THE OPERAS OF PUCCINI have an excellent capacity to make a marvelous first impression. They can, in a way, be appreciated by any person walking in off the street. Yet they also hold up to deeper scrutiny, as time has shown, and anyone who would like more than a nodding acquaintance with them would do well to consider the circumstances in which they were created. A closer look at the ideas current in Puccini’s time is crucial to understanding what these operas are, and, equally important, what they are not. Puccini’s life story, in and of itself, does not provide the most instantly impressive biographical material. He did not place himself in the center of world events, as Wagner did, nor did he seek out fame anywhere but in the opera house. His life was hardly without incident, but it is interesting on the human rather than the epic level (much the same could be said about his operas). He furthermore lived through an era of awesome creative (and destructive) activity, and responded to all these currents in his own fashion.
The city of Lucca is now officially part of Tuscany, but it is far from the Tuscany of rolling hills and villas populated by English dilettantes discovering their sex drives, students with backpacks, or divorced Americans in midlife crises. Lucca lies in a flat plain by the Tyrrhenian Sea that also includes Pisa, an ancient city with a long and proud tradition of independence. Although Pisa is officially in Tuscany now as well, the intensity of local prejudices can be seen in the still-current Florentine proverb “é meglio avere un morto nella casa che un pisano all’uscio” (it’s better to have a dead man in the house than a Pisano at the door). For most of its history Pisa was a maritime republic whose power once rivaled that of Venice. Lucca, likewise, was an independent republic with its own traditions and institutions dating back to the Dark Ages. A series of fortifications built in the Renaissance still rings the town, adding to a sense of insularity. The Lucchesi are known throughout Italy as being industrious, rather bourgeois in their tastes, and very self-sufficient. South of these two cities lie swampy wetlands, an area abundant in waterfowl and popular among hunters since anyone can remember. It is a melancholy landscape, traditionally considered unhealthy, and relatively primitive despite its proximity to the two sophisticated cities of Lucca and Pisa. Still farther south are the hills of the Maremma, now a protected “wilderness.”
A certain Domenico Puccini moved from the small hilltop village of Celle in the late seventeenth century to Lucca. His son Giacomo (ryr2-8r) was born in the city and studied music there and in Bologna, where he received honors. In 1740, Giacomo returned to Lucca where he was named organist of the San Martino Cathedral, built in the eleventh century, and maestro di capella (basically, “music-master”) of the Republic of Lucca. The job would have kept him busy. Besides the tonnage of new music required by cathedrals at that time, the republic additionally required music for public celebrations. Notable among these celebrations were the tasche, pageants accompanying the various rituals of election days in the republic. The tasche grew quite elaborate in the decades before the republic’s demise under Napoleon in 1799, and were not unlike little outdoor operas. Giacomo’s son Antonio (1747-1832) followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming organist of the cathedral and maestro di capella. He married Caterina Tesei, an organist in her own right who took over her husband’s duties after his death and who filled in for their son Domenico when he was away and after his premature death. Domenico’s son Michele (1813-64) became the next Puccini to lead the musical life in Lucca, still thriving despite the city’s loss of independence and attachment to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In 1848 or 1849, Michele married Albina Magi, who was nineteen at the time but already a proud woman known to all as Donna Albina. Michele tried his hand at composing operas, as his father had, but was more successful with his civic and church compositions and as a teacher and organist. He and Albina had a large family: Otilia (b. 1851), Tomaide (b. 1852), a third daughter who died in infancy, Nitteti (b. 1854), and Iginia (b. 1856). Their first son, baptized Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria, was born on the night of December 22-23, 1858. Two more daughters followed: Ramelde (b. 1859), and Macrina (b. 1862 and who died at the age of eight). A second son, Michele, was born after Michele Sr.’s death in 1864.
Michele’s death left Albina with a large brood and a public position to uphold. The Puccinis had led the musical life of Lucca for over a century and had worked with the brightest musical names of Italy, including Padre Martini of Bologna, their fellow Lucchese Luigi Boccherini, and the opera composers Mercadante, Paisiello, Pacini, and Donizetti. If the position of maestro di capella did not mean quite what it had at one time, it was still an honorable calling and a respectable livelihood. And although a few of the Puccini children showed musical aptitude, it was clear from his baptismal names that young Giacomo was meant from the start to carry the family torch. Albina scrimped and saved, borrowed money from relatives, and wrote endless grant proposals to the city authorities and, later, to the national government. She focused her attentions on Giacomo, assuming the daughters could marry or be otherwise settled. Indeed, Nitteti and Iginia were packed off to a convent in 1865, the latter eventually taking holy orders. Giacomo was a born musician if left to his own devices, but there must have been many times when Albina wondered if her efforts were in vain. Giacomo was not a good student. One teacher said, “He comes to class only to wear out the seat of his pants.” Albina wanted him educated in the classics as well as music, but he never could apply himself to any subject that did not hold immediate interest. Even the basics of counterpoint and rules of music eluded him. He simply could not pretend to be interested in abstract subjects, and so he would remain for the rest of his life. He did excel, however, in practical jokes and adolescent pranks, once being called before the authorities for having stolen a pipe from the organ and sold it as scrap metal to buy tobacco. And he was introduced to the carnal pleasures at a young age, although biographers quibble as to the exact date of the encounter with the generous lady Puccini the man was already formed.
One other formative incident of note occurred in these days. He and a group of friends walked the long road to Pisa to attend a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida at the theater there, larger than anything in Lucca. As he wrote later, a new musical “window” had opened for him. Whether he was aware of it at the time or not, his heart was already moving away from the musical course set out for him at birth, toward a broader horizon. He would later say that God touched him on the shoulder once and promised him great success if he wrote for the theater, but only for the theater. Puccini was never a man to speak of curious conversations with the Almighty, and tended to keep matters we describe as religious or spiritual at arm’s length. His later comment is all the more striking, then, and we might assume that the beginnings of his new “calling” were planted on that arduous trip to Pisa.
Albina was of the opinion that Puccini needed to complete his studies at the Milan Conservatory, the center of musical life in Italy. Through connections, she petitioned Queen Margherita of Italy for a scholarship for her son and won it. It was a small amount of money but it was filled out by some well-situated relatives and was enough for a student to live on. Giacomo was packed off to Milan in October 1880. Puccini had been something of a big fish in a small pond in Lucca. His name drew attention and created expectations, and his few early compositions, including a Mass for four voices, showed great promise. Milan, however, was another story. This metropolis boasted a heritage as old as anywhere in Italy, more or less, but was now the most modern and prosperous city as well. Situated in the middle of a fertile plain at a crossroads dating from before the time of the Roman Empire, Milan was a cultural crossroads as well for traders, travelers, and invaders. The Lombards made it their capital at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, and French, Spanish, and various German powers occupied it at one time or another. Milan was dominated by the Austrian Hapsburgs from the early eighteenth century until uniting with Piedmont in 1859, save for a brief period when it was one of the capitals (Venice was the other) of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy in the early nineteenth century. The city’s outlook was cosmopolitan and sophisticated. It had Italy’s largest and most important theater, La Scala, as well as its largest cathedral, the famous Duomo (St. Peter’s in Rome is not officially a cathedral). It also boasted the marvelous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, a sort of protoshopping mall with elegant shops and restaurants and cafés bustling with all the latest ideas. Industry was booming, producing its wealth for a few and misery for the many. The 300,000 inhabitants considered themselves the most forward-thinking, industrious, and best-dressed people in Italy, as their descendants still do.
Puccini passed his examinations and entered the Conservatory. The forward-thinkers there were looking at Germany and the development of symphonic music as the path of the future, the traditionalists were seeking to maintain a strictly Italian profile in their art, while the young were simply eager to absorb everything. And there was plenty to absorb in Milan just then beyond electricity and streetcars. There were ideas buzzing as well. The Kingdom of Italy had been formed by the previous generation: what would become of it now? Opera had been Italy’s chief export for over two hundred years. What form would it take now? The Grand Old Man of Italian opera, Giuseppe Verdi, seemed, to all outward appearances, to be retired on his farm in the province of Parma. Verdi’s trips to Milan were quiet and infrequent at this point. The younger people looked abroad for inspiration. The music of Richard Wagner was on everybody’s lips, even if very little of it actually made it to their ears. Producing Wagner’s operas was too expensive and risky a proposition in Italy, and there was even doubt that Italian musicians could play it adequately (The fear was not merely cultural chauvinism. The best musicians of Paris were quite unable to play the prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde when a series of concerts was arranged there in 1861.) Many of the new musical ideas were coming from France, to which Milan had ancient cultural and economic ties. Giacomo Meyerbeer’s formula for Grand Opéra was no longer new in Italy, but his works remained popular and impressive with their demanding solos and marvelous spectacle. Puccini attended performances of at least La stella del Norte (L’étoile du Nord) at La Scala as a student, although he wrote little about his impressions. Others, however, were quite impressed. Meyerbeer’s operas seemed ambitious and grand, worthy of a rich, modern nation like France and a model toward which Italians should aspire if they could dare to imagine their own cultural heritage in the same large terms. The French, meanwhile, were beginning to look beyond the rigid confines of the Grand Opéra and to redefine themselves after their own country suffered a traumatic shock in the war with Prussia and its aftermath in 1870 and 1871. Another whole world seemed to open up with the arrival of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen in 1875. While coldly received by the public at first, the novelty of Carmen soon captured much of the world’s imagination. Here were earthy common people, their outfits as tattered and inelegant as their emotions, who lived out their violent destinies without appearing to give a moment’s thought to the rules of counterpoint or notions of good taste in art. Audiences, after the first few, were shocked, disgusted, transported, and enthralled. Even the mercurial young philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had so recently proclaimed Richard Wagner as something just short of the Second Coming, decided Wagner was a disease threatening the health of the world and recommended universal renewal through the emulation of Carmen. Opera was not confined to the opera house in those days.
Indeed, the irresistible grunginess of Carmen followed corollaries that had long been developing in French literature and were reaching their fullest bloom in the 1880s. The novels of authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert had opened the floodgate of what would come to be called naturalism. The rhetorical artistry of the author was subdued in favor of a clear outline of the characters and their psychological motivations. The favored subjects were everyday characters of the present times: businessmen, housewives, shopkeepers, farmers. There were nobles and there were rustics in these novels, but they were presented as people one might meet in the street with all their human foibles rather than as idealized archetypes or thorough embodiments of evil from a romanticized past. Many readers felt these writings were closer to journalism than art, but there was no denying they seemed to encapsulate the modern era, with all its prosaic, industrialized reality. Clearly, romanticism was out and realism was in.
Italians soon followed suit. The Sicilian author Giovanni Verga published his short story Cavalleria rusticana (“Rustic chivalry”) in 1880. Its four pages of direct, unadulterated prose slapped readers across the face with its simple tale of jealousy and passion in a Sicilian village. (Describing Alfio, the “other man” in the story, Verga wrote simply, “He was rich. He had four mules.”) Verga followed this success with a novel, I Malavoglia, which used the same methods to narrate the fortunes and miseries of oppressed fishermen in the villages of Sicily. Verga’s work became the beacon of what became known in Italy as verismo, an untranslatable term usually rendered as “realism.” Cavalleria rusticana was transformed into a play and toured Italy with tremendous success. It played in Milan in 1884. Everyone knew these ideas would somehow be transported to music and opera, but no one was yet quite sure how.
The groundwork had actually been laid in opera, and not only by Carmen. Verdi had already scored a worldwide hit with La traviata, a love story about the doomed affair between a consumptive and elegant prostitute and a bourgeois young man. It may have been romantic in the modern sense, but it told of real people with some real problems: disease, annoying middle-class families, and overdrawn bank accounts, for example. In 1876, La Scala audiences flocked to see Amilcare Ponchielli’s La gioconda, which remained in the repertory. Gioconda was adapted from a play by the Frenchman Victor Hugo. On the surface, Ponchielli’s opera had many of the traits of French Grand Opéra: nobles of yore committing murder to preserve honor, religious pageantry, a full ballet in the middle of the proceedings, Yet Gioconda had an immediacy (some would call it vulgarity) that was a break from previous tradition. The tenor sings one of the most gorgeous arias in the repertory and then blows up an entire ship. When the title character decides to commit suicide, she does not sing of lofty abstract concepts, but walks to the front center of the stage and cries “Suicidio!” at the top of her lungs. The much-derided libretto was a miracle of incisive words and phrases that jumped out at the audience, even beyond the classic “Suicidio!” (Best line: “I love him like a lion loves blood!” The final line is another classic of Italian opera: “And furthermore, I killed your mother!”) In fact, there seem to be more exclamation points in the libretto of Gioconda than in all other libretti combined.
This libretto came from the pen of a young man named Arrigo Boito, son of a Polish countess and an Italian artist, who was educated around Europe. Boito returned to Milan in 1864 full of ideas and a healthy contempt for the old order. He found his inspiration from beyond the Alps, believing the French and the Germans held the keys to the future. As the most visible member of a group called the scapigliati (the disheveled ones, known for their lack of bourgeois niceties like combing their hair), Boito once composed an ode in honor of “New Italian Art” calling for renewal and a sweeping away of the old, which was tainted like the urine-drenched wall of a whorehouse. Verdi understood the jibe as squarely against him and avoided Boito for years. Meanwhile, Boito espoused theories in short-lived literary magazines, aided by abundant energy, a sense of mission, and a fondness for hashish. He wrote the words and music for his opera Mefistofele (based, significantly, on Goethe’s Faust, the towering masterpiece of German literature), which was booed off the La Scala stage in 1868. It was revised and presented with success at forward-thinking Bologna in 1868. He set to work on his next opera, Nerone. He would still be working on it, as we shall see, at his death in 1918.
Ponchielli was the chair of composition at the Milan Conservatory when Puccini arrived there in 1880. Boito had mellowed since his radical days, as his friendship with the amiable Ponchielli would demonstrate. In fact, Boito was even working with Giuseppe Verdi, of all people, on a revision of an earlier, unsuccessful opera, Simon Boccanegra, to be given at La Scala in 1881. This was a notable collaboration: the very emblem of the Old Guard and the soul of Italy working with the internationalist, multicultural enfant terrible! Boccanegra was a success, and for a moment it seemed as though the extreme poles of Italian culture might find some common ground after all.
Ponchielli was instantly aware of the young Puccini’s extraordinary talent and did everything he could to help him. He even corresponded at length with Albina back in Lucca, keeping her updated on her son’s progress. Like every other teacher Puccini had, Ponchielli did not hesitate to inform Albina of her son’s propensity toward carelessness in his studies. The student was undisciplined and overly casual in his attitude toward many of the fundamental courses. None of this was news to Albina. Puccini had written her that his Dramatic Literature class “bored him to death.” In other notebooks, he scribbled in the margins, “Help! Enough! I’m dying!” But Ponchielli’s interest in the tepid student was not dissuaded. He invited Puccini to the villa he and his wife opened to the literary and musical celebrities of Milan (including Boito) every summer on Lake Como.
Besides the established celebrities, there were plenty of other young men making their mark on the music world or just about to. There was his fellow Lucchese, Alfredo Catalani, only four years older than Puccini but already on the verge of a major career. Catalani’s elegant chamber compositions were popular, and his first opera had been given at Turin just before Puccini arrived in Milan. And there was Puccini’s fellow student Pietro Mascagni, who hailed from nearby Livorno, and with whom Puccini shared lodgings for a while. Together, the two indulged in plenty of pranks and adventures typical of starving students everywhere.
Puccini may have been undisciplined but he was not unproductive in these years. He graduated in 1883 and composed a Capriccio sinfonico for the end-of-the-year concert. The piece, written, Puccini claimed, on scraps of paper wherever the inspiration grabbed him, got attention from the foremost critics. It was included on a concert program at La Scala and was well received. Puccini wrote to Albina with obvious pride in his success.
