IF WE LOOK AT IDEAS and images in Puccini’s operas reflected in subsequent works by other creators, we get an idea of the depth of his art in the communal unconscious. Looking at these other works, in turn, gives us insights into the multilayered and unsuspected depths to be mined out of Puccini’s operas.
Let’s begin this look at Puccinian permutations by flailing Tosca and her leap a bit more. Certainly the setting of the Castel Sant’Angelo, repeated at virtually every performance of this frequently performed opera, has managed to register as a significant spot. It’s now one of those places whose very presence in, for example, a film, seems to be full of portent. Pasolini understood the overlap of myth and reality and felt that the mythic consciousness was most authentically present not in the rural poor but within the urban subproletariate of Rome. His references to Tosca become patent in his early masterpiece Accattone (1961), a film that remains spectacularly misunderstood by American critics when they have bothered to notice it at all. Perhaps they all need a good dose of Tosca to clarify the whole thing for them. At the beginning of the film, Accattone (the name means “beggar”) dives off the Ponte Sant’Angelo into the dirty, dribbling Tiber River for the coins this earns from onlookers. The camera makes a clear juxtaposition between Accattone and the statue of the saint on the bridge before he jumps off. Of course, this is only the Ponte (bridge) Sant’Angelo, not the neighboring Castel of the same name, and these are statues of mere human saints rather than an archangel. But then, Accattone is only a pimp and a thief, not a celebrated prima donna. He is lower than she, even though they end up in the same place. Accattone lives, and even gets some money out of it. Virtually every English-speaking critic names this striking initial scene as Accattone’s “fall from grace,” but this is the wrong interpretation. He is still reasonably successful as a pimp and a thief at this point. In the course of the film, he talks of his diving for money and laughs, “I’m going to end up like Tosca!” (“Vado finire come la Tosca”). Later, he attempts to jump off the bridge for money again, but can’t do it. He falls apart, and is run over by life. He doesn’t die, he just becomes the walking dead one sees in any city. His tragedy is that he doesn’t end up like Tosca. There is no grace for him. He cannot make the leap of faith. In opera, as in so many ancient myths, suicides are a form of moral victory. Even this act of dignity is denied a modern Roman street bum.
A much more glamorous and glib, if no less mythic, use of the Castel Sant’Angelo is to be found in the charming Billy Wilder film Roman Holiday (1951). Here we have the stunning Audrey Hepburn in her first lead role as a royal princess of some unnamed country on a goodwill tour of European capitals. A princess, of course, serves no practical function in the modern world but serves as a touchstone for a great many pent-up aspirations and dreams. In fact, a princess is a sort of priestess, a near deity whose very existence and interaction with the rest of us mortals is some type of divine grace that truly touches people, as we witnessed in the world’s unprecedented and traumatized grief over the demise of the late Princess of Wales. Roman Holiday is very much an American film (albeit directed by an educated Euro) and puts forth modern American claims on the ancient myths. The American claim is embodied in Gregory Peck, no less, a hard-bitten reporter whose ridiculously unlikely romantic encounter with la Hepburn results in a bout of self-actualization for both of them. They manage to sneak away from the palace (the Palazzo Barberini, in fact) for a night on the town, like any other romantic couple in Rome. They dance on one of the barges that occasionally still appear in the Tiber in the spring with a small band and Japanese lanterns, in this case moored directly across from the Castel Sant’Angelo, with our favorite archangel prominently lit against the Roman night sky. When they are spotted by palace guards, they escape into the Tiber, jumping in and swimming away. It is her defining moment, an action of self-definition that makes her fully a woman. We know this because they subsequently escape to Peck’s little apartment and there is much midcentury coy action involving getting undressed out of wet clothes, donning the man’s bathrobe, and so forth. It is her first time ever alone with a man, and they discuss the possibility of being a married couple. She promises she could learn to be a housewife and is in fact eager to be, swearing that she will learn to sew and do whatever is necessary to be a “real woman.” Funny. We tend to think of women’s rights advancing in a direct continuum to the present day, but this expression of postwar ideals must give us pause. In 1900, what Tosca suggested as an alternative escape from constricting social roles for women was the dismemberment of patriarchal authority figures. A half century later, the best Hollywood could offer was vacuuming. Fortunately, the princess does not morph into June Cleaver. She returns to her world, wiser and more self-assertive for the experience of her leap into the Tiber. The film ends at her farewell press conference. She has rehearsed a tactful speech about her favorite cities in the tour, saying that each in its own way blah blah blah, but abandons the speech and interjects, “Rome, definitely Rome,” to the amazement of the press and her advisers. She has discovered the ancient magic, where princesses can be common women and common women can be anything, and could only have made such a discovery in Rome.
