Puccini reinvented grand opera on an intimate, human scale, painting the lives of everyday men and women through music of exquisite and timeless beauty, with arias that speak directly to the heart.
From the album Puccini Arias in the series 1000 Years of Classical Music. Available onApple Music, oniTunes, onCD,Spotify, and YouTube:
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The achievement of Giacomo Puccini is staggering. It is remarkable enough that today, of his twelve operas, four are among the most popular of all time, while another five are very close behind. No other composer has had such consistent and extraordinary success over such a period. What is truly extraordinary, though, is that he emerged in a period absolutely dominated by the figure of Giuseppe Verdi, who for many people was the embodiment of Italian Opera. As Verdi apparently moved into semi-retirement in the 1870s, the search for a successor was intense, especially from Verdi’s publisher Ricordi, whose undoubted artistic aims were complemented by a strong financial interest. The fact that Verdi emerged from his retirement twice to present the world with two of his absolute masterpieces — Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) — did not make the life of the younger generation any easier.
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Verdi’s operas were, however, of an older school. Their musical traditions harked back to the bel canto era with conventional structures and stories taken from plays and novels that we would consider to belong to a rather melodramatic school. Tragic opera happened where everyday events left off. Verdi’s audiences wanted the operas set in exotic places and times, and the characters to be larger than life — and accordingly some of his greatest figures include a king of ancient Babylon, a Renaissance court jester, several Spanish noblewomen, a medieval troubadour, an Ethiopian princess, a king of Sweden and so on and so forth. They have passions rather than emotions and destinies rather than lives. The other important thing about these characters is that they have no life apart from the drama you’re watching. It drives everything — you’ll never know much about a Verdi character except what you find out by watching what happens to them, so what you usually find out is how they react to stress and tragedy. It makes for very powerful and grand opera, but it also makes the characters larger than life, sometimes almost monumental. Puccini’s characters, by contrast, are on a very human and personal scale; and it is easy to imagine almost any one of them in their day-to-day life, making the emotional connection to the audience a very immediate one.
Part of the reason for this is that when Puccini started writing, there had been a fundamental shift in how theatre and opera were being written. Figures such as Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen had helped to make everyday people a fit subject for the theatre, while a more popular version of this trend, called verismo in Italy, sprang up in theatre and opera. Its subjects were the peasants, the shopkeepers, the soldiers, the seamstresses. People who in Verdi’s operas would only have been fit to populate a chorus now came forward to tell their own stories.
Puccini’s early work charts this change in miniature. Very early on, he realised that his main talent was for opera, and he concentrated on it almost from the beginning. Despite that, he wrote a number of non-operatic works, some of them very fine, like Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums), an elegy for string quartet which he wrote in memory of the Duke of Savoy in 1880 — allegedly in a single night. It was opera which was to bring him success, though. His first, Le Villi, was written in 1882 for a competition run by the publisher Sonzogno, who was no doubt hoping to find someone as profitable for them as Verdi was for Ricordi. It is based on the same story as the ballet Giselle: Roberto and Anna are about to be married but shortly before the wedding he is enchanted by a siren and forgets her. Anna dies, and her ghost lures Roberto into the forest where she and the other spirits (the villi or Willis of the title) have him dance until he dies from exhaustion. The plot (which Puccini did not choose) is of the old school, and Puccini’s attempt to come to grips with it helps explain why the opera did not win the competition; but Anna’s aria "Se come voi piccina," in which she sings of her love for Roberto, is probably the first aria which shows what gifts Puccini had. It also indirectly helps explain why Ricordi, not Sonzogno, were the most successful Italian publishing house: it was Ricordi who contacted Puccini after hearing the work, and Ricordi who commissioned another opera from him. That opera, Edgar, was not successful, despite Puccini producing numerous revisions. Ricordi kept faith in him, though, and his next effort, Manon Lescaut, was to be the breakthrough. It also began what was to be a lifelong collaboration with his librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica.
By the time Puccini came to write La bohème in 1896, Verdi had finally and irrevocably retired, and Puccini was being hailed as his successor. La bohème sealed that title for him, but at the same time showed that he was a new, different generation of composer. It was an opera that Verdi could never have written. Its characters were poor artists and tradespeople, with the leading pair being Rodolfo the poet and Mimì the seamstress. The tragedy is a very simple one — Rodolfo and Mimì are in love, but she is dying of a combination of tuberculosis and poverty. As far as the heart of the plot goes, that’s about all; but what makes La bohème so marvellous is that the tragedy really is the core of so much more. Unlike in Verdi, we spend time getting to know the characters and building up an affection for them, which makes what happens to them a much more personal matter than in a Verdi opera. Verdi’s nearest equivalent was La traviata, which is a drama of personal renunciation and self-sacrifice. The dying Violetta in the last act of that opera will move you to feel pity and sympathy, but the death of Mimì in La bohème is like losing a friend. Watching La bohème, which bubbles with life and humour, you come to know not only Mimì and Rodolfo but their friends and acquaintances. You find out who they are, and about their quirks and foibles. You feel that you’ve become a part of their lives, and they are part of yours; so that when tragedy strikes, it’s personal in a way that it never was with Verdi.