The musical establishment in Italy was dominated by the House of Ricordi, a publishing house whose catalogue included Rossini and the greats of Italian opera as well as their current cash cow, Verdi. Publishers at that time invested a great deal of time and resources into “their” composers, and even acted as personal advisers. They loaned money, gave pep talks, and often handled the most complicated imbroglios that free-living composers frequently got into. Though Ricordi sat on the top of the heap, others were trying to break into the market with new and imported composers, and for a while there was healthy competition. The “upstart” House of Sonzogno (founded 1874) sought new talent among the younger composers and announced a competition for a one-act opera in August 1883. Ponchielli was determined to get Puccini entered into the competition and connected him with a poet and playwright named Ferdinando Fontana who had a handy libretto by the unwieldy name of Le willis. It was a “ballet-opera” based on a German legend, northern stories still being the mark of “progressive” thought among Italian artistic circles at this time. It also included many opportunities for orchestral interludes, at which Puccini showed an early aptitude. Ballet audiences already knew the story from the popular Giselle, ou les Wilis of Adolphe Adam. There were a few obstacles facing Puccini: Fontana had already promised his libretto to another young composer, but he was persuaded to favor Puccini instead (an interesting situation that would repeat frequently in Puccini’s career). Furthermore, Puccini had no money to pay for the libretto, as was customary at the time. Still, Ponchielli’s patronage counted for something, and Fontana was persuaded to reduce his fee. Excited from having heard the Capriccio sinfonico, Fontana agreed, and Puccini returned home to Lucca to work on the project.
Or not to work, as the case may have been…. Puccini wrote Ponchielli and admitted he was being lazy, doing nothing. One biographer remains convinced that the whole of the opera was written a couple of weeks before the deadline. Yet his sister Ramelde later reminisced that Puccini threw himself into the task with astounding energy Perhaps there was truth in both points of view: Puccini would always accuse himself of laziness and later critics would take this at face value, accusing him of the same. But we know from his constant revising of scores—even very successful ones—that he had a healthy artistic hunger to improve his work, and self-castigation was an integral part of his personality. His letters from Milan to his mother, Albina, are full of references to the sorrow he had caused, his acknowledgments of what a disappointment he was, and even requests for forgiveness for being a bad person. He clearly expected great things from himself, and must have always been a little disappointed, as great artists always are.
Whether he was lazy or a firebrand, he was slow in producing his first opera. In fact, he finished it at midnight on the day of the deadline to submit. There wasn’t even time to copy the score over in a legible hand, and it was sent, mistakes, cross-outs, and all. The judges were not impressed. Even before the verdict was read out a couple of months later, Puccini knew he had no chance to win. (He didn’t. The prize went to others whose names have not made operatic history.) Puccini returned to Milan with fewer prospects than before. Albina wrote Ponchielli asking for help, and Ponchielli introduced Puccini to Giulio Ricordi, the head of the titan firm. Puccini’s younger brother, Michele, the darling of the family and another budding musician, joined him in Milan to share his bohemian life, and for a while the brothers shared quarters again with Mascagni, who had even less money than the Puccinis. The three divided their humble meals of beans made on a hot plate in their room and wandered around the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in search of ideas, women, and lunch. Still, it must have lifted Puccini’s spirits, since Michele seems to have been a bit of a charmer. And Fontana was determined not to let Le willis disappear. Albina did what she could to raise money for her sons among supporters and relatives in Lucca, but her health was failing. She would not be able to help her sons much longer. Fontana was comfortable among the artistic salons of Milan, and dragged the shy, tongue-tied Puccini to soirees and musicales. He even bluntly asked for money to get the opera produced in a theater, something Puccini would never have been able to do. Fontana knew all the aging scapigliati of the town, and money came forth, including a modest investment from Boito himself. With at least the verbal support of Giulio Ricordi and Arrigo Boito, Puccini was practically blessed in “apostolic succession” to the great Verdi. He could not have asked for more.
Le willis was produced as part of a triple bill at the Teatro dal Verme on May 31, 1884, and received rave reviews. Puccini, embarrassed as ever by public appearances, was brought out on stage, cheered, and given a silver wreath. The next day Puccini telegrammed Albina with a glowing, crowing account of his success. Soon there was even more cause to celebrate: Giulio Ricordi announced that his firm had acquired the rights to Le willis, which effectively meant Puccini was the new, hot commodity on the Italian music scene. There was little chance to celebrate, however. Albina Puccini died on July 17, 1884. Puccini made no effort to hide his emotions. He adored his mother and was fully aware of all the long years of sacrifice she had made for him and his career. No wonder he always felt a bit guilty for not working hard enough! As a touching tribute to her contributions, he laid the silver wreath he had been given at the Teatro dal Verme on Albina’s coffin.
Puccini lingered on in Lucca, arranging family matters as best he could, corresponding with Fontana about new productions of their opera, now definitively titled Le villi. But most of the time he simply drifted in his grief until he found solace in a passion with a married woman, Elvira Bonturi Gemignani. She was married to an old acquaintance of Puccini’s, a former schoolmate and amateur musician, in fact, named Narciso Gemignani. Puccini, who was now responsible for his family after Albina’s death, was supplementing his income by giving music lessons in his native town, and Gemignani hired him to teach piano to his wife. The Gemignanis had two children, a daughter, Fosca, five, and a son, Renato, two. Yet somehow in this bustling household there was some flirting on the piano bench, and soon Puccini and Elvira were lovers. Puccini confided this to his brother Michele in Milan, but Gemignani did not catch on for about a year. When the cat finally came out of the bag, Elvira was pregnant and showing with Puccini’s child. Puccini had much to fear: Gemignani had both the law and public opinion squarely on his side (despite the fact that he was a known womanizer), and no one would have raised an eyebrow if Gemignani challenged Puccini to a duel or even had him murdered outright. Puccini, as we might say, may have been a lover but was never a fighter, quite contrary to the mores of his society. He and Elvira fled to the town of Monza, a day’s trip out of Milan, and rented furnished rooms. He had his sisters, whose position in their town was severely compromised by this escapade, write him, not from the general post office, where Gemignani could have tracked down his new address, but from the train station, which kept private records.
In their humble dwelling in Monza (since there was still no more money than there had been previously), there was an air of gaiety and friendship for a while. We have a record of an afternoon when a group of friends from Milan, including Catalani, Mascagni, Fontana, and the playwright and budding librettist Luigi Illica, along with Michele Puccini, paid a surprise visit to Puccini and Elvira. She put out what few snacks she could muster from the vacant pantry, but between all of them there was not enough money to buy a slab of meat for her to cook. Michele came to the rescue, hitting up a young lady of his acquaintance for some stamps to write a publisher in London. The stamps were then traded at the butcher for a piece of meat, and Elvira created a hearty stew for the delighted guests. On December 22, 1886, Puccini’s and Elvira’s son, Antonio, was born. He would be called Tonio for the rest of his life. For the next few years, Elvira lived sometimes with Puccini, wherever they could afford to set up a house together, sometimes with her sister in Florence, and occasionally wherever she could find a lodging for herself and her son.
There was also work to be done. Ricordi had supplied Puccini with a libretto by Fontana called Edgar, a full-blooded opera of murder and deception in the grand manner. There was even a “bad girl” in it, like Carmen but much, much worse, named Tigrana, no less. Puccini had the full backing of the Ricordi machine. He could write the most difficult roles without regard to making them manageable for local talent, since Ricordi could guarantee him the best singers in Italy. The same was true for the orchestral score, since it was understood that Edgar would be premiered at La Scala. Publicity and production would all be handled by the most experienced team in the country, if not the world. Puccini received a monthly stipend from Ricordi, which of course was insufficient for his growing needs but was still a salary, something many composers search for their entire lives in vain. All he had to do was produce.
Edgar was not finished after a year passed and his contract elapsed. Giulio Ricordi had to “go to bat” for the young man with his own board of directors, who were skeptical. And Signor Giulio had other priorities: wrangling new music out of the temperamental Verdi had been no easy matter, and, although few knew it, the “Bear of Busseto” (as Verdi was known) was working on yet another opera, Otello, with Arrigo Boito. There were resentments as well from Puccini’s other colleagues, who were ignored, or feeling ignored, by Ricordi. There was Catalani, growing thinner and more ill by the year, and Mascagni, who had no contract from Ricordi or anyone else. And there was the Baron Alberto Franchetti, who was no mere dilettante but a composer of great promise. Franchetti had enormous wealth and was born connected, advantages he used unblushingly He entertained lavishly at his many homes. These included the celebrated Ca’d’oro on Venice’s Grand Canal, arguably the most beautiful home in Venice and therefore the world. Franchetti had the palace refurbished by the architect Camillo Boito, Arrigo’s brother. As a sort of “aesthetic supervisor” on this most visible of private homes, Franchetti turned to a very remarkable, very short (5’4”) budding poet, author, womanizer, patriot, self-promoter, and all-around arty person named Gabriele D’Annunzio. Yet even Franchetti, with all his resources, remained relatively ignored by Ricordi in favor of Puccini. Franchetti did not grumble, and in fact remained generous to all his colleagues, even if he did make disparaging comments about Puccini’s music once at a dinner party, knowing it would get back to Puccini. He invited Puccini to pass the summer at one of his estates, but Puccini declined. It may not have been due to Franchetti’s bitchy after-dinner chatter. Puccini did not seek out brilliant company. In fact, he was a bit of a loner, which made Ricordi’s confidence in him all the more marked.
Edgar was finally completed and given the first-class treatment by La Scala. The singers were the best, the scenery top-notch, the publicity state of the art. Verdi was rumored to be making a rare public appearance at the premiere, which proved to be false. Everything was set for a brilliant night on April 21, 1889. It wasn’t. The audience yawned collectively. The critics were judicious, and almost all expressed an interest in hearing more from the young Puccini. Even Verdi, presumably having read the score, noted sound theatrical instincts in the young composer. But Edgar was withdrawn after two performances. Ricordi was not quite done with Puccini yet. He sent the young man to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth to attend a performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and make recommendations for cuts to the long work that could make it presentable to the Milan public. Ricordi had bought out Giovannina Lucca’s publishing house, which originally owned Wagner’s rights in Italy. Wagner died in 1883, but his famous festival, dedicated exclusively to his own music in his specially designed theater, resumed under his widow Cosima’s direction in 1886. Wagner’s final masterpiece, Parsifal, was written expressly for the unique acoustics of the Bayreuth Festival House and could only be performed there by special agreement with the German government. Other opera houses either respected Wagner’s wishes or couldn’t get their paws on a complete score until the Metropolitan Opera of New York produced a “pirated” version in 1903. In Bayreuth, Puccini attended a performance of Parsifal as well as Meistersinger, and was duly impressed with both. It is one thing to read Wagner’s music on a score or at a piano, but quite another to experience a professional production.
Catalani was ill with tuberculosis, a death sentence. He was bitter and angry, and vented a lot of his understandable frustration on Puccini, the new “Golden Boy.” How did this upstart presume to make cuts in Wagner’s work? Catalani ignored the fact that Ricordi ordered Puccini to make the cuts he, Ricordi, was convinced were necessary to sell Wagner’s work to an Italian public. (In fact, Wagner’s mammoth Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was given with substantial cuts everywhere except at Bayreuth until recent memory.) Nor was Ricordi being uniquely philistine in his desire to cut Wagner. Wagner’s previous Italian publisher, Giovannina Lucca, kept pestering Wagner to cut down his epic, four-day-long King of the Nibelung to a single evening’s entertainment, and a relatively short one at that. Wagner’s reply to Sra. Lucca was the priceless comment to the effect that she was welcome to try it herself if she thought she could pull it off, but he would certainly not wield the scissors himself. Ricordi himself never truly developed a love for Wagner’s music, but he owned it all the same. None of this mattered to Catalani, who was also hallucinating an intimate relationship between Verdi and Puccini and imagining the two of them planning the rosy future at Catalani’s expense. (Of course none of this was happening in reality.) All he saw was his own work languishing while Puccini was receiving every indulgence from the Ricordis.
Catalani was not without powerful friends of his own, particularly a young man of extreme intelligence and energy named Arturo Toscanini. He was born in Parma (which is “Verdi country”) in 1867, and studied the cello there at the Conservatory. His defining traits were apparent at a young age: he was brusque, incapable of suffering fools or people who he judged were not applying themselves to the sacred art of music with their full capacities, and, above all, had an astounding memory The young cellist joined a touring company bound for South America in the spring of 1886, a typical feature of the opera world in those days that allowed extra income for musicians when the theaters closed in the Northern Hemisphere summers. Toscanini turned nineteen on the passage over. The conductor was a Brazilian whom no one had met until they arrived. He was judged incompetent by the musicians from Italy, and the company was in an uproar. In Rio de Janeiro, the musicians were in a near-riot, and the conductor stepped aside, citing reasons of ill-health. (It remains astounding to this day how suddenly ill-health can strike in an opera house.) A substitute was summoned from the Italian company for the evening’s performance of Verdi’s Aida, but the audience took the sudden departure of the original conductor as an affront to their national pride and booed the substitute off the podium. What was to be done? If everyone simply left the theater right then, there wouldn’t even be enough money to book passages back home (not an unknown occurrence with touring opera companies). Toscanini ascended the podium, remaining perfectly still until he impressed the raucous audience with his composure, and conducted the mammoth piece from memory (as would become his habit). The evening was a triumph (opera audiences love to have their derision shoved back at them) and the Rio newspapers were ecstatic. Toscanini conducted eleven different operas for the balance of the season, all from memory, and was loaded with honors and presents, including a diamond ring from the opera-loving emperor of Brazil. (All the gifts were stolen from his hotel in Rio.) He returned to Italy, the subject of much talk among those who had been to Rio but having little else to his name. He returned to his cello and auditioned for the Scala orchestra simply to be able to play in the world premiere of Verdi and Boito’s long-awaited Otello in February 1887. He never forgot the experience (he never forgot anything) and was so moved that he ran home after the opening and ordered his startled mother to get on her knees and give thanks to and for Verdi.
The act of humility in rejoining an orchestra was remarkable, since Toscanini had already made his Italian conducting debut the previous November. The event was the premiere of Catalani’s opera Edmea at Turin. Giovannina Lucca had invited the young phenom to her villa, where he had impressed her with his playing of Wagner (from memory, of course, but this was a feat Wagner himself could rarely accomplish). Toscanini was recognized as a rare talent by the press, and he and the serious Catalani formed an intense friendship.
Puccini’s life did not relax after the disappointment of Edgar. Giulio Ricordi was calm: the third opera had been the lucky charm for Verdi and for Wagner; perhaps Puccini was following the same operatic destiny. But from Puccini’s point of view, both personally and professionally, things must have looked dire. Elvira and little Tonio kept up their peregrinations, Puccini and she trying not to spend too much time together to mollify their families. Puccini himself floated between Lucca and Milan and whatever summer homes he could find. His brother Michele emigrated to Argentina in 1889, and Puccini had hopes he would make some money in that prosperous nation. He even hit up Michele for cash by mail “no matter what the rate of exchange is.” Michele had enough problems without having to send money back home to Italy. He loved bustling Buenos Aires with its large Italian population and even found many familiar faces from Lucca there, but he accepted a position in far-off, provincial Jujuy in the Andes. In a strange reenactment of Puccini’s destiny, Michele got involved with a married lady to whom he was giving piano lessons. This particular husband managed to track down Michele, there was a duel, Michele shot the husband (who recovered) and fled the country. He went to Rio de Janeiro, but died there of yellow fever. The Puccini family was distraught over the loss of their youngest sibling. The one silver lining was that Puccini’s sisters eased their stern attitude somewhat toward their remaining brother and his socially unacceptable position. His favorite sister, Ramelde, even consented to meet the bastard Tonio, and relations improved in that important direction.