La Hepburn’s dip in the Tiber is an overt reference to Tosca. Other films use the idea of a “leap of faith” without any conscious reference to Tosca, but the impact of the image is nevertheless amplified by the communal experience of Tosca, conscious or otherwise. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) was directed by Zhang Yimou, whom we met as the director of a notable production of Turandot. The music for the film was written by Tan Dun, who is, not incidentally, also a composer of operas. In fact, Crouching Tiger is an opera, replete with arias, duets, trios, and choruses (albeit not sung), and full of outlandish situations that somehow become plausible within their context. The film ends with the “bad girl” taking a leap off of a waterfall, and, by the magic of film, gliding and somehow soaring away. There is no “splat” in this leap. Many were baffled by it, but the sense (corroborated by the musical score) was that it was a redemptive act of atonement. Anyone who had some sense of opera, however remote, would have been convinced of this interpretation.
This, of course, brings to mind a few other notable leaps in film: Thelma and Louise do not even need to drive the car off the banks of the Grand Canyon (an American icon) since the police are chasing them to tell them they’re actually out of trouble. Their death is more than a suicide dictated by necessity. It is a choice, a preference to this rotten world and all the humiliations they can expect as women if they stay in it. In this way, it is a moral victory, an analog of Tosca’s death with an additional nod to Butterfly’s. Perhaps the most notable, character-defining leap in American film is in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the characters are also evading the police. They assume the jump will kill them and it doesn’t, although they must leave the country afterward. It is therefore a rejection of their society no less than Tosca’s. When they jump, Sundance (Robert Redford) lets out a prolonged cry of “whoa, shit!” that made quite an impression on audiences of that time. This seems to be an American cinematic equivalent of a slancio, an ejaculation filled with raw, unedited emotion. It’s a convincing analog of the big theme from “E lucevan le stelle” that we hear at the end of Tosca and that caused Kerman so much aggravation. Elegant it’s not, but it strikes one as very appropriate and true in the circumstances.
Tosca has more in it than one jump, of course, and there are other aspects of Tosca that are important in subsequent pieces of art. We already saw how Bicycle Thief used Rome as both a background and a key to its own interpretation, and gave us a deeper understanding of the term verismo. The film that launched the brief, midcentury vogue for neoverismo, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945), is also a Roman story in every sense. It looks at small, inconsequential people caught up in epic struggles to survive and unwittingly playing major roles in history, or at least in modern mythology. There is a boy named Romoletto (little Romulus), a priest named Pellegrini (Pilgrims), and so forth. This is not exactly symbolism as we tend to understand it: there must be many actual boys in Rome named Romoletto, and a great many priests named Pellegrini, for instance. It is in its method of looking at the multiple dimensions of everyday people and places in Rome that it recalls Tosca, and being a definitively veristic work of art, it teaches us how to look at anything that can be classified as verismo. This is the formula that I explored previously: a search for the resonance of myth in common contemporary settings.
Yet there is more than tone in Open City that draws our attention back to Tosca. There is a comic sacristan with a penchant for stealing pastries. The hero is a partisan priest fighting the Nazis, and therefore a sort of composite of the revolutionary Cavaradossi and the priestess (in my reading) Tosca. There is a torture scene very like Tosca’s, with the lead forced to watch the torture of his companion. The bad guy Nazi is very much like Scarpia—punctilious, courteous, and sadistic. He’s also homosexual for good measure, but this is almost just icing on the cake within the codes of this pageant (although it adds the threat of sexual abuse to the torture scene). There is even elegant music floating into the room between the officers’ salon and the torture chamber where the priest sits enduring his friend’s torture while the villain watches with gratification, exactly as in the Palazzo Farnese scene in Tosca. The priest is eventually executed by a firing squad atop the Gianicolo, the hill that overlooks Rome from the Vatican side of the river. The camera pans to the group of boys, led by Romoletto, who march away and down the hill. We see the panorama of Rome and the dome of St. Peter’s in the background. It is a moment of hope for the future, vested in the children. It is a curious juxtaposition of imagery—here it is the priest who is martyred to liberty, and the dome of St. Peter’s is bathed in light while the music swells before the final credits. It does not convey the same message as Tosca, but it counts on the audience’s familiarity with the symbols in Tosca. The primary symbol being explored is Rome itself, the place of extreme opposites: republican/imperial, Catholic/Communist, partisan/Fascist, and so forth. The issues at stake are extreme—in fact they are the extremes of the human experience.