Puccini created this effect with a seemingly effortless stream of light-hearted, conversational music. Characters sing about the things which people talk about; they joke, they gossip, they boast and quarrel. In short, they do all those things which connect people to each other, with music which wells up full of emotion and humour. The best-known music from the opera is probably at the end of the first act, where Rodolfo and Mimì meet ("Che gelida manina"). He introduces himself — he is a poet who lives on little but his imagination. Mimì hesitantly tells him a little about herself ("Mi chiamano Mimì") and they realise that they are attracted to each other. Seamlessly the two arias merge into a love duet ("O soave fanciulla") which in a few short minutes encapsulates all the joy of young love and also allows us to celebrate with them. It will make the tragedy all the more poignant. In the third act ("Donde lieta uscì") the couple know that Mimì is dying and that living with Rodolfo in poverty can only hasten it. Despite their love for each other they know they need to separate, but cannot bear to do so straight away.
After La bohème things took a darker turn. In La bohème Puccini’s source material had been a French novel about life in the Latin Quarter; his next work, Tosca, was based on a play by Victorien Sardou which was set in Rome during the Napoleonic wars. The central characters are the opera singer Floria Tosca and her lover, the painter Mario Cavaradossi, with the villain of the piece being the sadistic chief of police, Scarpia. As with La bohème, the opera launches straight into the action, as an escaped political prisoner rushes on to hide in a church where, as we shall shortly discover, Cavaradossi is painting a Madonna. When Cavaradossi arrives, he becomes lost in contemplation of the fact that although his painting and his lover do not resemble each other, the fact that they are both beautiful means that while painting he thinks only of his Tosca. The aria, "Recondita armonia" — "obscure harmony of contrasts" — is what people must have been coming to think of as typical Puccini: on stage, the tenor’s lyric outpourings are counterpointed by the grumbling of the sacristan. The prisoner, Angelotti, reveals himself to Cavaradossi, who promises to help him. Before Angelotti can get out, though, Tosca comes to call on her lover. Angelotti hides again and Cavaradossi is left with the difficult task of trying to persuade Tosca to go again without letting her think that he wants her to go — she is of a jealous disposition, and her mood is not helped by the fact that Cavaradossi’s painting is based on a real woman whom he has observed praying in the church ("Ah, quegli occhi!").
The banter and quarrelling, the combination of affection and jealousy which comes across in this duet make these characters very much living, breathing people. The tragedy which follows is unspeakable — Cavaradossi is arrested and tortured so Scarpia can find out the wherabouts of Angelotti. Tosca is told by Scarpia that the price of Cavaradossi’s freedom is her body. Having agreed to the condition, Tosca watches as Scarpia tells his subordinate to prepare a mock execution for her lover so that suspicion will not be aroused. When Scarpia turns to claim Tosca, however, she stabs him with the only weapon she has found — a fruit knife. The last act begins with Cavaradossi’s lament "E lucevan le stelle," in which he remembers his first meeting with Tosca. She arrives and they celebrate their impending freedom — until the smoke clears from the firing squad and Tosca realises that the execution was for real. As Scarpia’s body is discovered, she throws herself from the battlements.
Tosca is an absolute no-holds-barred, gripping drama — bloody and unrelenting, with music which is perfectly paced to ratchet up the tension from beginning to end. The best-loved of all Puccini’s works, however, remains Madama Butterfly. The story was apparently based on a real incident in Nagasaki in the late 19th century, and the play on which the opera was based emerged out of a sort of popular and colourful offshoot from the realist movement — stories of realistic people in exotic places and situations. Captain Pinkerton of the US Navy diverts himself while on leave in Nagasaki by going through a wedding ceremony with a young geisha known as Butterfly. She, though, takes it very seriously — in fact she has renounced her religion in order to marry him and is ostracised by her family. When Pinkerton leaves she is convinced he will return for her. Eventually he does return, but with his American wife in tow, and Butterfly does the only honourable thing her emotions allow her to do — she commends their child to Pinkerton’s care and commits ritual suicide.