In 1888, Mascagni had won another one-act opera competition from the House of Sonzogno. His entry was an operatic setting of Verga’s groundbreaking play Cavalleria rusticana. Puccini was happy for his friend’s success, but no one was prepared for the furore that ensued at the opera’s premiere in May 1890, at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Italy had not seen a triumph of this magnitude from a young composer in almost half a century, since the heady days of Verdi’s youth. Verismo, the Italian catchall term for the naturalist trends in literature, had found an expression in opera. It was more than a success in the opera house—it was a national success as well. For decades, words like “new” and “exciting” had been applied only to art and music from Germany and France, and even from more exotic claimants to innovation such as Russia, Bohemia, Hungary, and elsewhere. Finally, there was something entirely new (well, almost entirely new, since we have seen harbingers in Verdi, Ponchielli, and Bizet) from tired old Italy. Cavalleria packed a punch in about an hour, with a brash, even vulgar score leading the audience in an inexorable sweep to its finale, which was an actual scream from the stage. It was repeated everywhere, discussed everywhere, derided and applauded everywhere. Within a year it had crossed the Alps and the ocean, and the chatter covered the whole music world.
Puccini, still smarting from the big yawn of Edgar, was working on an opera based on Manon Lescaut, the protonovel of French literature. It was a risky proposition for a number of reasons, primarily because the opera Manon by the Frenchman Jules Massenet was immensely popular everywhere, including in Italy. But Puccini was not deterred. Massenet had written a beautiful and utterly French opera, while Puccini would fill his with purely Italian passion. Hadn’t Verdi been warned by the old-timers to avoid Otello, since the mighty Rossini had used the same subject and he could never hope to compete with a legend like Rossini? All right, Massenet was still very much alive while Rossini was dead many years when Verdi set to work on Otello, but what of that? Hadn’t Rossini himself set The Barber of Seville while Giovanni Paisiello was still alive and whose own Barber of Seville remained popular? That was not the problem for Puccini. The problem was getting the libretto just right.
This proved to be a major problem for Puccini, as it would remain for his entire life. Puccini rejected working with Fontana again, although he never fully explained why, and Fontana felt, not without reason, that Puccini owed him a thing or two. They never collaborated again. Instead, Puccini was paired with Ruggero Leoncavallo, a man of many talents and many more tall tales. Leoncavallo was a composer and a poet who had been around quite a bit, from Egypt to Paris and Naples and elsewhere. He claimed to have met Wagner in Bologna and expounded to him on his own ideas for an Italian answer to the King of the Nibelung, which he said Wagner enthusiastically encouraged. (Nobody believed this, then or now.) In any case, his path crossed Puccini’s in Milan in 1890 and they set to work on Manon Lescaut. Puccini was unsatisfied with the results and unceremoniously dumped Leoncavallo. He then met a literary man while hanging out in the Galleria in Milan and asked him on the spot to help him with his opera. The man, named Praga, said he was not a good poet but had a friend who was, Oliva, and the three got to work. Ricordi approved the libretto as rearranged by Praga and Oliva, but Puccini then requested major changes—drop an entire act and add another new one. First Praga quit, then Oliva. Ricordi, who must have pulled out his remaining hairs by this time, decided to bring in the heavy artillery and, if necessary, start over. He hired the outstanding man of letters Giuseppe Giacosa, a highly honored intellectual and good friend of Boito’s, as well as Luigi Illica, a brash and temperamental young playwright. The plan was that the theatrical Illica would develop the scenario, while the educated Giacosa would provide the polished poetry that was still expected in Italian opera (even in the verismo Cavalleria rusticana). Nobody knew it at the time, but Giacosa and Illica would collaborate with Puccini on his most successful operas. Still, the classic triumvirate of Puccini/Giacosa/Illica was not yet solidified. Puccini himself contributed some lines, and even Giulio Ricordi supplied four lines to the final libretto! Before it was finally set, Puccini even returned to Leoncavallo to ask for a few bits and alterations. Perhaps by that time he had forgotten ever working with Leoncavallo in the first place.
Leoncavallo might well have forgotten Manon Lescaut, since he was off on a new compositional adventure of his own. Always one to sense which way the wind was blowing, he pitched Sonzogno with an idea for a one-act chunk of verismo, for which he would supply both the libretto and the score, about a jealous clown who murders his wife onstage. Leoncavallo later claimed the incident was drawn from real life, and his father, a judge, had heard the case. (This claim came in handy when Leoncavallo was shortly thereafter accused of plagiarism by French author Catulle Mendès.) Sonzogno jumped at the plan, although it eventually expanded to two acts, albeit still in the brief and hard-hitting style of Cavalleria. He worked with admirable speed, and I pagliacci was given to a frenzied audience at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan in May 1892. Toscanini was the conductor. The cast was spectacular as well, but the work itself had undeniable punch, and within two years had been given in every European country and many overseas.
Puccini (not to mention Ricordi) must have wondered if he was barking up the wrong tree. His Manon Lescaut had everything going against it, from a French rival to a patchwork libretto. There were some signs of hope, however. Edgar, of all things, turned out to be a success in Ferrara in a three-act version, and Puccini even traveled to Madrid to oversee a production of it there. The Madrid production was not a howling success, even though Puccini was introduced to the queen of Spain. (He was unimpressed with the queen and with Madrid, only writing a twisted letter to Elvira about how beautiful the women were in that city and then adding that of course he was remaining faithful.) Puccini rediscovered the village of Torre del Lago in the wetlands of the plains south of Pisa, and decided this was where he belonged. Only someone of Puccini’s melancholy character could have found the place an “earthly paradise,” as he called it, since it is an eerie, swampy landscape and certainly not the tourists’ ideal of “Bella Tuscany.” It afforded great opportunities for hunting and fishing, which appealed to Puccini, and it was quiet. He moved to a rented cottage with Elvira. She promptly hated it, and the locals, very simple folk living a rather primitive existence, instantly disliked her. But she did manage to talk her husband into letting her daughter come live with her and Puccini, and little Fosca brought some much-needed joy into the house.
Manon Lescaut was scheduled for Turin on February 3, 1893. Turin was not La Scala, but Ricordi knew what he was doing. Edgar’s failure in Milan made another venue more practical. Besides, La Scala had bigger priorities: the seventy-nine-year-old Verdi, in collaboration with Boito, had written yet another opera, Falstaff, to be given there on February 9. After the dizzying triumph of Otello, the entire musical world was focused on this living legend who paradoxically seemed to be getting younger, artistically and in every other way, as he approached the century mark. Giulio had his hands full with the grumpy Verdi, and barely made it down to Turin between rehearsals to attend the opening night of Manon Lescaut. He must have been glad he did. Manon Lescaut was the biggest success of the season. The progressive use of the orchestra seemed to absorb all the latest German ideas while remaining unflinchingly Italian in tone. And everyone was astounded at the genuine feel for the human voice in the opera. Puccini had arrived.
A lot was happening in these few years. Catalani’s masterpiece, La Wally, debuted in 1892. It was a distant cry from Cavalleria and Pagliacci, which were eating up the world’s stages, and Manon Lescaut, with its clear mastery of both voice and orchestra and its wealth of melody. Italian opera seemed to be going in several directions at once, but which would prevail? George Bernard Shaw, familiar with all the goings-on in Italy, saw Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House in London and stated bluntly that Puccini struck him as the “successor to Verdi” more than any of Puccini’s contemporaries. It was an honor, a victory, and a burden to be so named. Verdi, it must be stressed, was much, much more than the greatest living Italian composer. His status in Italian history was assured just by the important symbolic role he had played in the Risorgimento, the unification of an independent Italy. But for all the subsequent mythification of the Risorgimento, the reality of the Kingdom of Italy was quite different. Count Cavour, the political genius behind creating the Italian nation, died shortly after that birth—a great calamity for all involved. Without Cavour’s guidance, his creation foundered. Verdi himself resigned from parliament and “retired” to his farm, leaving the other notable figures of the era to lose public esteem over time. Garibaldi wore everyone out with his constant ravings and drew the ire of public opinion against himself when he forced the national army to engage his irregulars at Aspromonte. The new king, Victor Emanuel II, did everything possible to lose the affection of the nation after unification. Even his title, “the Second,” showed he considered himself primarily the king of Piedmont-Sardinia and only the king of Italy as a sort of afterthought. The long-awaited annexation of Rome was also anticlimactic. The new government brought in an administration from the north and failed to ingratiate itself with the Romans. The pope locked himself in the Vatican and declared he was a prisoner of a foreign occupying power. The king hated Rome and locked himself in his palace, and he and the pope glared at each other across the Tiber for years. Meanwhile, the city itself was overrun with new development to make room for the new government, and the sleepy but gorgeous city of 200,000 became a dirty metropolis of half a million within twenty years. The sense of loss was inevitable. Nor was it limited to the capital. The southern half of the country waited in vain for the modernization and prosperity that was promised with the new unification: it is still waiting. The mass emigrations began, to Buenos Aires, to New York, and elsewhere. Nor were the emigrations only from the impoverished South. Genoa and the surrounding areas lost inhabitants to the New World. Verdi thought it worth boasting about that his own district had almost no emigration. Michele Puccini commented on how many fellow Lucchesi he recognized in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1889.
The industry in the northern cities such as Turin and Milan was supposed to propel the new nation into modernity, but it was not long before this proved to be a disappointment as well. Wealth, as usual, was concentrated in the hands of the few, while the many workers found their lives even more wretched than before. Finally, in 1898, troops were ordered to fire on disgruntled workers in Milan, and the bloodshed was far greater than it had been when Milan was crushed under Austrian occupation two generations before. It must have been small consolation to the victims that their assassins spoke Italian rather than German.
The disillusionment was all the more pronounced when compared to the German nation, which had gone through a similar painful process of unification. Bismarck’s Second Reich was everything Italy was not. Centralization of political power was achieved while maintaining many of the outward forms of the old rule and allowing the disparate regions to maintain at least the fiction of some autonomy. Industrialization was vast and produced great wealth, and if Berlin was even uglier than the new Rome and Milan, the loss was considerably less since Berlin had never been Rome or Milan.
In short, the only thing that was right about Italy was Verdi, and Verdi was gloriously right in a specifically Italian way. As a citizen, he was flawless. When he left parliament in the 1860s, he worked in his farm at Sant’Agata, improving the land and providing for his district in a sensible, rather than ostentatious, manner. He let it be known that he wanted no honors, and was genuinely horrified when there was talk of giving him a noble title. In his eighties, he set up most of his large fortune as a trust to endow a home for retired singers that he had constructed in Milan, designed by Camillo Boito. He seemed to embody all the manly virtues, real or imagined, of the early Roman Republic. Artistically, his legacy was even more impressive. Many thought his Requiem of 1875 was to be the grand finale to a splendid career, but the best was yet to come. Otello, which premiered, as we have seen, at La Scala in 1887, was not only an undisputed masterpiece—probably, all things considered, the best Italian opera ever—but it was unmistakably Italian. All the gimmicks of traditional Italian opera that had fallen into disrepute among intellectuals, progressives, and Germanophiles—the Drinking Song, the Oath Duet, the Suicide Finale, even the Mad Scene, in a sense—were present in Otello, but they were transformed by Verdi’s genius (along with Arrigo Boito’s) into new, vibrant entities that even made the avant-garde gasp in wonder. Imagine the significance of this to Italians at the time, paralyzed by the weight of their own cultural history: one school of thought seemed to say Italy must remain fossilized in order to preserve her glories, while the opposite school was striving to erase every memory of the past. Otello offered the possibility of sublime progress through tradition. Then his Falstaff appeared in 1893. The ingenious score impressed the musical world even more than Otello had. While Falstaff has always towered just a tad above the public reach of true affection, it proved that Otello was no fluke. It also proved that age, whether it was Verdi’s chronological age or the ancient span of Italian art, need not be a barrier to innovation or triumph. In 1820, when the Carbonari revolt against the Austrians failed, Lord Byron wrote back to England, “Alas, the Italians must [now] return to writing opera.” The condescension was patent. Verdi’s career demonstrated that writing operas was not an effete avoidance of political or military imperatives. In his case, it was their apotheosis.
The issue of who would be the Successor to Verdi, therefore, meant much more than who would write the next popular operas. It was a search for someone to justify the Italian national identity, since clearly there would be no such justification from the government. Later, when Italians ceased looking to opera composers for such inspiration and turned, instead, to the government and the military, the result was the greatest disaster to afflict Italy since the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Roman Empire. But that is a story outside of our own.
The success of Manon Lescaut, soon making the international circuit, meant that Puccini was out of debt. He settled into his rented villa in Torre del Lago and began to think of building a home there. The success also meant that the brewing resentments among the artistic community were now in full gale force. Catalani was dying and full of invective about the new trends in opera. His own elegant and refined works were being pushed out of the limelight by these new loud, crass operas. His friend Toscanini kept vigil with the dying man, and the experience made a lasting impression on him. Deep down, Toscanini never loved the verismo movement. He thought Catalani was forging the path that the younger generation should follow and that the composer’s early death was nothing short of a disaster for Italian art. Toscanini, who married in 1897, named his daughter and son Wally and Walter respectively, from the lead roles in Catalani’s opera La Wally. He did conduct the premiere I pagliacci, but the experience wore him out mentally and physically (he fell asleep in his evening dress and shoes that night). His distaste for the genre would color his long operatic career. The man who managed to assimilate both Verdi and Wagner when most people thought those two were polar opposites had serious issues with the genre born under his very nose.
Leoncavallo soon had a very direct reason to resent Puccini. The two met one day in the Galleria and discussed their current plans. Puccini casually said he was working on an opera, La bohème, based on Henri Mürger’s play Scènes de la vie de bohème. Leoncavallo’s jaw dropped. But of course Puccini knew he himself was working on the same opera! Hadn’t Leoncavallo originally offered the libretto to Puccini? Puccini admitted to nothing, and Leoncavallo left in a huff. He promptly alerted the newspapers that he was writing La bohème. None of this bothered Puccini in the least. He had taken on Massenet; now he would take on Leoncavallo. And if the two operas were to be written and produced simultaneously, all the better. The public would decide.
Puccini tortured his librettists Giacosa and especially the rather difficult Illica during the composition of Bohème. At a time when many composers were writing their own libretti (after Wagner’s fashion), Puccini needed the words to be perfect (in his estimation) before he would be able to set them. Sometimes he would write doggerel verse to his librettists to give them a sense of the meters and rhythms he was seeking. But just as often he would change his mind when he received exactly what he ordered. He was frustrating to work for, but there was never any doubt once he found something appropriate. Then the music would flow, and the results would inevitably prove that his carpings had been correct all along.
He composed at the piano, and usually late at night. The very opposite of the temperamental composer who demanded absolute silence in the house for his creative process, Puccini in fact seemed to enjoy having friends around when he worked. Sometimes he would have cronies from Torre del Lago come over and play cards, and he would simply exit from the table every now and then, go in the next room, bang a few bars on the piano, jot some notes, and then calmly return to the game. Other times he would actually have the card games in the same room as the piano! He arranged a ramshackle hut next to a tavern as the “Club la bohème” where he and his drinking buds could gather free of their womenfolk. There was a piano, and amid the rambunctious gatherings, he would compose. Of course, he did not always compose under such circumstances, and occasionally would seek out even quieter spots than Torre del Lago to work on a given piece, but much of his work was done amid daily life. Critics have abused him for this (many critics find composing at a piano to be inherently unmusical), but then we must also consider that Puccini probably came closer to writing music that appears drawn from real life than any other opera composer. Many contemporary composers of our own time go through great exertions to try to imitate the patterns of daily speech in music. I wonder how many of them ever tried sitting at the piano during a drunken card game.