Open City no less than Tosca has been criticized for compromising on “realism” and dipping into melodrama, yet who could separate melodrama from realism when the issues at stake are so large? Open City represents a different moment in Italian history than Tosca, although the conflicts to be resolved remain much the same as they always have been. Open City, made at the moment of liberation of Italy from the Nazis and the Fascists, offers a vision of hope that the remnants of Italian society might find common ground in the children to rebuild this beautiful, sacred country. The Church and the Communists might have found that they were not enemies after all, having fought together to rid the country of this foreign-based evil (at least in the world of Open City). All the opposite urges that pull apart the city and the world are exposed and apparent in the panorama of Rome. Perhaps these impulses are not so opposite after all, the film dares to suggest. Of course, this moment of hope passed almost immediately after the end of the war, and the old hatreds erupted anew and continue to the present. The finale to Open City is more dated than that of Tosca, in this sense, but is perhaps even more poignant because of the vanity of this moment of hope. But it would have made no sense—indeed, it surely wouldn’t have been filmed in the same way—without the precedent of Tosca.
Tosca embodies certain ideas that will get bandied about as long as people are talking, and in particular the persistent concept of Rome. It is not, however, the only work of Puccini to lodge itself in the public’s mind. Madama Butterfly, beyond the woman-as-victim idea in Fatal Attraction, has become a flash point for the whole fraught issue of East-West relations. The film My Geisha (1961) used snippets of the score because, well, how could it not? On Broadway, there was David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, which was very much about the myth of the submissive Asian woman in the Western mind. The play was a fascinating gloss on a complicated subject, made even more complicated by the twist of the heroine in question being an anatomical man, unbeknownst to her Frenchman lover of twenty years. The story of the play was said to be based on a true story, although Madama Butterfly is also said to be based on a true story, and really everything is based on a true story in some sense. Audiences were quite fascinated by the technicalities: how could a man make love to someone for twenty years and not know his lover’s sex? Hwang correctly glossed over that with a few comments (“Asian women are bashful,” s/he says) and allowed everyone to use their imaginations. The point of the play was not the nature of genitalia but the functions of power, and of course the hero/ine becomes the character with all the power by the end. The Frenchman goes from sexual imperialist to a broken and bereft remnant of a man, which is what I, for one, imagine will happen also to Pinkerton when he returns to the States. Hwang gives the Butterfly myth its full due and looks beyond the victim idea, as I believe the opera does too, as anyone can say if they actually attend a performance of it. Elsewhere, Hwang has said that it is common among the Asian community to say that one of them who has fallen in love with a white guy has “pulled a Butterfly.” These myths run deep, and it is fascinating that a community that has been saddled with another culture’s perceptions of them can take the stereotype and run with it. The sarcasm is implicit and cutting. It makes me think about how Spaniards deal with the whole idea of Carmen.
M. Butterfly embraced the ambiguities of the story. Miss Saigon, which owes a great deal to Madama Butterfly, chose to ditch them. This hit musical opted for a true love story, which is to say a rather unrealistic story. The protagonists are good, honest people (he’s American, she’s Vietnamese) who are genuinely in love. The conflict is entirely around them (the Vietnam War) and not at all within them. This happens, of course, and is worthy of stage presentation, but one learns less about the darker recesses of human nature when confronted with a story of this type. It also must make us wonder if there is any progress at all in our national capability for critical thinking about our role in the world. A century ago, even in the era of Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet, a popular Broadway playwright such as Belasco was able to present an American naval officer as a cad and sexual opportunist with a culpable sense of entitlement. Eighty-five years later, audiences on that same Broadway needed, and got, a likable, good-looking American chap with a high moral standard. All characters onstage are representations, and we seem to have even less stomach for seeing mirrors held up to our own failings than our supposedly more bigoted Victorian antecedents.