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The character of Butterfly affected Puccini deeply — he felt his métier was the depiction of ‘great griefs in small souls" and Butterfly, with her youth, fragility and vulnerability, is the embodiment of this condition. The duet "Viene la sera," where Pinkerton and Butterfly are left alone for the first time after the wedding ceremony, is a rapturous moment which, as the opera progresses, will stand out in the memory as Butterfly’s sole moment of happiness, and as the height of Pinkerton’s tragic insouciance. The great aria in the opera, though, is Butterfly’s "Un bel dì," usually translated as "One fine day". As her maid doubts that Pinkerton will ever return, Butterfly tries to reassure them both by conjuring up her vision of the day he comes back, showing us how everything in her life — her hopes, fears and future — have become bound with her love for him. It is a tremendously moving moment, not least because we in the audience can feel that the more she hopes, the greater will be her grief when her hopes are dashed, as they inevitably will be.
Ironically enough, given its later popularity, Madama Butterfly was a complete failure at its premiere at La Scala in Milan — although the failure had little to do with the quality of the opera itself and was probably more to do with resentment against Puccini and the management of the opera house for, among other things, having excluded the critics from the dress rehearsal they traditionally attended. After Japan, Puccini took to another play by the author of Madama Butterfly, David Belasco. This work was set in a location which for Italians was quite as exotic as Japan — California during the Gold Rush. The unusual setting of La fanciulla del West becomes more understandable when considered in context. The work was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the first time an American opera house was to host an internationally awaited premiere. The Americans, truth to tell, were a little puzzled to find themselves depicted as exotic; and the work has never had the popularity of Puccini’s earlier ones. For a start, its strength does not lie in great arias, but in a seamless, integrated stream of music, which in its colour and complexity represents a new direction for Italian opera. Puccini was inspired by Debussy and the impressionists, and La fanciulla del West is musically dense and highly coloured. The story concerns the outlaw Dick Johnson — in love with the saloon owner Minnie — and the sheriff Jack Rance, who is pursuing Johnson. When in the final act Johnson is arrested and about to be hanged, he sings the great aria "Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano," asking the crowd to let Minnie think that he has escaped and is far away. Unusually for a western, the girl turns up to rescue the boy, and unusually for Puccini, there is a happy ending and they do manage to ride off into the sunset. Maybe American optimism had touched a chord with Puccini.
Puccini’s next work was not so much exotic as an unusual exercise for him. In 1913 he was approached by the opera in Vienna to write, of all things, an operetta. It was not remotely ready when war broke out the following year, and so the work, when it was finished, was finally performed in neutral Monte Carlo. La Rondine, ultimately, is not an operetta, but neither is it a fully blown tragic opera, and it has never quite achieved the stature of his other great works. Nevertheless it has wonderful moments, such as the set piece "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" in which the leading character, Magda, teasingly completes a new song about a poor girl loved by a king, which another character, the poet Prunier, has commenced.
During the First World War Puccini worked on another opera for New York, or more precisely, three operas in one act each, which he called the trittico, or triptych. Il trittico contains his only comedy, Gianni Schicchi, which shows, more than anything else Puccini wrote, how masterly his sense of timing in music was. Puccini by this stage was unsurpassable at knowing exactly what an audience’s expectations would be at any given point, and at structuring his music to take advantage of this. Most of his great moments are created out of knowing what the audience is expecting or thinking, and then playing with that knowledge to create a tension or dramatic irony which drives the opera onwards.
Puccini’s final work, Turandot, was unfinished at his death from throat cancer in 1924. It is set in a mythical China, with a fairytale plot of a prince who can only win a princess by answering her three riddles. When he does so and she still refuses to marry him, he tells her that if she can find out his name by dawn, she may execute him, as she has her other unsuccessful suitors. The third act opens with what has become Puccini’s most famous aria: the princess Turandot has declared that no-one shall sleep ("Nessun dorma") until the stranger’s name has been discovered, but he is confident that he will triumph. When he confronts her and kisses her, she comes to realise that love is not weakness and that although he has won, she is stronger for it. He reveals his name to her — he is the prince Calaf — and she announces to the people of Peking that the stranger who has conquered her is: Love.
Turandot would appear at first sight to be a return to the old Verdian style of opera, with larger-than-life and unusual characters; but it is actually something else again, and had Puccini lived, it might have represented a new direction for him. Musically it is a riot of colour and fascinating effects; and it is stylised in the way that it uses oriental motifs and characters drawn from commedia dell’arte. Rather than being a throwback, it is a brilliant creation in its own right, with driven, tense characters and a richly woven, sinister splendour. Its nearest literary equivalent today would be one of the darker sort of graphic novel, and it has the same bright and macabre fascination.
Above all else, Puccini understood something about the voice: like perhaps no other composer, Puccini was able to write an aria that spoke directly to the heart. He has been criticised for being sentimental, but actually he had an ability to create a melody which translated directly into an emotion. Singers can resist them to sing no more than an audience can to hear them, because Puccini understood voices and their power so well. He left behind a magnificent legacy: a group of operas which no-one can listen to and remain unmoved.