Illica and Puccini both got personally involved with the rehearsals for the premiere, slated for February 1, 1896, again in Turin. The cast had bright spots and problems, but Toscanini was conducting, which assured a certain level of quality. Ricordi sent frequent instructions from Milan: careful with the tricky crowd scenes, don’t make the singers lose their voices in rehearsal, and so forth. The big night came. Act I passed with polite applause. Act II was received with absolute frigidity. Acts III and IV went over rather successfully. But the chatter in the lobby was not favorable. The next day, the papers made Puccini gulp. One local critic famously said the new opera would not last beyond the present performances. Some Milan papers, however, were impressed. Ricordi advised caution to Puccini. He had seen many operas come and go, and Bohème was different, unfamiliar. It would yet succeed. He was right, of course, and the opera ran for twenty-four performances in Turin, which is highly respectable.
It’s hard to imagine today, when La bohème has come to stand for all opera in the popular imagination, how it could have ever been considered difficult to understand. And yet, if we look closely at the work and think of it in the true context of its times, the audience’s initial bewilderment is not so far-fetched. It all comes down to the understanding of the term verismo. Cavalleria and Pagliacci defined the genre when they clobbered the audience over the head with violence and a sort of musical vulgarity: that is, clear, gushing music when unadulterated emotion was being portrayed, and so forth. La bohème is definitely verismo but it does not work in the same way It is not about emotionally extroverted peasants in “those places over there, where they act weird” (Sicily and Calabria, respectively, in the cases of Cavalleria and Pagliacci). It is about modern, urban people of no particular distinction whatsoever who have real emotions about events and situations any one of us could recognize. There are no knives drawn in Bohème, there is no code of honor, and there is no exoticism. It was about the audience, as it still is. This may seem mundane now. It was a lot to comprehend in 1896.
Puccini went to Rome for the premiere in that city on February 23, and the same pattern was repeated, only more intensely. The first two acts failed entirely, and the last two were enthusiastically received. On balance, it was a success. He went to Naples to supervise rehearsals at the venerable Teatro San Carlo in March, but left before the opening night. The Neapolitans were insulted, but Puccini explained he did not want to overdo the publicity. He made a jab at Leoncavallo, who never missed an opportunity for applause, and could not resist saying that Leoncavallo was “playing the clown.” Yet Puccini was perfectly willing to attend the important premiere of La bohème at Palermo, where he was paraded around town and toasted like a victorious general. The Palermo audience created a frenzy from the very beginning of the opera, perhaps intoxicated with themselves for having landed an important composer in their town. In any case, Bohème’s conquest of the world’s opera houses was now assured. Leoncavallo’s Bohème, incidentally, was hardly a flop when it came out the following year. It is a very good, very interesting opera whose chief flaw is that it is not Puccini’s La bohème. The two cohabitated in Italian opera houses and elsewhere for about a decade, until Leoncavallo’s opera faded. It is still to be seen, primarily in Italy, on occasion. The mercurial Gustav Mahler, by now general director of the august Vienna Imperial Opera, took a great dislike to Puccini’s work, even though he had conducted Le villi in Hamburg in 1892. He championed Leoncavallo’s opera for years and stood aloof from all Puccini’s work. Puccini and Leoncavallo, who were never especially close to begin with, distinctly disliked each other from then on, Puccini usually writing the name Leonasino (from “Lion-horse” to “Lion-ass”) in his letters.
After Bohème, Puccini set to work rather rapidly on his next project, Tosca. It was based on a play by the Frenchman Victorien Sardou, a very popular playwright in his day who never aspired to, nor received, high critical acclaim. La Tosca, as the play was called, had in fact been written for no less a stage presence than Sarah Bernhardt. It was violent, raw, and even a tad kinky. In Sardou’s version, all the cheesiness of the story is embedded in good French dialogue and excruciating dramatic detail, for Sardou was a proponent of what was long called “the well-made play.” Everything had a reason, and all the reasons were spoken out at some length.
Nevertheless, there was an emotional core to the work. Verdi had looked at it and pronounced it stage-worthy which was nothing short of a message from God for Ricordi. But he would not write it himself: the eighty-one-year-old icon was serious, finally, about not writing any more operas. There was a slight problem: Ricordi had assigned Illica to work on the libretto of Tosca for Franchetti, and in fact Franchetti was writing Tosca as Puccini was composing Bohème. Once Bohème was done and launched, and while Franchetti was still dithering over Tosca, it became necessary to pull the work out from under Franchetti and give it to Puccini. There are several variations of how this was managed: some say Ricordi used fraud and cheated Franchetti out of the chance at a huge success. Others maintain that Franchetti had never really loved the story and was eager to be rid of it. There is plenty of evidence for both points of view. The upshot, of course, is that it went to Puccini, even if there are more hints of strained relations between the two at this time. Franchetti wasn’t the only person with reservations about Tosca. Giacosa found the whole thing disgusting, and wasn’t afraid to say so. He had to be pulled through the process of working on the libretto. Illica, too, felt that it was coming out all wrong, and complained loudly about it. Puccini even got into quite a row with Ricordi—their first ever—over disagreements about the work. There was something about this opera that simply set people off.
Puccini held his ground, wrote conciliatory letters to “Papa Giulio” saying, “You’ll see!” and plans were made for the premiere. The story takes place in Rome, and moreover is, as Sardou kept stressing to Puccini in his input into the opera, a Roman opera in more than the setting. The premiere, therefore, had to take place in Rome, where Puccini had never premiered an opera before. Rome was tense in 1900. Pope Leo XIII had declared 1900 a Jubilee Year, and the city was full of pilgrims and tourists. Of course, Rome is also always full of agitators and revolutionaries as well, and just then the anarchists were making their presence known with no subtlety. All the divergent political and cultural spasms of Italy were shaking Rome at just that time, and many feared the city would explode one way or another that year. The premiere on January 14 was especially tense. Bomb threats were made on the opera house. Ricordi was actually more nervous about the many musical notables present in the audience, including Mascagni, Franchetti, and others who he feared would cause a disturbance. Anarchists he could manage, but composers are unpredictable…. Queen Margherita of Italy announced her intention to attend (she was late and missed Act I). A disturbance was heard shortly after the curtain went up, and the conductor, thinking a bomb had gone off, played the national anthem (it was latecomers arguing with ushers). People’s nerves were shot, which happens to be an excellent way to enjoy this particular opera. The audience was enthusiastic and the critics the next morning were, in many cases, so outraged and repulsed that Puccini immediately knew he had another big hit.
Later that year, King Umberto was indeed assassinated. Queen Margherita wrote a simple and poignant prayer, published in the newspapers. Verdi, never a Royalist, was moved by the prayer, and attempted to set it to music. He got no further than a few notes, though, and they were his last. The Grand Man died in Milan on January 27, 1901. Three days of national mourning were decreed. Giacosa delivered the funeral oration. In case anyone had any doubts, the old century had passed. Attentions would be focused on Puccini as never before, and he was not one who loved attention.
Returning to Torre del Lago after Tosca, Puccini was now in a position to build a house for himself. He had already begun to buy, refurbish, or build small residences, hunting lodges, and summer homes in the hills nearby. Puccini had a case of what the locals called “mal di pietra,” “the stone sickness,” or what we might call “buildingitis.” It is not surprising, given his many years of wandering and his desire to live apart from “the world,” that he should have indulged in this vice, and at this point in his life he could well afford it. He built the Villa Puccini in Torre del Lago right by the waters of Lake Massaciuccoli, a pleasant but eminently unpretentious home. It is a museum today, and contains a mausoleum where he, Elvira, and Tonio are buried.
Puccini went to London, the only city he ever really liked, in 1900 to oversee Tosca. While there, he attended the theater and saw Madame Butterfly, a play by David Belasco about a geisha in (then) present-day Japan who is destroyed by believing that her sham arrangement to an American naval officer is a real marriage. Belasco was in the theater the night Puccini attended. According to Belasco, Puccini accosted him backstage after the performance and, in a flood of tears and Latin cheek-kisses, thanked him for the wonderful experience and declared on the spot that he would write an opera on the subject. At least, that was what Belasco thought Puccini, who was blubbering in Italian, was saying. This may or may not have happened in reality, but Puccini was uncharacteristically clear about his intention to set Madame Butterfly. It wouldn’t have been the first time the remarkable Belasco adorned the facts.
Belasco was born in San Francisco in 1853 of Sephardic Jewish parents from England who had joined the Gold Rush. Somewhere along the line he attended a seminary school, and throughout his life affected clerical garb à la Franz Liszt. He was eventually nicknamed “the Bishop of Broadway,” a paradox he adored. He learned acting and stage management in San Francisco and with traveling troupes throughout California’s Gold Country, eventually coming to New York in the 1880s. His plays, mostly adaptations, became tremendously popular for their realistic acting and their staging. In one play, set in a typical diner, he not only re-created every detail of furniture and tableware from a nearby New York establishment, but insisted fresh pots of coffee be brewed onstage nightly during the performance so the audience could recognize the smell. He was also among the first directors to plumb the importance of the new science of lighting, and one of the most impressive features of Madame Butterfly was a fourteen-minute-long “vigil” over the city of Nagasaki with no speaking from the actors. The audience (including Puccini) was held enrapt by the effects of nightfall, with the lights of the city appearing in the background, and the subsequent sunrise. Birdsongs were used for the latter part of the scene. Belasco appealed to almost all of the senses but, like Sardou, never attempted to challenge the intellect. He was a well-known figure in New York and London, always recognizable in his curious outfit. He owned several theaters in New York (one of which is now the Belasco Theater and another one, the stunning New Victory on Forty-second Street) and was involved in what would become the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He acted as theatrical mentor to one of his friend’s sons, a certain Cecil B. DeMille.
Back in Torre del Lago, Puccini worked on Butterfly, which at this point primarily consisted of wrangling with Illica over the adaptation. He had other diversions as well. By 1900, he had met a young woman from Turin named Corinna. We don’t know much about Corinna except that she may have been a teacher, she was single (as was Puccini, according to the law), she was younger, and she felt like a breath of fresh air. Elvira had become increasingly difficult over the years, with scenes of jealousy (not without reason), uncertainty about her own status in society and that of her children, unhappy in the swamps at Torre, and terrified to run into her husband in Lucca. Puccini, besides having a roving eye, was also starting to worry about aging: we read comments in his letters from as early as his mid-thirties about gray hairs, his terror of growing old, and a feeling that life was passing him by. Puccini had one of the longest midlife crises in history.
He and Corinna met in Viareggio, the lovely seaside resort up the coast from Torre. Elvira knew about it in a general way, and there were recriminations, scenes, and even a hunger strike. Puccini confided his feelings of guilt about Elvira to his family but could not stop the affair. Gossip got to Ricordi, who wrote strong letters in a paternal fashion to Puccini. Puccini tried to play all sides and did not entirely neglect his home. One foggy night in the winter of 1903, he drove with Tonio and Elvira to Lucca. Puccini always had an interest in cars and the latest machinery and sometimes attended car shows in Milan (occasionally with the rich and apparently ubiquitous Franchetti, who happened to be the president of the Italian Automobile Club). On this particular night, he and Elvira and Tonio were driven by a chauffeur. The car missed a curve on the ride home and overturned. Elvira and Tonio were shaken but without serious injury. The chauffeur had a broken leg. A nearby physician, fortunately, heard the crash and came running. No one could find Puccini. He was eventually found under the car, trapped in a little hollow that saved his life. He was bleeding and his legs were fractured. He was carted to the villa of an acquaintance and left there to convalesce.
Nobody knows what Puccini and his brood were doing in Lucca that night. Ricordi issued a press release to say they were dining with friends. Local gossip, well substantiated, believed that they had gone to see Elvira’s husband, Gemignani, who was dying (some said from injuries sustained from a fight with a jealous husband he, in his turn, had wronged). Elvira was trying to get him to forgive her and die free of the rancor that might imperil his soul and, incidentally, to make sure his will provided for her. There were reports of scenes and harsh words from his relatives as the man lay dying, almost a scene worthy of comic opera. In any case, Gemignani did in fact die the next day while Puccini’s life lay in question. We can only imagine the toll these few days took on a nervous constitution such as Elvira’s.
Telegrams poured in from around the world to Puccini: from the king of Italy, statesmen of several countries, friends (including Mascagni, who was in San Francisco), and well-wishers, although Franchetti mysteriously sent nothing. Puccini’s convalescence was slow. He chain-smoked in bed, alternately lost weight and then gained it, smoked some more, and finally was able to move to a wheelchair. He had a special piano rigged up so he could play from the wheelchair and possibly finish up Butterfly, which lay languishing. While he was convalescing, doctors diagnosed him with diabetes.
Puccini was pressured to renounce Corinna and marry Elvira, who, according to law, could now marry him after the passage of ten months. Elvira even recruited Giulio Ricordi into the plan, but Ricordi needed little prodding. He was still writing his ominous letters to Puccini telling him that l’affaire Corinna was compromising his art, work, and more. Ricordi did not yet know about the diabetes, and stated bluntly that he was convinced Puccini had syphilis, which was all one could expect from “that sort” of woman. Puccini was offended but the prevailing winds carried the day. He broke off with Corinna, who threatened to sue him. Corinna demanded a personal meeting with Puccini in Switzerland, and Elvira moved heaven and earth to prevent this meeting, all to no avail. Puccini did meet with Corinna, but we do not know what was said. According to Elvira, she and Puccini had a fight when he returned and he actually punched her. (In later incidents, Puccini complained of physical abuse from Elvira.) “Yet something had been settled with Corinna, and Elvira was able to announce her engagement. She and Puccini were married by the mayor of Viareggio in a civil ceremony. That night (January 3, 1904), they were married in the parish church at Torre, very late, with only a few witnesses, and curtains thrown up over the windows. The claim was that they did not want publicity, but one is hard-pressed to imagine a less romantic wedding.
The day after the wedding, Puccini went to Milan to arrange for the premiere of Madama Butterfly. He was bubbling with confidence. His life, albeit not perfect, was at least normalized after the accident and the sorting out of his messy domestic situation. He knew he had written his best opera to date. The soprano, Rosina Storchio, was managing the demanding lead role with aplomb. The costumes and the sets were gorgeous, under the direction of Tito Ricordi Jr., Giulio’s son, who was being groomed to take over the firm, and the orchestra was well rehearsed under Cleofonte Campanini. For the first time in his life, Puccini arranged for his family to attend the premiere.
La Scala has seen—and created—its share of disasters over the years. Verdi’s second opera, Un giorno di regno, was a failure that sent the young man into a tailspin and almost (so he claimed) cured him of the compulsion to write operas. Boito’s Mefistofele was booed off the stage. But both of those nights would seem models of decorum compared to the premiere of Madama Butterfly on February 17,1904. The audience was cold or worse to Act I. Butterfly’s entrance was jeered with shouts of “Bohème!” from audience members who thought Puccini was recycling material from his biggest hit (and in this first version, a case could have been made for these comments). The applause for the love duet at the end of the act was, hard to believe today, subdued. There were boos and shouts at the curtain. In Act II, all hell broke loose. Storchio’s kimono billowed and people shouted that she was pregnant. “From Toscanini!” chimed in others, eager to show that they were in on (true in this case) backstage gossip. When Butterfly subsequently showed her child by Pinkerton to the American consul, the audience fell into a fit of derision and laughter. In the now-celebrated vigil and sunrise scene, which had so impressed Puccini when he saw Belasco’s play staged, Tito had arranged for birdsong to accompany the orchestral interlude. The audience answered with its own birdcalls, rooster crows, and eventually, mooing. Giulio Ricordi wrote that the audience, after shouting and screaming for the final curtain, left the theater in a festive mood and quite pleased with itself. Some newspapers attempted a judicious critique of the new work but others fell in with the mob mentality and castigated Puccini. One went so far as to call it a “diabetic opera” and the “result of an accident” in its headline. The Milanese smelled blood and fell into a feeding frenzy.
