From the issue dated January 24, 2003
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Puccini: Beyond 'Butterfly' and 'Bohème'By PHILIP KENNICOTTWhen Mary Jane Phillips-Matz published her one-volume biography of Giuseppe Verdi in 1993, it stood several inches thick. It was a major scholarly achievement. Now she is back with a much slenderer volume, Puccini: A Biography (Northeastern University Press, 2002), on the composer who inherited from Verdi the Italian operatic mantle. The books make a statement: Side by side, Verdi dwarfs his successor, not just in talent and in quantity of output, but also in the breadth of his intellect and the sheer density of historical incident packed into his life. Verdi was a hero of the struggle for Italian independence and unity, politically attuned, and his operas dealt with the complexities of politics in an unprecedented way. Passionate and widely read, he also reinvented himself, both musically and dramatically, in his final years with two operas (Otello and Falstaff) that are the most successful marriages of Shakespeare and music ever produced. Giacomo Puccini, by contrast, liked cars and boats, tobacco, and beautiful women. He was often mawkish, appreciated human misery primarily for its operatic potential, and even considered writing an opera based on Dickens's Oliver Twist. He remained resolutely apolitical throughout his life, showed little interest in learning, and only moderate interest in reading. Yet his presence in American operatic life today exceeds that of Verdi. Puccini's Madama Butterfly and La Bohème are first and second on the list of most-performed operas of the last two decades; his Tosca isn't far behind. American opera companies have long presented themselves as an island of good news in a sea of classical-music troubles -- they point, in particular, to statistics compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts that show the opera audience is growing, getting younger, and replenishing itself with new listeners under the age of 35. But, in America at least, it is a business built on Puccini, and on a mere handful of his works, at that. Puccini, of course, isn't responsible for the lack of artistic diversity in American opera houses, but a mere trio of his works are so fundamental to the financial stability of American opera that they have had a stultifying effect. They bear so much of the burden of keeping the opera house full, and audiences have become so set in their expectation of seeing them produced as museum pieces, that opera companies are compelled to stage them as unvarying rituals. Phillips-Matz's book arrives almost simultaneously with Julian Budden's Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford University Press, 2002), a survey devoted more to the composer's artistic output than to the details of his life. Like Phillips-Matz, Budden is a distinguished Verdi scholar. His new book gives us the sense that Puccini's career was not only an epilogue to that of Verdi, but the final chapter in the history of Italian lyric drama. "With [the composer's last opera] Turandot, a tradition of Italian opera that had obtained for more than three centuries came to an end," he says. "Puccini alone succeeded in pulling the age-old communal tradition of Italian opera into the postwar world." The war was World War I, and the postwar world was not just a landscape of great political volatility; it also saw the flowering of cinema as a popular art form, the emergence of an audience for such mass entertainment, and the fracturing of musical styles into myriad schools and subschools of innovation and reaction, all of which helped push Italian opera from the center to the margins of culture. Puccini's life spanned decades of musical ferment. He wrote his first operas when the intoxicat ingly revolutionary music and ideas of Richard Wagner, promoted by his partisans as the music of the future, threatened conservative musical establishments throughout Europe. The last of Puccini's operas, La Fanciulla del West, La Ondine, Il Trittico, and Turandot are contemporaneous with the great Modernist provocations of Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Both composers admired Puccini, who absorbed more of the Modernist musical zeitgeist than is commonly acknowledged. Listen to the stark opening rhetorical gestures of Tosca or Turandot, or the frequent use of exotic-sounding whole-tone scales. He also successfully and cannily borrowed from Wagner without ever losing his Italian musical soul, or getting himself branded a "Wagnerian," a concept anathema to many critics and conservative audiences. Puccini borrowed precisely those things -- leitmotif technique (the association of a musical idea with a dramatic referent) and orchestral scene setting -- that could be easily adapted to sentimental purpose without burdening his works with any particular intellectual cast. Wagner's leitmotifs gather together the philosophical strands of the drama; Puccini's refer more to primitive emotional reactions, and are developed less organically as part of the musical structure. At the same time, there are passages of rhythmic and dissonant brutality in Puccini's Turandot that bear comparison with Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Puccini knew his strengths: "I compose only to a successful and sensational drama; it is the best way to catch success," he once remarked. Successful and sensational drama, in his day, was essentially melodrama, often with a heavy helping of exoticism. Madama Butterfly takes place in Japan, Turandot in China, La Fanciulla del West in the California of the Gold Rush. His Tosca, based on a popular play by Victorien Sardou, crystallizes the classic ethical and erotic confrontations of melodrama, building toward a humiliation and near rape of the title character and the eventual death of all three protagonists. Remove the singing and it would be one of the last and purest of the classic melodramas to hold the stage, a living reminder of a tradition that flourished for more than a century. Yet Puccini was regarded as a theatrical innovator, if only for his insistence that dramatic niceties, such as pacing, not be subordinate in the creative process. Under the influence of Wagner, young opera composers of Puccini's day were fighting against the rigidity of musical forms that had held sway for centuries in the opera house. Arias had long been written as discrete units, breaks in the plot for personal expression. Wagner argued for a more seamless unity of music and drama, pushing his singers back from the lip of the stage where they once stood and soliloquized, and integrating them more closely into the events of the drama. Puccini managed a compromise: He built dramatic unity with his