The Power of Puccini
The daring Italian composer rewrote the operatic rulebook; Christopher Cook explores how he did it
His operas are some of the most popular ever written, moving audiences like no others. But the Italian composer was also a daring innovator whose creative genius took opera to new places, as Christopher Cook explains
Puccini had a remarkable gift for melody and an unerring feel for the dramatic
How many 20th-century composers have more than three operas regularly performed around the world? Giacomo Puccini is one of those very few. It’s said that in every 24 hours Mimì dies of consumption somewhere on the globe, leaving an inconsolable Rodolfo surrounded by Musetta and his trio of fellow-bohemians. And with good reason: La bohème is a masterpiece. Giacomo Puccini reaches audiences that other opera composers never do. Who else has you fumbling wet-eyed for your handkerchief within minutes of the first downbeat?
When Puccini died in 1924, Milan gave him the kind of farewell that they had reserved for Verdi. Black plumed horses pulled the hearse through jam-packed streets, the cortège led by a detachment of priests and followed on foot by the Italian great and the good, all sheltering under umbrellas. It was, said one commentator, as if the heavens themselves were weeping for the composer hailed as Verdi’s heir.
Puccini would have relished the hyperbole. He had stretched Verdi’s legacy in unexpected and exciting ways. If he was a romantic, he was also an astute and practical man who knew his own worth. He came from a long line of Italian musicians who had navigated uncertain musical worlds to make a living. While one forebear had composed operas, most of them kept body and soul together by writing church music. Not Puccini. Those secular temples, the opera houses of both the Old and the New Worlds were where he would exercise his vocation; and he succeeded because of a remarkable gift for melody and an unerring feel for the dramatic. He instinctively knew how to choose his characters and how to coax them into revealing themselves and their inner lives.
However, Puccini never rested on his laurels. After the triumphs of his middle period – La bohème, Tosca and Madam Butterfly – he was always looking to do things differently. But too often we downplay, if not ignore, this aspect of a composer who turned
the American West into a music drama, reinvented Viennese operetta and wrote a trio of one-act operas that acknowledge Stravinsky and Debussy, composers at the cutting edge of the 20th century. Here is a composer who, in each of his ten operas, broke new ground.
Le villi
Teatro Dal Verme, Milan, May 1884 Dying of a broken heart, Anna becomes a malevolent spirit – a Willi – dancing her faithless Roberto to his death after he has abandoned her for another woman.
Listen closely to this gothic story set in Germany by an Italian, and you can hear the composer that Puccini became – in the Act I love duet, for example. This is a score that puts the drama in the orchestra pit as well as on stage, and it’s more than just an apprentice work. Puccini’s teacher, Amilcare Ponchielli (La Gioconda), eager to help him win a competition for oneact operas, paired him with Ferdinando Fontana (pictured left, with Puccini), a dull librettist but one who understood the zeitgeist – femmes fatales, doomed love and the dark work of enchantment.
Puccini didn’t win a prize, but there was a creditable premiere in 1884, in which the symphonic intermezzo between the two scenes had to be repeated twice. Puccini was judged to be ‘one of the most brilliant and most promising hopes of art,’ and compared favourably to Bizet and Massenet. But the musical accent was German, not French: Richard Wagner.
Therein lies the score’s originality – a deft mix of German and Italian traditions in a work that eventually grew into two acts.
Edgar
Teatro alla Scala, Milan, April 1889 14th-century Flanders. Fidelia loves Edgar, who is besotted with the temptress Tigrana who is loved by Frank. Three acts later Edgar sees sense, but it’s too late: Tigrana kills Fidelia.
Eventually not even Puccini cared for Edgar. On the first page of an edition belonging to his English mistress Sybil Seligman he wrote ‘Edio ti Gu A Rdi da quest’, meaning ‘May God preserve you from this opera!’
For over three years Puccini wrestled with Fontana’s intractable libretto, with its nudging hints of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and a medieval knight caught between sacred and profane love. But Edgar is more full-blooded Italian verismo than music drama; and still a traditional Italian opera with discrete musical ‘numbers’ of the kind that Verdi felt comfortable with.
After a disastrous first night, four acts became three, but still Edgar failed. ‘It is warmed up soup,’ Puccini wrote after a performance in Buenos Aires. ‘What it wanted is a subject which palpitates with life and is believable.’ And characters that live, and move us. However, Edgar had clearly sharpened Puccini’s dramatic instincts. A chunk of the excised fourth act eventually found characters that do ‘palpitate with life’, Cavaradossi and Tosca, while Toscanini chose to play the ‘requiem’ for Edgar at the composer’s funeral in 1924.
Manon Lescaut
Teatro Regio, Turin, February 1893 Rescued from life in a convent by a penniless student, Des Grieux, Manon acquires a taste for luxury when her scheming brother propels her into the arms of a rich old man. Saved again by Des Grieux, she and her lover are deported to Louisiana where, worn down, she dies.
After an elephantine gestation – typical of Puccini’s operas – and with six people contributing to the libretto, Manon Lescaut showed what the composer was capable of. Ploughing a skilful middle furrow between Wagnerian music drama and Verdi’s take on the Italian opera tradition, it develops its themes symphonically. Above all, Puccini gives full rein to his melodic gift. In later operas the tunes may be lusher, but who can resist ‘Sola, perduta, abbandonata’, Manon’s final aria in exile in what the libretto quaintly describes as a vast landscape on the edge of New Orleans?