What could possibly explain the disaster? Sr. Giulio was convinced there was a plot afoot, set in motion by jealous rivals. He squarely blamed Mascagni, even though Mascagni had attended and even stood in his box berating the crowd for its boorishness. Sr. Giulio coldly dismissed this as “crocodile tears.” Puccini never made direct reference to Mascagni in this regard but did assent to the idea of jealous rivals and a conspiracy. Indeed, the idea is not implausible, and the butt of the reaction was not merely Puccini but the House of Ricordi and the whole of the Italian musical establishment it represented. The rival House of Sonzogno billed itself as the music of the future, and blamed the problems other composers were having on Ricordi’s firm grip on the Italian music scene. Furthermore, Puccini’s “little operas” about ordinary people were not satisfying the national craving for something epic that would command the respect of the rest of the world. Puccini wasn’t even trying to grow, as they saw it. Another opera about a sad heroine! Just what Italians needed! As if the world didn’t already see them as a nation of emotional, teary lightweights with soft, gooey centers! They, or at least a vociferous portion of them, wanted more muscle on their stages to represent the new Italy, a player on the world stage.
Puccini was predictably distraught, but managed to attend a damage-control meeting early the next day with Tito, Giacosa, and Illica. Tito believed in the opera even more than his father, who, despite his spirited defense of Butterfly in print, deep down in his heart also wanted something of a larger scale from Puccini. Giacosa felt that his original idea of three acts instead of two would make the opera irresistible. Puccini did not need much encouragement to try again with Butterfly: he knew it was his best work, and throughout his life maintained that it was the only opera of his he could bear to hear over and over. Ricordi sprang into action, instructing La Scala to cancel all further performances immediately and refunding them a sack of money for their troubles. He sent agents around to the music stores in Milan to buy up all copies of the piano-vocal score. The creators of the work got to work snipping here and tucking there and made plans for the premiere of the revised work. But where would they give this reborn Butterfly? Milan was out of the question. Rome, perhaps? Turin? Forward-looking Bologna? Tito lobbied for Brescia, with a smaller theater and temptingly—even tauntingly—close to Milan. Madama Butterfly was given there in three acts and with some small but important other revisions on May 29, 1904. It was a triumph, and Puccini was vindicated. He now needed to conquer (or reconquer) a large city. With a few more revisions, Butterfly was staged in Paris, and so began its triumphal tour of the world.
Puccini now had an arsenal of four surefire international hits to his name, and took some time to oversee productions and promote his work. On a trip to London in the autumn of 1904, he met the beguiling Sybil Seligman, who was to become his greatest and in many ways his most important friend. Sybil was beautiful, filthy rich, educated, and refined beyond the bounds of civilization. She came from a wealthy background of Jewish banking families that placed high emphasis on cultural achievement. According to later reminiscences from her sister, Sybil and Puccini did begin their relationship as lovers but settled into a much deeper friendship. Others doubt they ever were lovers. Whatever the clinical definition of their relationship, we have many of their letters, and it is clear that Puccini was open and honest with her and held her opinions in the highest regard. The two families became close, the Seligmans passing many summer vacations at the Puccinis’ several homes or in nearby Viareggio and the Puccinis meeting up with the Seligmans at every opportunity in London or Monte Carlo. Much information was related by the son, Vincent Seligman, in his book Puccini Among Friends, where his memories of the private Puccini add considerably to our knowledge of the man.
After London, the Puccinis sailed for Montevideo and Buenos Aires to attend a series of performances. Toscanini had already introduced Puccini to audiences in those cities, and a special season of Puccini’s operas, including Edgar, was arranged for his visit to Buenos Aires. Elvira got seasick halfway up the gangplank and retired to her room for the entire trip. On arrival, Puccini was feted, toasted, and celebrated, all of which was difficult for him. The operas were a tremendous success (except for the exhausting Edgar, which was now finally retired), and the Puccinis returned to Italy.
But what to do next? Ricordi wanted something very grand. Franchetti had obliged him with the large-scaled Germania in 1902, which showed every indication of remaining in the repertory (it didn’t). Leoncavallo was writing everything from popular songs (including the still-ubiquitous Mattinata, recorded by the tenor Enrico Caruso and then playing in living rooms around the world) to an epic celebration of the Hohenzollern dynasty written at the kaiser’s request. The French were churning out everything from the light and lively to poetic grandeur, as witnessed by the surprising popular success of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902. Everybody in the world seemed to be writing operas in that decade: Czechs, Russians, Norwegians, even Americans, of all people. New and magnificent opera houses were springing up from San Francisco to Buenos Aires to Sofia. And the Germans, after a post-Wagner hangover, were making noises again. Richard Strauss, a successful composer of orchestral music, was now concentrating on opera. After two misfires, he hit the world on the head with Salome, a scandalous shocker an hour and a half long. The Italians needed something big.
Puccini and Strauss paralleled each other for many years. Strauss labored under the burden of being the Successor to Wagner as Puccini struggled with his own expectations. The two composers appear entirely different, at least according to their various partisans, yet time has shown them to have had many similar goals. And they both concentrated on the soprano voice like no previous composers. Puccini was always puzzled by Salome but remained fascinated by it and was not afraid to say so publicly. The affable Strauss made some derisive comments about Puccini here and there but also praised him. He once explained to a journalist that he never said he disliked Puccini’s music. He simply needed to avoid it because he couldn’t get the melodies out of his head and feared that he would write Puccinian Strauss. It’s hard to imagine a higher backhanded compliment. The two occasionally met and pointedly avoided discussing music theory, which neither of them enjoyed anyway. They were both happier playing cards.
The remnants of the Old Guard clucked in disapproval at the new popular composers. Boito said he felt the sadness of being trapped between Butterfly and Salome: the first was a glass of tepid water, but the second an ocean of ennui. Boito returned, depressed, to his literary articles and desultory glances at his still-unfinished Nerone. Boito had long since given up his hashish but he retained his melancholy and his abstract musings until the very end. Similar to young radicals everywhere, he had developed into a reactionary.
After the exciting but nervewracking experience of Butterfly, Puccini was truly at a loss for his next project. The problem was an overabundance of ideas rather than a lack of them. Giacosa died in 1906, a great loss to Puccini. He and Illica would never produce another opera together, although this was not yet apparent. He set Illica to work on a project that had the full backing of Giulio Ricordi: an opera based on the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette. It would have historical spectacle and opportunities for great, larger-than-life soprano antics, and, most important of all to the Ricordis, it would be about something other than trivial people. Puccini ran hot and cold on the idea. First of all, he did not want to look as if he were capitalizing on Umberto Giordano’s success with Andrea Chénier, an opera that combined verismo with history and spectacle. Then other times he was excited about it, and allowed Ricordi to publish reports that he was definitely working on the project and it would be his next opera. The one who paid for all this ambivalence was, of course, Illica. Puccini’s constant rejections of his written scenes must have told him deep down that the opera would never happen, yet it was not officially put to rest for many years.
Puccini also combed the short stories of the radical Russian author Maxim Gorky for ideas, and again found one or two that sparked his imagination. His plan was to write a trilogy of one-act operas, thereby combining the best of the original verismo ideal of Cavalleria with the demand for epic operas. Giulio Ricordi was fixed against the idea from the start, but this did not stop Puccini from sending out ideas to librettists and poets for them to tinker around with. Anna Karenina was briefly considered. For a long time, Puccini diddled with a very unusual story by the French poet Pierre Louys entitled La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet), which told of a woman who tries to get her lover jealous by making him catch her in flagrante delicto with a young boy. The lover beats her mercilessly, causing the woman to declare her love for him, since she never knew he cared enough to beat her. This certainly would have removed Puccini from the category of “sentimental,” and shocking operas were all the rage just then. Didn’t Strauss get a ton of publicity when his Salome was banned from the Met after a single performance? He set librettists to work on this story, calling the operatic version Conchita. It remained on his desk for years, but he never wrote it. Puccini then turned to Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom he had originally contacted (through Ricordi’s agent) after La bohème and again after Tosca. D’Annunzio was making quite a name for himself with his poetry, dramas, articles, and mistresses—the most visible of whom was Eleanora Duse, Italy’s most famous actress. (Duse began an affair with D’Annunzio while she was still carrying on an affair with Arrigo Boito. It is a testament to her grace and deep affection for Boito that they remained close friends after the affair and until his death.) By this point, D’Annunzio was being called “The Bard of Italy,” and on one hand it was only natural that the leading composer and the leading poet of the country should work together. However, the thought of a Puccini/D’Annunzio collaboration must strike anyone familiar with either of their works as perfect absurdity. They met and exchanged flatteries (D’Annunzio being much more successful at this than Puccini). The poet recommended his historical tales Parisina and The Rose of Cyprus. Puccini was pushing for something intimate, light, and human-scaled. They lived on different planets. They continued to exchange polite letters for years and each took a long time letting go of the ego-flattering idea of working with the other. Privately, D’Annunzio complained of Puccini’s lack of vision on the big scale and said he had failed to mature as an artist. Meanwhile, each shopped for other collaborators.
Puccini was invited to New York in 1907. The financier Otto Kahn had joined the board of the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1903, stealthily taking over the whole huge operation. His intention was to make the Met the world’s Number One Opera House Bar None, and he had the money—his own and other board members’ such as J. P Morgan—to throw around. Not content to hire Gustav Mahler as music director, he also made Toscanini an offer he couldn’t refuse. The idea was to have Mahler in charge of German repertory and Toscanini take care of the Italian, although in reality there was a good deal of tense crossing over. He then managed to lure Giulio Gatti-Casazza from La Scala to act as impresario. But before any of these colossi could be nabbed, he insisted on getting Puccini himself to New York to attend a sort of Puccini festival, including Met premieres of Manon Lescaut and Butterfly.
Kahn gave Puccini the first-class treatment, booking a luxurious suite for him and Elvira aboard the steamship Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. Elvira fared little better on this North Atlantic passage in the dead of winter than she had on the voyage to South America, but she managed to get out of the cabin occasionally. Puccini, meanwhile, had a childlike delight in the ship’s amenities, particularly impressed with the bathroom lighting. Still, the ship was late in arriving in New York, and then had to clear customs and quarantine in Hoboken. They did not disembark until five o’clock on the afternoon of January 17, with the Met premiere of Manon Lescaut slated for that very evening. The Puccinis checked into the Hotel Astor amid bustling Herald Square and hopped into evening clothes just in time for the opera a few blocks up Broadway.
The performance, needless to say, was a great success, and suddenly Puccini was the toast of the celebrity-crazed town. He already knew the now-legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, whose appearance in La bohème had been booed off the Scala stage in 1902, partially due to illness. (Puccini was in the theater on that painful night.) The fun-loving, card-playing Caruso acted as Puccini’s tour guide in New York and introduced him to many prominent members of the Italian community there. They found quiet Italian restaurants near the opera house and in Little Italy where they could play cards until the wee hours. New York impressed Puccini, but it was all a bit much for him: the cold, the expense, the crowds. He admired the tall buildings and the latest in technology. The Met impressed him. And he liked American women. “They could make the Tower of Pisa stand erect,” he wrote his sister Ramelde. Elvira spied on him as ever but he “got away with everything,” he added in the same letter. The boast was premature: Elvira found a compromising note from a local groupie hidden in the band of Puccini’s top hat, and confronted the poor woman at the first opportunity. Puccini began to wonder if Elvira possessed supernatural powers of divination.
Meanwhile, however, he was rumored to be having an affair with the stunning soprano Lina Cavalieri, who was bringing Manon Lescaut to life onstage. Butterfly took more rehearsal. The very beautiful and popular Geraldine Farrar was given the title role. Farrar took great pains with it, hiring Japanese actresses with her own money to coach her in deportment. She was even said to walk around New York in the dead of winter in wooden sandals to master them. Puccini was never impressed with Farrar, however, thinking her voice too small for the role, especially at the large Met. Caruso was also to sing in Butterfly, which he had already sung in London. Farrar complained of his lack of attention at rehearsals and thought the Italians were in a conspiracy together. She may have been right. The newspapers raved about Butterfly and Caruso (as they always raved about Caruso) but said little about Farrar. She persevered, and it soon became her signature role, selling out the house frequently for more than a decade. Meanwhile, Puccini still needed an opera to compose. Sybil Seligman was set on another Belasco play, The Girl of the Golden West, which was in fact Belasco’s favorite of his own works. Puccini saw the play in New York, was favorably impressed, and returned to Italy Sybil got the play translated into Italian for him to read (Puccini never came close to mastering English, and his impressions of plays in English were made without regard to the actual meanings of the words, which is a fascinating point to consider.) Sybil also suggested the work’s final operatic title, La fanciulla del West. The Girl would keep him busy on his return, but it would be interrupted by a great crisis.
Life cannot have been easy for Elvira. Because of her precarious position as a woman who had left her husband, she must have had hundreds of daily insults and humiliations that we can only imagine today. And her second husband preferred life in small towns and in the country, where attitudes were even worse than those in the large cities. Puccini gave her plenty of real reasons to be furious, and her own fears and paranoia exacerbated the already precarious situation. In the fall of 1908, she finally snapped.
The event is probably the best-recorded incident in Puccini’s life. Their maid, Doria Manfredi, had worked in the Puccini household since shortly after the automobile accident, when she was sixteen years old. All seemed peaceful for more than five years. In September 1908, Elvira began to accuse Manfredi of seducing her husband. Both the girl and Puccini denied the accusations, but Elvira would not be convinced. She insulted Doria and spread rumors about her in the gossip-starved village. In early October, Elvira called the girl a whore and fired her. Not even this was enough. She consistently denounced her to anyone who would listen, and even to many who tried hard to avoid her. Puccini was distraught. He wrote to Sybil of his sadness and mentioned that he had “lovingly fingered his revolver.” All work on Fanciulla was suspended. Puccini wrote to Doria expressing his regret at Elvira’s behavior, and to Doria’s mother assuring her of the falseness of the accusations and apologizing profusely. He communicated much the same to her brothers, whom he knew from hunting trips.
Elvira left to visit her mother in Lucca before Christmas, and Puccini might have hoped for some peace, but she was even more worked up on her return. She publicly insulted Doria on Christmas Day, and in January actually threatened her life. Puccini considered abandoning Elvira between thoughts of suicide. Finally, he fled to Rome and checked into the Hotel Quirinale. It was, in retrospect, a cowardly act, but he simply could not endure the situation. Elvira increased her battle stance. She wrote Manfredi’s relatives detailed letters of the imagined affair and quoted imaginary love letters she supposedly had found. Doria could not even leave the house for fear of running into Elvira, who was constantly on the prowl in the village for the girl or for anyone who would listen to her tirades before they could escape her. Doria wrote a suicide note in which she protested her innocence and begged her family to take revenge on Elvira but not on Puccini, who had never done anything wrong in any way According to one account, she bought a toxic disinfectant and swallowed some, lying in agony for five days. The doctors could do nothing. Puccini, in Rome, learned of the incident and was distraught. His pity for the girl was clear, but his letters to Sybil at this time speak more of his own life being in ruins. Doria died on January 28, 1909. Puccini swore he would never speak to Elvira again, asking Ricordi to manage her affairs for him. Torre del Lago began to question if Elvira had not been right after all. Perhaps Doria really died of a botched abortion? A postmortem was ordered, and Doria was determined to have died a virgin.