Bohème, of course, is the emblematic Puccini work, and it has not gone unnoticed in popular culture. Snippets of Bohème are everywhere, even beyond such thorough explorations of the opera as a whole as Moonstruck. Delia Reese’s best-selling hit of her career was 1959’s “Don’t You Know,” which was “Musetta’s Waltz” sung as a fully honest love song. There’s no complaining about what la Reese did with the world’s most abused melody. She sings it well in her own style and seems to believe every word. The only problem one might have with it, if one is aware of the original, is the utter lack of irony involved. This was, of course, a tune written for the launching of a battleship. How curious that it became emblematic of a love song by some transitive property (“Musetta’s Waltz” = Puccini = Romantic Love, perhaps). But the waltz appears everywhere. Currently, the piano solo version is the background (and virtually only sound track) of a New York State Lotto television commercial about a neglected dog who buys a lottery ticket, wins, and drives past his previous owners in a limousine attended by three dolled-up poodles. Somehow, it’s charming and funny. (Of course the dolled-up poodles are especially funny to anyone familiar with the character of Musetta.) Like the opera from which it comes, “Musetta’s Waltz” always works, often to its own detriment.
Bohème, however, is so well known as a cultural icon that it can be telegraphed to an audience without any (or with hardly any) reference to the music. In this way, it is almost unique among opera—Carmen is the only other opera I can think of that comes near this level of recognition. The film Moulin Rouge virtually is Bohème. Everyone called the movie an update of the Camille story, which it is in many ways: the heroine Satine is a prostitute rather than a grisette like Mimì, and the hero Christian is tormented with bourgeois guilt over his liaison. (Interestingly, the hero becomes an Englishman for no apparent reason except that the mores of the bourgeoisie have become synonymous with the English-speaking peoples in the world’s view. Having a Frenchman feel pangs of conscience for loving a whore would simply make no sense to anyone nowadays.) It may take the template from Camille (and Camille’s operatic offspring, Verdi’s La traviata), but the whole ambience is La bohème: the fetishization of poverty as moral/political identity, the celebration of the Artist as a spiritually superior shaman, the camaraderie of the band of bohemians are all in our subconscious because of Puccini. Director Baz Luhrmann even brought the red neon “L’Amour” sign that he had used in Bohème productions since at least 1993 into the film. The film makes Satine a showgirl so we can have spectacular production numbers, all very anachronistic ally jumbled up with a sense of dizzying glee. Moulin Rouge uses the imagery of Bohème, but makes no attempt to be Bohème. Thus we are able to enjoy its own strange postmodern whirligig without having to compare it to Bohème.
This is not the case with Rent, the late Jonathan Larson’s rock opera set in the 1990s’ East Village of New York City and based deliberately and relentlessly on Bohème. At least Larson wrote his own music for his updating—well, mostly his own music. Rent has its passionate partisans and violent detractors (Sarah Schulman wrote a whole, fascinating book against it), and there’s no need to take sides here. What matters for our purposes is what Rent teaches about its role model Bohème—a comparison the audience is dared to make at every conceivable opportunity. While the self-consciousness of Moulin Rouge is urbane, Rent’s is deadly “relevant” and digestibly hip. There is a whiff of preachiness about the whole thing, suggesting that if you really cared about people today, you would respond to Rent and leave Bohème behind. This is where I reach for my guns.
Puccini wrote a shamelessly sentimental little mood piece about a solitary tragedy, knowing full well that he would be castigated by the cognoscenti for his choice. But he believed in it to the end and created a musical vocabulary that allows others to take the journey with him. Moulin Rouge, on the other hand, is an assault of impressions that, by its very detachment, still manages to tell a vaguely human story. Rent seems to want it both ways. Self-consciously hip and sassy (Mimi—accent on the first syllable—seduces Roger with the line, “Don’t I have the hottest ass on Fourteenth Street?” Not much of an accolade, frankly, since she’d be competing mostly with fast-food guzzling bargain-hunters on that august thoroughfare), it counts on delivering an emotional coup de grâce but has no means to do so when the time comes. The moment of Mimi’s death is “represented” by a loud wail on the electric guitar of the big theme from “Musetta’s Waltz.” The World’s Favorite Little Tune happens to sound great as an electric guitar riff, but so what? It always sounds great. Ashbrook assures us that it even manages to work in an edition rewritten for sussuraphone. That’s not the problem. Quoting the opera at this moment literally and figuratively puts quotation marks around the emotional climax. Moreover, Mimì rejoins the cast for the final number, further distancing the audience from any emotion. Such a gimmick is an intended statement in The Beggar’s Opera, not to mention the “framing” techniques of a master like Bertolt Brecht, but here it is a big fat cop-out. And why, why, why the “Waltz Song,” of all things? Simply to telegraph Bohème! to the audience? (What if the guitar played “Sono andati?” Would the audience have mistaken that for, perhaps, A Chorus Line?)