‘Manon is a heroine I believe in,’ the composer told his publisher Ricordi, ‘therefore she cannot fail to win the hearts of the public.’ But it was probably their tears that made the opera so appealing. Nothing moved late 19th-century opera audiences quite so much as a good girl gone bad and punished with death. Within a year of its first performance in 1893, Manon had travelled from Italy to the rest of Europe and across the Atlantic to Montevideo, Philadelphia and Mexico.
Manon is the first of Puccini’s life-size heroines that he condemns to die. An ocean of Freudian ink has been spilt on explaining why he kills Mimì, Tosca and Cio-cio San, but later in his career it becomes clearer that he is not simply an unrepentant male chauvinist.
La bohème
Teatro Regio, Turin, February 1896
Four Bohemians in Paris: a musician, a philosopher, a painter and a poet, Rodolfo. He falls in love with the girl upstairs, Mimì, a seamstress, who dies – beautifully – from consumption.
La bohème is one of two operas that never put a foot wrong. Like Bizet’s Carmen there’s not an ounce of fat on the plot, with the drama pared down to four short acts that leave you aching for more.
The miracle is, given the fighting between the composer and his new librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, that La bohème ever made it to the stage; while the wonder of this work is that nothing seems out of place, from the abrupt beginning which pitches us straight into the freezing attic shared by the four Bohemians to the arias at the end of the first act for Rodolfo and Mimì crowned by their sublime duet ‘O soave fanciulla’.
Here and throughout – whether Musetta’s Waltz as she baits her former lover, the painter Marcello, or Mimì and Rodolfo’s Farewell aria – Puccini has learnt to draw us right in to the action, while the orchestra holds our hand and guides our eye throughout. Only Rodolfo doesn’t hear the orchestra telling us that Mimì has died, which only intensifies his despair and our anguish.
Puccini told his biographer that after composing Mimì’s death ‘I had to get up and, standing in the middle of my study, alone with the silence of the night, I began to weep like a child. It was as though I had seen my own child die.’ The best die young, love never lasts … no wonder La bohème been borrowed by the movies, turned into a musical (Rent) and been constantly reinvented for succeeding generations.
Tosca
Teatro Costanzi, Rome, January 1900 Rome, 1800. It’s ruled by the sadistic chief of police Scarpia, who lusts after the singer Floria Tosca. But she loves the politically radical painter Cavaradossi and will fight to save him from the firing squad.
In a very real sense, the personal is political in Tosca. At the opera’s heart is one of Puccini’s greatest arias. In ‘Vissi d’arte’, Tosca pleads with Scarpia for her lover Cavaradossi’s life: ‘I have lived for art
The brutal chords that introduce Scarpia anticipate the Expressionism of Salome
and I have lived for love.’ This is an opera about art and politics played out through the personal lives of the three carefully drawn central characters.
Puccini’s eye had been on Victorien Sardou’s play Tosca for over a decade.
His publisher Ricordi encouraged Puccini’s ambitions yet detested Act III, calling it ‘a grave error of conception and craftsmanship’. But the composer stuck to his guns and changed nothing; he had developed an unerring instinct for what worked on stage.
He had also thoroughly recomposed the rules of Italian opera. Verdi once told a friend that Puccini was composing symphonically: ‘Opera is opera, and the symphony is a symphony and I do not believe it’s a good thing to insert a piece of a symphony into an opera, simply for the pleasure of making the orchestra perform.’ What Puccini had learnt by the time that he wrote Tosca was that the orchestra ‘performs’ the drama. The brutal chords that introduce Scarpia may anticipate the Expressionism of Strauss’s Salome or even Schoenberg’s Erwartung, but they are also the tyrant before whom all Rome trembles.
Madam Butterfly
Teatro alla Scala, Milan, February 1904 Pinkerton, an American naval officer, marries a Japanese child bride. He returns to the United States, leaving Ciocio San pregnant; she waits patiently for his return. When he finally comes back with an American wife, Butterfly takes her own life.
Madam Butterfly was calculated to tap into the late 19th-century fascination with all things Japanese, but the first night was a fiasco. Rosina Storchio, the first Ciocio San, was having an affair with the conductor Arturo Toscanini and when her kimono blew open someone in audience shouted that she was pregnant. ‘And the child is Toscanini’s’, came the cry from another part of the house. Her great aria ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ was heard in silence while the Act I love duet was barracked.
Puccini set about refashioning the opera that Illica and Giacosa had shaped out of David Belasco’s original melodrama. Three acts were compressed into two; local colour was cut from Act I, including some offensive dialogue about Japanese customs. Indeed, Pinkerton became less of an imperial lout and more a silver tongued operatic hero with a brand new Act II aria, ‘Addio fiorito asil’. Puccini had discovered that when music theatre is a business as well as art, you can’t move too far ahead of your audience.
Yet what makes the score so satisfying is Puccini’s attention to unexpected musical detail – a snatch of the Japanese Imperial Hymn and a popular Japanese tune The Cherry Blossom in the wedding scene. There’s something distinctly Modernist here – we’re not so very far from Charles Ives’s aesthetic of musical quotations. Puccini himself seems to have been known this. ‘I am conscious’, he said, ‘that … I have written the most modern of my operas.’