orchestra and ensemble scenes, while maintaining, even concentrating, the role of the individual aria. Wagner's music remains difficult to excerpt; Puccini's arias are a staple of recitals and compilation recordings. The familiarity of his arias produces a disconcerting sense of recognition in the opera house, which is paradoxical: The character in the opera is reaching his or her most hysterical pitch of emotion, yet one senses the audience happily settling deeper into its seats. Familiar musical ground creates a pleasure that trumps dramatic significance. Theodor Adorno, in an essay on background music, noted the odd way in which Puccini's compositions float free of emotional or dramatic meaning and become the ideal music for passive listening: "One could think that Bohème, Butterfly, Tosca were created with the thought of imaginary potpourris that do not emerge until the last tear from the operatic catastrophes has dried up." Those potpourris have survived the cafes of Adorno's time and are alive and well as background music for television commercials. Puccini also developed Wagner's leitmotif technique into something immensely more simple and blunt than the leitmotifs of the German master. In Wagner's hands, especially in the later operas, dozens of interconnected leitmotifs churn suggestively; in Puccini, a small number of such musical "tags" are brought back primarily at climactic moments. On occasion they may contradict what the singer is saying; mostly they emphasize an emotional idea. Puccini's particular skill in building sentiment, musically, is often paralleled by a similar concentration on dramatic tag objects -- a toy in the hands of a child, a muff bought for a dying woman -- something small that is freighted with emotional power. For people who resist sentimentality in the theater, such moments are the composer's guiltiest. For loyalists, they are the crux and reward of every Puccini opera. There is little middle ground between finding them cathartic or manipulative. Popular musical theater, particularly the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber, is perhaps the most significant offshoot of Puccini's operatic legacy, and presents the dichotomy even more starkly. Budden's biography is published as part of the distinguished Master Musicians Series, an imprint of Oxford University Press that has attracted top scholars. In the preface, he notes, "It has taken more than a hundred years for Puccini to be admitted to the ranks of the Master Musicians Series." The prejudice was against opera composers in general, but Puccini's belated arrival also suggests that those who have traditionally been suspicious of opera have held Puccini in particularly low esteem. There is a long literature of invective against the composer, primarily for the extremity of his dramatic situations and a certain taste for vulgarity. In a more innocent era, some critics were also repelled by the almost sadistic violence of works like Tosca (famously dismissed by the musicologist Joseph Kerman as a "shabby little shocker") and Turandot. There has developed an apologist's literature as well, like John Louis DiGaetani's Puccini the Thinker (Peter Lang Publishing, 1987), arguing that Puccini's work has greater intellectual depth and cultural context than past critics have allowed. Both Phillips-Matz and Budden have produced works that are, refreshingly, in neither camp. Budden admits the composer's flaws, his apolitical detachment, his parsimoniousness, his wandering eye; but the author is a keen observer of the composer's musical strengths, too -- the particular melodic tics and orchestral habits that make his music both distinctive and uncommonly powerful. Unlike Phillips-Matz, Budden has filled his volume with musical examples. Readers with a basic reading knowledge of music will find them useful and well chosen, especially when the author is examining obscure works like the early operas Le Villi and Edgar, and the handful of pieces Puccini wrote for use outside the opera house. Phillips-Matz has produced a more concise book, and a more serviceable one for readers who care primarily about the details of the composer's life and career rather than the mechanics of his music. She traces the composer's family history back to the 17th century, and deals chronologically with the major events of his life -- his first failed attempts at opera in the 1880s, his emergence as an international celebrity in the early years of the 20th century, his troubled efforts to explore new directions in his final years. She is also more dogged in pursuit of some of the lingering mysteries and scandals of Puccini's private life, especially the tragic suicide of Doria Manfredi, a servant in the composer's house who was driven to despair by Puccini's pathologically jealous wife, Elvira. Phillips-Matz untangles the chronology of the tragedy and leaves the reader with a sense of disgust both at Elvira's cruelty (she denounced the young woman publicly and incessantly) and Puccini's feckless capitulation to it. Puccini emerges from both books as genial and friendly, self-absorbed, sometimes irresponsible, and admirably modest -- a simple but flawed character. As early as 1908, an Italian critic lamented that the composer's La Bohème was overexposed, a complaint that helped spur the often distracted and sometimes indolent Puccini to finish his cowboy opera La Fanciulla del West. With the exception of Turandot, however, the works Puccini wrote after finishing Madama Butterfly in 1904 have never enjoyed the popularity of his earlier scores. Both Budden and Phillips-Matz argue, profitably, with this unfortunate public opinion, especially in support of the merits of Fanciulla. In his later works, Puccini took new risks and demonstrated an impressive impatience with the easy success of his earlier scores. In Fanciulla, he succeeded in creating a masterpiece of opera as action flick that builds on the cinematic sweep he explored first in Tosca. Budden cites Anton Webern's admiration for the score in a letter the atonal composer wrote to his teacher Arnold Schoenberg: "A score with an original sound throughout, splendid, every bar a surprise ... not a trace of kitsch." Quoting Webern -- the master of the smallest phrase, the lightest gesture, the most allusive detail -- in praise of Puccini -- the architect of the long, soaring lyrical line -- is delicious. Webern sought novelty, exploration, and theatrical effectiveness in Puccini, and found it in one of the composer's least-known works. If only American impresarios were as open-minded. Philip Kennicott is the culture critic for The Washington Post. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 20, Page B16
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education