It’s hard to know which is worse: Elvira’s persecution of an innocent girl or the attitudes of a community that demanded clinical proof of “innocence.” Had she not been a virgin, would that have justified her death? Still, setting aside this admittedly anachronistic quibble, the inquest should have satisfied the questions current at the time, and one would imagine even such a person as Elvira would have sought a way to de-escalate the situation. Not a chance: she actually continued her tirade. The Manfredis brought legal action against Elvira. The story made international headlines. Puccini lingered in Rome, doing nothing. Elvira fled to Milan with Tonio, since life at Torre del Lago was no longer a viable option for her. Friends urged Puccini to take this opportunity to split with Elvira once and for all. Illica even suggested he move to New York to avoid the possibility of him returning to “his weakness,” as he called Elvira. In March, Puccini came down with the flu and summoned his sisters to Rome to care for him, effectively eliminating any severe course of action. After much swearing that he would never see Elvira again, Puccini showed signs of wavering, as Illica feared he would. He went to Milan to see Tonio, still insisting he would not see Elvira. He did, however, and she was hardly repentant. Indeed, she reiterated that it was all his fault, that she knew she was right, and that God would punish him for all the suffering he had brought down on her over the years. Here we have clear evidence that Elvira’s vehemence was years in the making.
They met in Milan in June, and although she continued her abuse, they moved toward a rapprochement. He told her plainly that he intended to return to her if he could be assured of the peace and quiet he needed to work. The court reached a verdict in the Manfredis’ case against Elvira (she was not present) on July 6. She was found guilty of defamation, libel, and menace to life and limb, sentenced to over five months in prison, given a small fine, and ordered to pay all costs. The international press returned the story to the headlines. Elvira wrote Puccini, castigating him for not doing enough. Did he want to see her in prison? (A rhetorical question, one suspects.) And she added a new leitmotif to her tirade: the Manfredis had misled her, the sisters had gossiped, and the mother, the real culprit, was behind it all. Puccini sent the attorneys to work. Finally, the Manfredis withdrew the suit with a payment of 12,000 lire from Puccini. Elvira met up with Puccini again in Bagni di Lucca, and they resumed their life together, somehow.
We do not know on what terms the Puccinis were reconciled and can only imagine what he had said to her privately, Yet everyone noticed that Elvira was slightly changed by the experience. There would not be any more major public scenes in their life together, let alone international headlines. The obsessive spying on her part dropped dramatically. And if friends and intimates never saw them as particularly close, even in the latter days of their bizarre relationship, they did achieve some sort of entente that allowed for at least the appearance of a reasonably peaceful household. Their great marital crisis had this salutary effect, even if it also had a body count.
Before we completely trash Elvira, we need to pause a moment to reflect that women who have married great musicians invariably have a rough time with public opinion. Kostanze Mozart has been unfairly enshrined as a twit. Giuseppina Strepponi was blamed by the people of Busseto for alienating Verdi’s affections from them, even though there never was any affection to alienate. Cosima Wagner (admittedly, a difficult character) is always cited as being even more hateful than her husband, which is simply not within the realm of possibility Pauline Strauss remains the butt of many jokes. In our own day, Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman McCartney are somehow both blamed for the demise of the Beatles (and a great deal else besides), while the public is convinced that Courtney Love actually killed Kurt Cobain (who called her a “goddess” in his suicide note). Granted, all these women had or have their faults and shortcomings. Other than Strepponi and Eastman, who patiently withdrew from public view and waited for public opinion to change, the others asserted themselves and have been heavily abused for it.
But whatever their faults, the men in question needed no wives to encourage their dark sides. Mozart was an overgrown brat with some serious developmental issues; Verdi loved humanity best from afar; Wagner has a good claim to be rated as one of the real bastards of all times; Richard Strauss was even dumpier and more conventionally bourgeois than his “scrubbing-brush” Frau; John Lennon was a genius and an inspiration but was also a bitter and angry person; and nothing could have stopped Cobain’s self-destructive spiral. It is as if the public must siphon off the sins of the artist and dump them on his wife in order to enjoy his art with a clear conscience. People are afraid that admiring the creations of a flawed man will be seen as an inherent endorsement of that man’s character defects: thus the whole debate about Wagner the Man vs. Wagner the Artist. It goes beyond music. The public is still shocked—shocked and appalled—whenever a sports hero is busted for drugs or an American president is caught with his pants down. However, there is a particular problem with this in music history, and, the “great musicians” being disproportionately male, we have gotten into the habit of making their wives out to be albatrosses at best, monsters at worst.
With all this in mind, however, it is still rather difficult to discern the good in Elvira Puccini. That she was a handsome woman we take on the word of her contemporaries, since the photos do not bear this out. No doubt she was attractive when she smiled, but one searches the photo archives in vain for such a moment caught on film. Although she came from a musical family, she had no appreciation for music—Puccini’s or anyone else’s, and he once complained to her in a letter about the way she sneered whenever he mentioned the subject. In fact, she even met Illica for lunch once in the early days of her liaison with Puccini for the sole purpose of telling him that Puccini was hardly working at all on La bohème. But little more harm was done in that direction, since Illica learned to avoid her. Ramelde had long maintained that Elvira would ruin Puccini. Even the charming Vincent Seligman discreetly let it be known that he did not care for her and frankly admitted that he and the other children were afraid of her. He suggested that Elvira must have welcomed her own death the day it came, and one wonders if she was the only person to feel a sense of relief on that day.
Puccini managed to finish Fanciulla despite more than the usual amount of problems with the librettists. Working without Giacosa and Illica for the first time in decades, Puccini was paired with Carlo Zangarini, who was half American and whose mother was from Colorado, no less. Puccini was dissatisfied, predictably, and a second collaborator was brought in, a certain Guelfo Civinini, who would spend many subsequent years complaining of the shoddy treatment his verse got at Puccini’s hands. The premiere was slated for the Met, the first ever for that house. Kahn was getting everything he wanted for “his” house: Gatti-Casazza, Toscanini, and Mahler were installed in their various positions, and for the moment everyone managed to get along.
New York was brimming with opera. Caruso, Farrar, and a host of other big names kept audiences enthralled. Oscar Hammerstein had opened the rival Manhattan Opera Company on Twenty-third Street, gathering up all the world’s best singers who weren’t already under contract to the Mighty Met and specializing in everything that wasn’t getting full treatment there: French opera, new works, and many performances of Salome, still anathema at the Met (as it would remain until the 1930s). Kahn eventually had to buy out Hammerstein, paying him a fortune not to produce opera in New York (surely the sweetest deal ever for an opera impresario). But for the moment there was a healthy rivalry. All Kahn needed was a first-class world premiere to put the Met at the top of the world’s heap.
This happened on December 10, 1910. Puccini sailed to New York with Tonio and Tito Ricordi, and without Elvira, who, it seems, was still being “punished.” Toscanini had been working the orchestra through its difficult music for weeks. Belasco himself directed, working himself to the bone to try to teach the mostly Italian choristers how to throw a lasso (and what one wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall for those sessions!). The Met was festooned with flowers and Italian and American flags for the gala, and (predictably) ticket prices were raised. Scalpers pushed prices up to $150. La toute New York was there in all their formidable jewelry. The audience went ballistic, American style. Ovations, flowers, and shouts greeted the singers (the Czech soprano Emmy Destinn taking the difficult role of Minnie, supported by Caruso and the star baritone Pasquale Amato) and Puccini, Toscanini, and Belasco. It was two in the morning before Puccini could sneak away to a quiet Italian restaurant.
The newspapers were mixed, puzzled by the opera’s American setting and the unusual score (as they still are), but for the moment Puccini could savor the biggest demonstration of public affection of his career. The Met took Fanciulla to Philadelphia and to the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, and the ovations continued. The public had not merely been dazzled by the gala at the Met. Fanciulla, with the first-rate cast singing roles especially written for them, Belasco’s directing, and Toscanini’s conducting, was a hit. It would only fade into the background years later, when people started to believe the notion that Puccini’s personal life had interfered with his flow of genius and the giddiness of initial audiences was seen as more symptomatic of American pride than artistic judgment. It has since risen again in public estimation, but now suffers from a dearth of Destinns, Carusos, Amatos, Toscaninis, and Belascos to bring it fully alive. If one could operate an operatic time machine, December 10, 1910, would be as good a night as any in history to return to.
The result on the composer was, predictably, a large creative hangover. Sailing back to Italy on New Year’s Eve, he stayed in his luxurious cabin while the rest of the ship partied, and poured out his soul in a sad letter to Sra. Carla Toscanini. If she only knew how unhappy he was and how much he envied her happy life! Since he, Carla, and half the world knew perfectly well about Toscanini’s infidelities, and knew that Toscanini was at that moment carrying on a grand, very public affair with no less a personage than Geraldine Farrar, Puccini must have been miserable indeed to write such things to Sra. Toscanini. He returned to Torre and leafed through all the uncompleted ideas on his desk, desperate as ever to find another project. He wrote volumes to Sybil asking for help.
Puccini’s searches for libretti in many ways reflected the schizophrenia of Italian thought at the time. It was not only a problem for music, but for all art and architecture and everything that could define the national identity. The Englishman John Ruskin, for example, had started an international debate centering on the city of Venice. What was to be done with the crumbling treasure? Should it be repaired? Or rebuilt, but as it was? Or rebuilt with modern amenities? And what about new buildings that were required, such as hospitals? Should they be modern or built in the style of the surrounding structures? The architect Camillo Boito designed buildings for the Venetian lagoon (besides his restoration work, such as on Franchetti’s Ca’ d’oro) that were modern but created in the style of the neighboring buildings as those styles were understood at the time.
This historicity earned scorn from all sides of the debate, but answered a lot of needs as well. On the extreme end of the spectrum were the Futurists, whose famous Manifesto of 1909 declared war on the past. Museums, they declared, were cemeteries. False historicism was deplorable. Struggle was art, and war beautiful. Some Futurists expressed their desire to fill in and pave the Grand Canal of Venice and turn it into the world’s greatest drag strip for racing cars. One is almost smothered by the obvious unresolved Oedipal complexes afoot here (“must… obliterate … patrimony!!!”), and one is grateful that the aesthetics of the movement were so vaguely stated, Yet the fatigue with museums and historicity was not contemptible—every traveler in Italy has felt it, even if furtively, at one point or another. The Futurists may not have succeeded in paving over the Grand Canal, but they were a symptom of the issues of their times, and their influence pervaded many surprising segments of Italian society.
Puccini represented much of what the Futurists hated, or at least thought they hated at the time. He was the established composer of the nation, and therefore was by definition all wrong. His work, long derided as “effeminate” and “sensitive,” lacked the muscularity the new age seemed to demand. (Indeed it did, to Puccini’s credit, as history has determined.) The young composer Ildebrando Pizzetti wrote a scathing article in 1910, castigating Puccini’s bourgeois tastes. And Pizzetti was no fly-by-night trying to make a name for himself by being controversial: he was clearly a serious composer. Pizzetti’s music over his long career was good, although when hearing it one always has the fear that there will be a pop quiz after the concert. His was clearly a very different nature from Puccini’s, and while he mellowed considerably in his attitude toward the composer in later life, his youthful fulminations against the previous generation upset the always-sensitive Puccini. Pizzetti’s articles were nothing compared to the book-length rodomontade issued by the critic Fausto Torrefranca in 1912. Torrefranca reiterated Pizzetti’s gripes and then got personal. Puccini was lazy. He did not venture into new territory. (This is a common invective aimed at artists who do not create what the critic would like them to create: one may like or dislike Fanciulla, but no one who had listened carefully to it could have made that claim.) He was in it for the money. In short, he was not an artist and he did not produce music.
Again, Puccini took this jab more seriously than the public did. He was at sea trying to figure out what to do next. Mascagni was able to turn out new works according to the latest ideas: none of them have survived in the repertory, but this was not yet apparent. Mascagni even managed to do what Puccini never did in setting two works of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s: Isabeau in 1911 and Parisina in 1913. Puccini could not adapt to the latest fads. Even the House of Ricordi itself seemed to be turning its back on him. Tito Ricordi pushed Puccini for something he was clearly never going to be able to produce: a huge, epic opera that would satisfy and unify all the various national urges and force the world to acknowledge the supremacy of Italian art. Meanwhile, all Puccini could do was read through plays and stories, write to Sybil asking for more ideas, reject them, and carry on another affair.
This one was with the beautiful German Baroness Josephina von Stängel, the wife, we believe, of an officer in the German army. They met in Viareggio, always popular among fashionable northern tourists, and at some point Puccini rented a house for her there. She seemed to think Puccini would divorce Elvira (in Germany, since divorce was not possible in Italy until very recently) and marry her, and welcomed the prospect. Although Puccini resorted to all his usual tricks to keep the affair quiet, he also took some rather flagrant chances this time. Perhaps he thought Elvira was sufficiently chastened after l’affaire Manfredi, or perhaps he was enjoying pushing the limits. Or perhaps he just enjoyed the game as much as Elvira did in her own twisted way. He arranged for letters to be sent to a secret post office box. At one point, when he was on a clandestine visit to Josi, as she was called, he tried to arrange sending his letters home to Elvira through a friend, who would have them postmarked in his village and thus throw Elvira off the scent, Yet he also traveled with Josi, and Puccini knew he was a recognizable face throughout Europe and beyond. He and Josi attended the Bayreuth Festival in 1913, the last, as it would turn out, for eleven years. At the festival, a friend of Puccini’s from Milan happened to be the guest of Wagner’s widow Cosima, and pointed him out to her. Cosima immediately asked the friend to invite Puccini to her box. The embarrassed Puccini explained that he was with the baroness and could not accept the invitation, and the friend had to return to Cosima and say he was mistaken … it was not Puccini after all. Biographers take Puccini’s excuse at face value, but I am dubious. Although the mores of 1913 haute société could confuse anybody, Cosima Wagner was not in a position to put on airs about respectability. Nor was prudery among her many prejudices. And if Puccini was concerned about gossip regarding his latest affair, I don’t see why the most famous composer in the world would have dragged his mistress to the Bayreuth Festival, of all places. I suspect Puccini, who was always tongue-tied around notables and celebrities, was simply terrified to make small talk with the scariest witwefrau in the Second Reich. Still, history should note that Cosima had the grace, or curiosity, to extend an invitation to an artist whose work, in and of itself, did not interest her much, while Puccini lacked the grace, or the curiosity, or the courage, to effect that meeting.
Somehow, Puccini survived this little indiscretion intact, but that did not solve the artistic problem. He must have wondered if Tito Ricordi was starting to believe the Pizzettis and the Torrefrancas of Italy, since relations cooled between them at this time. Tito had a new protégé, the thirty-year-old Riccardo Zandonai, a former student of Mascagni’s. Zandonai had done what Puccini had said was impossible: he had made an opera out of Conchita, the lurid Louys-derived story, and had a success at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1911. Zandonai made no secret of his contempt for Puccini, and Zandonai had Tito’s ear. His next project was exactly what Tito wanted: Francesca da Rimini, produced at Turin in 1914. It was based on a play by D’Annunzio, which was in turn an expansion of the celebrated episode found in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno. It had big passions with larger-than-life people in it—no commoners leading inconsequential lives on the streets of Paris or in the mountains of California. There was a ripsnorting battle scene, pageantry, and drama. The score owed much to Wagner, a bit to Debussy, and also a thing or two to Mascagni and the Italians. This one had it all. It subsumed French Grand Opéra, Wagner’s “Music of the Future,” and the blood-gushing of Verdi, Yet it was thoroughly Italian, having a provenance of D’Annunzio and Dante. Francesca was a success, and it has always remained popular in Italy, although its scale makes it difficult to perform frequently. But it never quite got off the ground outside of Italy. An important production at the Met in 1982 was received with puzzled interest, and everyone was able to praise its qualities (as Puccini himself had). But if the point of Francesca was to kill off Bohème once and for all, it must be considered a failure. And Zandonai never repeated this early success.
D’Annunzio seemed to be on the cutting edge of everything, even if Puccini was well aware of the man’s greatest talent—self-promotion. D’Annunzio even ventured into the newest of new worlds, cinema, getting paid a fortune merely for writing the screen titles in the epic of ancient Rome, Cabiria, in 1914. (Pizzetti made some good money writing the music.) Funny, there was no outcry from the Futurist quarters about the historicity of the film Cabiria. Mascagni, always hip to new trends, wrote a sound track for the film Rapsodia satánica the following year. Puccini never developed, or pretended to develop, an interest in cinema.