This flaw, however, probably tells us more about the times we live in than any failures on Larson’s part. There is no way to convey sheer tragedy with music that could be called “contemporary” by the critics. Our loss. And to think we tend to imagine audiences of the 1890s as uptight and repressed…. Still, there remains something about the characters in Rent that do not seem as real somehow as those of Bohème, even if they are wearing Levi’s rather then hoopskirts. Both the bohemians and the Rentkids do their share of preening about their superiority to bourgeois conformity, but it’s more natural in the first instance. The bohemians don’t sing about not paying rent—they simply don’t pay the rent. By the end of the evening, the bohemians are forced to get real. Larson’s kids are never required to pay the rent, emotionally speaking. They are largely the same people at the end of the evening as they were at the beginning, and still preening. If this is what the partisans mean by insisting that Rent is more relevant to today’s world than Bohème, one can only sigh for today’s world. Rent has much to commend it, and some lessons from Bohème were well applied. There is a deft seamlessness in many of the songs, with characters coming in and out and returning to the dominant melody that recalls Puccini’s accomplishments in the same area. This is rare on Broadway, and even rarer in a rock musical, whose very musical structure tends to restrict it to 4/4 time and glaring breaks between songs. No doubt Larson would have gone on to great heights had he lived longer, and it would have been wonderful to experience his work, especially when it was not saddled with comparisons to Bohème.
Puccini lives on Broadway beyond Rent. He can be heard every night in (slightly) altered form in The Phantom of the Opera. The climactic phrase of the love duet “Music of the Night” was so similar to the climax of the love theme in Fanciulla that the Puccini estate sued Webber. The case was settled out of court, and the details are murky. But obviously the Puccini estate had a good case, and in fact it is instantly recognizable as a “lift” to anyone who has heard Fanciulla. Even though I am sensitive to plagiarism in composers I confess I’m not sure what all the fuss was about. I doubt Webber was hoping no one would notice: Fanciulla isn’t that obscure. And this is a story about an opera house, so why wouldn’t there be a quote here and there? (I’m not sure why Webber would have quoted Fanciulla to make that point when Gounod’s Faust is there for the taking, but that’s not for us to say.) Besides, as Sir Arthur Sullivan said, there are only eight notes between all the composers (well, the composers of the European tradition at least). Puccini himself plagiarized at will. There is the enigmatic quote of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the beginning of Turandot, and I distinctly hear Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un Faune in the “Principessa, grazia!” ensemble in the same act. (No one else seems to hear that, so perhaps I’m imagining it, and yet…) I’m sure there are other instances. Every other composer does the same. I wonder why the Puccini estate got so riled up about this one instance. If our courts were more sensitive to artistic property issues, then the Puccini estate could have sued Webber for his entire career. Webber increasingly tried over the years to become Puccini, and it does a disservice to both composers. Webber is a great songwriter, but opera is a different animal. Let’s recall the? formula: it’s not the numbers themselves, it’s the spaces in between them and their relationship to each—that’s where God is. There is nothing shameful or inferior about being a great songwriter and not an opera composer. Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, and Schumann, to name just a few from the German classical tradition, and not to mention every other great songwriter of history, all managed to make marks “merely” as songwriters. We can learn lessons from Puccini without having to try to become him.
These forays out of the opera house are merely a small attempt to give context for Puccini’s work and see where it has resonated beyond the admittedly marginal world of opera. Or perhaps it is also an attempt to see that the world of opera might not be quite so marginal as it sometimes appears (or is said to be). But the best resource for diving into Puccini’s work remains Puccini’s work, and the following chapter looks at the wide availability of this work on recordings and videotape/DVD.