imagine the friendly encounter between him and Schoenberg at a performance of Pierrot lunaire in Florence in April 1924.
Puccini was determined to forge his own path. In the context of his era, with the Italian operatic tradition entering its final stages, the composer’s ‘internationalism’ seemed like a problem. Viewed from our perspective, his cosmopolitan attitudes seem intriguing, refreshing, part of what make his oeuvre enduringly relevant. Puccini’s operas deserve to be seen as more than conservative, sentimental remnants of an extended 19th century. Being ‘modern’ in operatic terms is surely about more things than the rejection of tonality.
Gianni Schicchi was praised for reviving the great Rossinian comic opera tradition