Puccini maintained his correspondence with D’Annunzio and would have been delighted to compose something cutting-edge, provided that it had the human element so crucial to his own artistic process. On a visit to D’Annunzio on the Riviera in 1913, the poet was excited about an opera based on the ill-fated “Children’s Crusade.” Puccini found the notion grotesque. Clearly, the two were getting nowhere. D’Annunzio was obsessed with war, a subject Puccini could never stomach. Nor did war remain solely a poetic stance: D’Annunzio wrote tomes and made speeches encouraging Italian colonization of Libya in 1912, which turned out to be a thirty-year-long disaster for both countries. He took the Futurists’ bellicose stance at face value, and wrote odes urging his countrymen to “hurl our seed from Latin shores to make the desert bloom.” (Indeed, there is rather a lot of seed-hurling throughout D’Annunzio’s work.)
Puccini never once wrote about war after Edgar: this alone must make him unique among opera composers. On a subsequent visit to Paris, Puccini and D’Annunzio were supposed to meet again and find something to work on, but D’Annunzio “got busy” and the meeting never happened. It was their last attempt to collaborate. Puccini finally turned away from the whole D’Annunzio idea and actually welcomed overtures from a theater in Vienna that wanted him to write an operetta. The producers had an eye to the lucrative sheet music market. Imagine, a dozen waltzes and other light tunes by Puccini! Tito Ricordi was disgusted with the idea. This was not what he wanted for his business. Puccini collaborated with the journalist Giuseppe Adami, a very agreeable man quite unlike his temperamental previous librettists, and set him to work on the basic outlines of a romance story he had received from the Viennese producers. It soon became apparent that an operetta was not within Puccini’s gifts. “Anything but that!” he eventually wrote.
Adami reworked the story as an opera, but under Puccini’s constant micromanagement. He wanted something like Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, only lighter and funnier. And yes, there would be waltzes galore in it. Why not? Never content to have librettists work on merely one project at a time, he also set Adami to work on a ghoulish one-act play he had seen in Paris, La Houppelande, by Didier Gold. If this weren’t enough, Puccini also focused on a novel that had interested him for some time, The Two Little Wooden Shoes, by the famous Victorian “Lady-Novelist” who wrote under the pen name of Ouida. This bit of teary fluff by the authoress of A Dog of Flanders continued to gnaw at Puccini, and he finally announced to the newspapers that he was setting it as an opera. Within days, he read that Mascagni, too, was setting The Two Little Wooden Shoes. All the better, he thought. It would be like the old days, when he went head-to-head with Leoncavallo over La bohème and wrangled with Franchetti over La Tosca. Now he and Mascagni would finally duke it out. Puccini was back on track. Only a worldwide cataclysm could distract him.
When the cataclysm came in August 1914, Puccini’s powers of imagination did not comprehend its magnitude. Austria-Hungary Germany, Russia, France, and Great Britain mobilized, and Puccini was not alone in hoping that the war would be a quick exercise followed by a tedious session of diplomatic wrangling. Few could imagine that Europe, as they knew it, would be changed forever. Italy was neutral at the outset of the war, bound by a diplomatic alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany forged in 1882. The pact was denounced by Verdi at the time, and there were still people alive (Boito among them) who had fought Austria in 1866 to annex Venice and the Trentino Valley to the new Kingdom of Italy. (Venice had been won, but the Trentino remained in Austrian hands in 1914.) There were also the cultural and economic ties with France, which most assumed were Italy’s natural ally. But there were ties with Austria and Germany as well, and Puccini had a hard time taking sides. In the summer of 1914, while most of Europe was mobilizing, Puccini was enjoying a seaside idyll with Josi in Viareggio. Toscanini visited, and Puccini was tactless enough to mention that he thought it might be a good thing if the Germans invaded Italy and set all the chaos into some sort of “good German order.” Toscanini had a fit and locked himself in his own room for a week, steaming. He refused to see Puccini or receive any word from him for some time, and their relationship was permanently compromised.
Nor was Toscanini the only person Puccini annoyed. The Germans invaded neutral Belgium and bombed civilians and targets of cultural heritage in the French city of Reims. Artists of many nations signed on to a French newspaper ad denouncing the atrocities. Puccini refused to sign, saying he had friends on both sides of the conflict. The French journalists now denounced Puccini, who was absolutely bewildered by the rancor. He compounded the problem by writing a letter explaining that he was obligated, as an Italian subject, to remain neutral in the war. The German papers, meanwhile, reported that Puccini had in fact signed the original protest letter, and his operas were immediately banned in Germany. A pose of neutrality had not helped him any more than it had served Belgium. Now he was a fair target for patriots of all sides. Meanwhile, he continued to meet with agents of the Viennese theater to plan for his projected production there. Even after Italy entered the war on the Allies’ (France, Russia, and Great Britain) side, Puccini continued to meet with the Viennese parties in neutral Switzerland. Josi, of course, became an enemy alien when Italy entered the war, but she managed to rent a villa in the Swiss town of Lugano, just across Lago Maggiore from the Italian border. Puccini’s little trips to Switzerland therefore served a double purpose, at least for a while.
Puccini’s conduct during the war stood in stark contrast to his peers. Mascagni, in his array of official positions in Rome, led all the galas and fund-raisers that were expected of him. Toscanini, an ardent patriot, quit the Metropolitan and returned to Italy. There had been artistic differences with Kahn, and his affair with Farrar had reached a breaking point when she demanded he leave his wife Carla if he wanted to continue with her. How little Farrar understood him: asking an Italian man of that time to keep a mistress was one thing, but to leave his family quite another. In any case, Toscanini would indubitably have returned to Italy in the dire times no matter what temptations remained in New York. Farrar briefly married an actor out of spite (it did not last long) and Toscanini moved up the date of his return to Italy. It was just as well: he had originally been booked to sail on the Lusitania’s last voyage. Once back in Italy, he forfeited all fees and salaries to work for the cause. He organized a season at Milan’s Teatro dal Verme and persuaded the singers to donate their performances gratis. The season was a great success. He gave a series of concerts in other Italian cities and was finally invited to do the same in Rome. His choice of music for these nonoperatic concerts was interesting, and a harbinger of things to come: he played Beethoven, Wagner, and even a work by a living German composer (albeit of half-Italian ancestry) named Ferruccio Busoni. Many were highly displeased. Toscanini did not want to forfeit the iconic power of German art to the German militaristic cause.
Years later, Toscanini would find himself in exile in New York, taking advantage of the great talent pool to be found there among fellow exiles from the Third Reich, giving performances of Wagner and Beethoven at every conceivable opportunity. Even Winston Churchill, one of the great manipulators of imagery of all times, was impressed, and co-opted the famous four-note introduction to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as the BBC’s theme during the Second World War. But that lay years in the future. During the time of the Third Reich, it would be possible, if tenuous, to separate the idea of Germany from the idea of National Socialism. In the First World War, there was no such possible parsing. There were cases of dachshunds in London being killed. The Germans were the Huns, les boches, racially defined as bloodthirsty barbarians. Otherwise, what on earth was this war about? Revenge for the French humiliation of 1871? A strip of mountain valley in the Alps? No one was in the mood, yet, for Toscanini’s theories about art.
The city of Rome banned German music for the duration of the war, and Toscanini refused to conduct there again until 1920. But he did not relax his war efforts for a moment. His entire household was mobilized: Signora Carla joined the Red Cross; their fifteen-year-old daughter Wally sewed at home and helped in the hospitals. Their seventeen-year-old son Walter joined the ambulance corps and then enlisted in the artillery at eighteen. Toscanini took a band directly to the bloody Monte Santo front in 1917, the apex of Italy’s involvement in the war. His aplomb under fire became legendary, with international reports (verified by numerous eyewitnesses) telling of his conducting during battles. When there was an explosion or a flying piece of shrapnel whizzing by, Toscanini might exclaim, “Viva Italia!” but would otherwise not miss a beat. Once, a shell ripped open the bass drum, but Toscanini continued to lead the band. Elvira read this newspaper account aloud to Puccini, perhaps tweaking him a bit, saying the Lord must have intervened to save “our friend.” Puccini, we are told, shook his head and said nothing. After the disastrous defeat at Caporetto in 1917, Toscanini and his band were among the last to quit the battlefield, well after the High Command had fled however they could. Toscanini helped soldiers escape on trains and wagons, and calmly went to the hospital, where Walter was wounded. He returned on a slow train to Milan, along with many other scattered remnants of the army, came home, and broke down sobbing in Carla’s arms, crying for Italy.
If Toscanini’s efforts during the war were exemplary from a patriotic standpoint, D’Annunzio was in a state bordering on the psychopathic. Even before Italy entered the war, he staged public rallies to encourage involvement on the Allied side, quite grander than his Libyan “seed-hurling” exhortations. The theatricality of these events was notorious, always with D’Annunzio as the centerpiece. His passion was beyond any sense of patriotism—he had assimilated all the Futurists’ blather about the sublimity of war and decided he himself would become their long-awaited “man of action.” He was probably the Italian most responsible for Italy’s entrance in the war (along with some good help from the British Foreign Office). Once Italy entered the war, he jumped in with both feet, first in the army and then in the fledgling air force. He lost an eye in an accident in 1916, but returned to active service by the following year. In 1918, he even flew over Vienna and dropped propaganda leaflets he composed himself.
Puccini could not have been further from all this. While he helped friends and acquaintances with letters, and donated a song or two fund-raising albums, he never once appeared in public in any patriotic or fund-raising activity. He continued to visit Josi until the Italian consul, wondering if the mistress were not in fact a German spy, canceled his visa and threatened Puccini with arrest if he crossed the border again. (Elvira got wind of this contretemps and fortunately kept whatever she had to say private, thereby avoiding an international incident.) After much wrangling through third parties, Puccini managed to secure the right to supervise the premiere of his new work, now called La rondine, in technically neutral Monte Carlo, forfeiting royalties in Austria and Germany. The premiere of the offbeat work there was a success in 1917, but it scored Puccini few points back home. Puccini’s enemies had a good case against him. By all appearances, his answer to the Great War was to hide in his swamps, ignore public appeals, stand aloof from fund-raisers and morale-boosters (even of the nonbelligerent, Red Cross variety), annoy the French, fool around with a German woman, and compose Viennese waltzes while expressing more fears about his lost royalties than about the greatest catastrophe to strike Europe since the Black Plague. We know from Puccini’s letters that the senseless killing grieved him to the point of near-incapacitation. He simply could not wrap his head around the fact of the war, and this looked a lot like treason in 1917.
He discarded his plans for The Two Little Wooden Shoes, allowing Mascagni to do what he would with it. Mascagni’s opera, Lodoletta, was successfully produced in Rome in 1917, but for all its qualities, has not survived in repertory. (Interestingly, criticism of Lodoletta sounds much like the primary complaint about Puccini’s La rondine: namely, that the first two acts are excellently light and fluffy but are at odds with the final act, which aspires to high drama without quite attaining it. Perhaps the times caused disjointed creativity.) Meanwhile, Puccini did manage to rally enough to complete his most ambitious project to date, a series of three one-act operas titled (after much debate) Il trittico. The first opera in II trittico was set to Adami’s translation and adaptation of La Houppelande, which was the first to be completed. The next two were Suor Angelica and the comedy Gianni Schicchi, both original creations of the playwright Giovanni Forzano. Suor Angelica was a real gamble, telling the story of a nun who committed suicide distraught over the death of the child that had been taken away from her. Puccini visited his last remaining sister, Iginia, now the Mother Superior of her convent, and played the score for the assembled nuns. They were all reduced to tears and pronounced their nihil obstat on the work. The honor of the premiere went again to the Metropolitan, although Puccini did not plan to attend. Wartime travel was too dangerous. Indeed, the composer Enrique Granados and his wife, returning from the successful premiere of his opera Goyescas at the Met in 1916, died when their ship, the Sussex, was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel.
The war dragged on, and another sad tragedy shook artistic circles in Italy. Boito fell ill in January 1918. Puccini wrote depressed letters but did not visit, as others did. Toscanini was a frequent visitor at Boito’s bedside and kept vigil there in his last days. They discussed plans for the still-unfinished opera Nerone, and Boito died in July. Peace finally came in November 1918, but there could be little rejoicing. Too much had been lost.
Il trittico was going nowhere, fast. There was a great success in London, where Puccini was cheered to the rafters at the premiere and received and congratulated by the king and queen. He was surprised, then, to learn of Covent Garden’s almost immediate subsequent plans to dismantle the work. Puccini engaged Sybil to lobby for him at the house, and especially for his poor, neglected Angelica. It was no use. The Royal Opera was under the direction of a Mr. Henry Higgins, who was an iron-willed impresario. (Once, when receiving a foreign diva’s exorbitant salary demands, Higgins told her agent, “Please inform the good lady that we are only engaging her to sing!”) Trittico got chopped up in London, despite all of Sybil’s best efforts. This is better than it fared in Cologne, where it simply flopped. Puccini needed Toscanini’s help in bringing the difficult work to life, but that help was not forthcoming. Besides their usual personality problems, Toscanini simply did not like Trittico, and said so publicly. Only Vienna managed to make a hit out of it, with Lotte Lehmann interpreting the role of Suor Angelica. The trip to Vienna was rewarding for Puccini, and he was glad to visit the grand old city again in peacetime. It was changed, of course, shorn of the empire that was its raison d’être. Yet the soul of the city survived intact, and Puccini noted that the musical life was in fact better than ever.
It was hard to say the same about his own country. The sense of disappointment in Trittico’s, fortunes mirrored the malaise of Italy after the war. Six hundred thousand dead soldiers, many, many more maimed and wounded, unemployment, Communist agitation, strikes … and for what? The Trentino Valley? A slightly better-looking map of Italy? Puccini went into another depression. D’Annunzio, for contrast, went into action, even if it was insane action. Rallying a band of black-shirted disillusioned “patriots,” D’Annunzio decided to circumvent the peace negotiations at Versailles and annexed the city of Fiume (over the northeastern border) to Italy. When Italy disavowed D’Annunzio’s action, he set himself up as a sort of “philosopher-king” of the city, writing a poetic constitution and staging pageants for the New Order. He arranged exercises for the soldiers and battle cries of “Eia! Eia! Eia!” with a separate half crying back “Alala!” Megalomaniacal foolishness, of course, except that there was inevitable bloodshed. Not D’Annunzio’s, naturally. He escaped the city and saved his hide. His antics were closely watched by the up-and-coming man on the political scene, Benito Mussolini, who applied D’Annunzio’s aesthetics exactly but more effectively. This was the payoff of the cries for muscularity and action demanded by the early critics who deplored Puccini’s sentimentality and feminine sensitivity We should remember this when we repeat those comments uncritically today.
It was time to get back to work. Puccini had lunch with the agreeable Adami and also their acquaintance Renato Simone, a temperamental sort of litterato in the D’Annunzio mold. He would prove to be a difficult collaborator for Puccini, as Puccini would prove for him. But at this lunch, all lights were green. “What about Turandotte?” asked Simone casually. He left Puccini with an outline, and within days Puccini had given the go-ahead on the project.
The story of Turandot, as it would come to be called, was a major departure from Puccini’s norm. The play was written by Carlo Gozzi in 1762 as a reaction to the “realism” of his rival, Carlo Goldoni. Gozzi’s play reverted to the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte and had the familiar clowns of that tradition wander into legendary China. The play was full of topical references made comic by their context. For Puccini, working on this story would be a final break with verismo, although certainly his last few works pushed the narrow limits of that genre almost beyond recognition. He knew it would challenge him deeply. He was also interested in a symbiotic relationship between Italian operatic tradition and Chinese music. Puccini knew nothing of Chinese music, and had no intention of writing an ethnographic essay, but he was delightfully inspired by what he heard on a music box from an acquaintance, the Baron Fassini, who had been in China. Puccini made notes of the music and set to work.
Adami and Simone delivered the first two acts of the three-act opera within a reasonable amount of time and with a relative minimum of rearrangement by Puccini. The third act, however, proved elusive. Either Simone could never get it right or Puccini could never be satisfied. The fact is that Puccini had backed himself into a corner: Turandot was epic and ambitious. He had beautifully set up the conflict of Male vs. Female. But to resolve that conflict on the stage within a couple of hours, on his own human terms (as opposed to Wagner’s very philosophical exploration of the mystical union of opposites in Tristan und Isolde) was eluding him. Why wouldn’t it, since the conflict itself had never been resolved? Puccini blamed Simone squarely, and complained to all and sundry that his librettists were killing him. (It may have been the other way around. Illica died in 1919.)
So was everything else. Puccini was not feeling well. His diabetes wore him out, and he began to complain of a sore throat that simply would not go away. He continued to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, however. There was more. Torre del Lago had changed. A peat factory whirred and hummed and stank where there had only been eerie, sea breeze-scented quiet before. It was time to leave. He and Elvira moved permanently to Viareggio. That was hardly a step down, and Elvira must have been overjoyed that her thirty-year purgatory in the swamps was finally at an end, but for Puccini it represented another break with his treasured past. His sister Iginia died in late 1922, praying for the soul of her errant brother until the end. He was the only Puccini left of his generation.
A bright spot, and a sparkle from the past, came that year. Toscanini had taken over La Scala in 1921 and turned the place upside down with positive reforms. In fact, the 1920s, his span of rule there, may well have been the apex of that venerable house’s distinguished history. A gala production of Manon Lescaut was planned for the 1922-23 season to mark the opera’s thirtieth anniversary. Thirty, of course, is a random number to pick as important, but the twenty-fifth anniversary fell during the war and there was no time for galas then at La Scala. It had more significance beyond the thirty years. The production was meant to be an acknowledgment of Puccini’s long career, a sort of “lifetime achievement award,” and perhaps a token of apology for the fiasco of the Butterfly premiere. And it was to solidify the rocky, tenuous relationship between Italy’s leading composer and her leading conductor, so injured by the war, their disagreements over Il trittico, and their divergent personalities.
The night of December 26 was a tremendous success for Puccini on almost all these levels. No one present had ever heard such a performance of Manon Lescaut, not even Puccini. It caused a great deal of reconsideration of Puccini’s whole output. Manon Lescaut had put him ahead of a very large pack in 1893. Thirty years later, a production that gave the opera the respect it deserved made it clear that Puccini was on an entirely separate plane from the other composers with whom he was invariably grouped. Mascagni may have had the edge on officialdom in Rome, and there would always be Cavalleria, but Puccini ruled the opera house. As far as being an official act of reconciliation with Toscanini, however, the night had only a temporary healing effect.
Puccini struck up another affair, his last. This was Rose Ader, a light soprano who (somehow) had premiered the role of Suor Angelica in Hamburg in 1921. The relationship was quite passionate and remarkably free of drama, considering Puccini’s track record. Puccini tried to get her hired at the Met, but they replied that they already had plenty of voices of “that type” from within their own country and did not need to import any. Some scholars think the second soprano role of Liù in Turandot was written with Rose in mind, although she did not sing it. Rose, who was Jewish, emigrated to the Americas with the advent of the Third Reich and settled in Buenos Aires as a music teacher.
Puccini managed to play what he had of Turandot (all but that damned Act III) for Toscanini and told him of his plans for completing the opera. Toscanini had other priorities. The premiere of Boito’s Nerone was slated for May 1924. Toscanini worked with several others to complete the work, according to what he and Boito discussed in the latter’s last days. It was more than a premiere for Toscanini—it was a point of national honor. Puccini, naturally, was curious, if a bit skeptical. Privately he complained about “that God” Toscanini and casually referred to Toscanini’s “manipulations” of Boito’s score. This got back to Toscanini, who was not pleased. Toscanini closed all rehearsals at La Scala to the public. Puccini snuck in and was discovered, and was unceremoniously tossed out of the theater by Toscanini. Puccini shrugged. “That’s the way he is,” he muttered to Rosa Raisa, the prima donna, on his way out. The final dress rehearsal was open to a few invited colleagues and musical notables, but Toscanini ordered Puccini to be barred from the theater. Puccini showed up and was forbidden entrance. It was an unnecessary humiliation from Toscanini, based purely on personal rancor. It also demonstrated that in the new era, the conductor held all the power, even over the composer. Toscanini’s dictatorial personality, which had so much impact on his ability to yank great performances from musicians, and which would one day face off without flinching against Mussolini and Hitler, simply crushed the gentle Puccini. He retreated from Milan, and Nerone was premiered without his attendance. Toscanini got his victorious night of national honor, but the opera did not last in the repertory. Puccini’s doubts were not unfounded after all.
It would not matter for long. Puccini was terminally ill. The nagging sore throat he had suffered for some time turned out to be cancer, although Tonio withheld this diagnosis from his father for some time. Doctors were consulted, tried, and dismissed. Finally, a specialist was recommended in Brussels who used a technique of inserting radium needles directly into the tumor. The operation would be grueling and painful, but Puccini agreed to it. Tonio took him to Brussels on November 4,1924. Elvira was ill and being cared for by Fosca. Both intended to join Puccini in Brussels. Puccini took along sketches for the second part of Act III of Turandot, intending to work on it during his convalescence. External treatments were applied for ten days. Fosca arrived with her best friend Carla Toscanini, though Elvira, still unwell, went to Milan. The grueling second phase of the treatment, with a tracheotomy and the insertion of radium needles, began on November 24 and was deemed successful. Puccini showed signs of recovery, but then suffered heart failure. The papal nuncio in Brussels administered the last rites. Puccini died on November 29, 1924.
Before the news hit the papers, Adami was informed. He rushed to La Scala to tell Toscanini, who broke down and sobbed before he assigned himself the unenviable task of informing Elvira. The newspapers told the world that evening. Condolences came from the Italian government, several foreign heads of state, the king, and the pope. For a moment, many factions paused in their rivalries to consider what had been lost to the world.
There was an official funeral in Brussels, paid for by the Italian government. Puccini never attended Mass, but neither had he criticized his religion, unlike Verdi, and the Church buried him with the highest honors. The coffin was sent to Milan, which had an impressive delegation meet it at the station: Toscanini, the mayor of the city, and delegations of musicians, including Zandonai and Pizzetti. A state funeral was held in the Duomo, with Toscanini playing funeral music from poor, neglected Edgar. Puccini was buried in the municipal cemetery and reinterred in the mausoleum at Torre del Lago two years later.
The House of Ricordi, headed by a coalition of partners since Tito’s dismissal for mismanagement in 1921, was eager to mount Turandot, and Toscanini, quite naturally, was in charge of the task. It would be harder than completing Nerone. The final love duet, which brings the whole piece together, had nothing but a few jotted notes from Puccini’s hand, and cryptic notes in the margin. A major composer would be needed. But who? Zandonai was the first suggestion, but Tonio vetoed the idea. Zandonai was too famous in his own right (and no doubt Tonio rankled over Zandonai’s disparaging comments over his father’s music). Mascagni was considered for a while, but also jettisoned. Finally, the task fell to Franco Alfano, a respectable composer whose last bona fide hit was in 1904. Alfano’s work, however, would not be included at the emotional premiere.
Apparently, a few million people must have been inside La Scala the night of the Turandot premiere on April 25, 1926, and each one had a different memory of what exactly happened. What we do know is that Toscanini led an excellent cast and chorus through to the point where Puccini had finished (halfway through Act III) and stopped the performance. He turned to the audience and said—the exact accounts vary wildly—words to the effect that this was the spot at which the Maestro laid down his pen. Silence was observed. The rest of the performances were given that season with Alfano’s ending, which has never entirely pleased anyone, and the critics were not in the least sentimental. They praised certain aspects and took exceptions with others, just like any other opera being given. Turandot was given on the international circuit and was well received in general, although the work was rather challenging and the world did not immediately fall in love with it. It stands today as an acknowledged masterpiece, difficult to cast and perform, and with some rather obvious problems. Moreover, it is a constant reminder that Puccini was an ever-growing, ever-evolving artist. He was castigated in his lifetime for failing in this regard, but in retrospect this seems to have more to do with Puccini’s failure to write volumes of theory and publish manifestos than to sit at the piano and grow. Every one of his works, from Manon Lescaut through Turandot, presents a full and different experience, from the handling of the orchestra to the vocal demands. Each is valid in its own way and each shows a creative hand willing to attempt new things. In this way, Puccini’s death at the age of sixty-six is more than premature—it is a tragedy. Certainly other composers had died younger, but we can only imagine what Puccini might have done had he lived longer. We must remember how much of Verdi’s critical supremacy rests on his final works. There have been Italian operas written since Turandot, and there have been some excellent ones, but there has never been an Italian opera that has found favor in the hearts of millions since then. Italians take their chances to write operas like anyone else since Turandot. It is the long-unbroken tradition of Italian opera, from the night in a Florentine conversation circle in 1597 until 1926, which ended on the night of the premiere of Turandot.
Elvira did not long survive her husband, dying in 1930. Tonio studied engineering and died in 1946. Fosca married first a tenor, by whom she had three children, and then an industrialist. Her second child, Little Elvira, received the nickname Bicchi from her grandfather Puccini. She altered this to Biki in her professional life and became a noted fashion designer in Milan, where she lived until 1999. Zandonai kept composing, expanding into chamber music and even film music before his death in 1944. Leoncavallo predeceased Puccini, dying in 1919 after writing a string of operettas and an unsuccessful patriotic opera in 1916. D’Annunzio took a moment from his conquests to comment that the prolific creator with two beasts for his name must have died of “melodic adiposity.” Franchetti taught, which seemed a natural place for him from the beginning, and died during the war in Viareggio in 1942. Pizzetti kept writing operas through the 1960s, including one based on a D’Annunzio play in 1954, years after anyone else thought that would be a good idea. Pizzetti’s work always had partisans among the critics but audiences have not (yet) sought them out for repertory. Tito Ricordi moved to Paris after his exit from his family firm and died in obscurity in 1934. D’Annunzio met his match in Mussolini when the latter came to power in 1922. Mussolini co-opted everything about D’Annunzio that manipulated public opinion (without, of course, the poetry) and retired the difficult poet to a villa. He was given the euphonious and empty title Prince of Monte Nevoso (“Snowy Mountain”) and kept well supplied with money, drugs, and frolicking virgins for his garden as long as he kept his mouth shut. The villa can be visited and is one of Italy’s most bizarre niches. He died, subservient to Mussolini, in 1938. Mascagni, always feeling underappreciated, continued to compose but never recaptured his moment of glory from 1890. He injudiciously allied himself with the Italian government in order to maintain a voice in Italy’s musical life, and this has severely compromised his subsequent reputation. While it is difficult to accuse Mascagni of having been an ardent Fascist by conviction, the fact is that Italians have been slow to explore his less-known operas because of his work with the regime. The memory of collaborationism is still too painful, even sixty years after the end of the Second World War. Memory lasts longer in Italy than in America. Mascagni died in a hotel in Rome in 1945, having lived long enough to see peace restored. He was a recluse for his last few years.
The survivor was, of course, Toscanini, who had another three decades of conducting in him after the Turandot premiere. Toscanini’s role in the formation of American attitudes on classical music, for better and for worse, cannot be underestimated. Conductor of the New York Philharmonic in the 1930s, political symbol, the man who made the classics a mass-market commodity in the United States, leader of the NBC Symphony of the Air, familiar figure on the cover of Life magazine, and so much more, Toscanini is crucial to study for any understanding of music in the twentieth century. It is interesting to ponder how many of our assumptions in America were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Toscanini experience, especially regarding Puccini. Toscanini did not conduct at the Met in the later part of his career, but he made opera recordings and performed radio concerts of operas. His idols in his fixed canon remained, as always, Wagner and Verdi. For all his friendship with Puccini, and the important role he played in Puccini’s career, from La bohème to Turandot, he always maintained a certain condescension toward his works. “Puccini was really very good,” he once said, “but only very good.” That Puccini was neither Verdi nor Wagner cannot be argued, but it shouldn’t count against him. Whatever problems the two “friends” had with each other should not color our impressions of Puccini’s work (or, for that matter, of Toscanini’s legacy). At the very end of his life, the eighty-seven-year-old Toscanini went to the piano and played a beautiful little piece. It was something Catalani had composed during his final illness. Toscanini had never seen the written music, and had not heard it played in sixty years, but that didn’t prevent him from remembering it exactly. Toscanini never forgot anything.
Puccini attained a level of popularity in his own lifetime that very, very few music professionals ever achieve. His operas made him independently wealthy from the age of thirty-four on, and he never once, after his student days, had to work at anything uncongenial to him. He was celebrated in person on three continents and his music has been heard and appreciated in every corner of the globe, even by many who would not recognize his name. He is part of the world’s subconscious.
Naturally, anyone with this level of popularity will meet some criticism. There were several complaints about him during his lifetime. His art was thought to be trivial, uncommitted to ideology, and lacking in a certain vigor that many wanted at the time. No artist is above criticism, and Puccini had his share of shortcomings. We should not, however, make the same complaints about him that were made at the turn of the last century. Our issues are different from theirs, and it says nothing to repeat what was said then and try to pass it off as critical thinking now. Puccini was trivial if, by trivial, we mean that he placed more importance on the concerns of common individuals than on ideologies. The people he focused on, generally speaking, were of no major consequence. This predilection flew in the face of everything that was considered progressive in 1910, after the brief fluorescence of the verismo movement in its purist form two decades previously. This cannot remain a valid complaint about Puccini’s art, although one reads echoes of this same attitude whenever experts want to minimize his art. If the whole rotten, miserable history of the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that we must trust no ideology that values anything above the needs of the humblest individual. If such a stance as Puccini’s was a shortcoming eighty years ago, it looks a lot like hope now.
Virgil Thompson maintained that Wagner was the most intellectual composer and Puccini the least. Thompson knew what he was talking about, but his comment must not be taken as a format for appreciating or disdaining either. Wagner has not survived because of his intellectual accomplishments. Indeed, far better for the world had his intellectual pretensions been forgotten early on. Wagner, as it turns out, has survived for the same reason Puccini has—because somewhere amid the blather about racial destiny and salvation through purity was a thoroughly human artistic core that continues to speak to people’s feelings. That same core in Puccini takes second place to no one. If his passion and compassion did not—and could not—disguise themselves behind an ideological framework, so much the better. Puccini’s operas stand as naked as anything in art. This is, I believe, what many have mistaken for sentimentality in his work. Couldn’t the label of sentimental be a defensive response to the feeling of discomfort that the nakedness of these works elicits in the viewer?
Puccini was entirely aware of all the trends going on around him in the world of music during his lifetime. The most challenging of these trends, paralleled by revolutions in the other arts, are scarcely comprehended by the public (or, if truth be told, by musicians) even today. Puccini understood and even appreciated these innovations in his time, and, when appropriate, he learned from them and applied them in his own work. However, he never once tried to be anyone other than himself. This, alone, should command our artistic respect. He had a mandate (from God, as he understood it) to adhere to his inner dicta. As popular as he was, he never once (despite some rather superficial comments from his contemporary journalists) altered his vision to gain an even wider popularity. How different, how richer, and how truer the world of music would be if other composers had emulated this aspect of Puccini. With all this in mind, and with all the advantages of hindsight, we may well be approaching a time when the intellectuals, the professional musicians, the existing operatic public, and the general public might finally be able to accept their love and need for this man’s art without triangulation, without any self-consciousness about susceptibility to so-called sentimentality, and, indeed, without any excuses.