Opera has a vocabulary all its own, as does any art form (or sport, or computer games, or …). The language of opera has tended to reinforce the institution as foreign, obscure, and vaguely unhealthy for Americans. We have not yet, as a nation, transcended our linguistic xenophobia, but there are positive signs in that direction. One now hears words such as “latte” and “cappuccino” even at some truck stops in the heartland, and perhaps food and coffee are leading us to a greater level of comfort with foreign words. Not all the words in the opera lexicon are Italian. Some are German, others French, and quite a few are in good old English, although often no less arcane for that. It is notoriously difficult to describe music in words. Approximations are as close as we can hope for. It is even harder to describe aspects of the human voice. The basis of “opera-ese,” then, is inaccuracy, mixed with generous helpings of tradition, spiced with four centuries of journalistic and literary flourish, and served with a dollop of self-referential whimsy. In short, it’s really all part of the fun. No one should be, or feel, excluded from the pleasures of opera because of the words engaged by its partisans, anymore than one should avoid baseball because “knuckleball” sounds bizarre. To that end, I have included this glossary as a tool but also as a commentary on the language of opera itself. I have also included a bit of information on some of the theaters that played important roles in Puccini’s career, since it would be presumptuous to assume familiarity with or interest in these places. There’s also a bit of opera lore to be found in this key to the “secret language” of opera and Puccini.
arco (It., “bow”): An instruction to string players to bow the note, rather than pluck it, which is called pizzicato (q.v).
aria (It., “air”): An aria is an operatic solo. In traditional Italian opera, there was a clear delineation between a recitative (q.v.) and an aria. All the “action” and development would take place in the recitative. The aria was a conscious suspension of time wherein a soloist would reflect on the conclusion of the recitative. Nobody thought this was strange in the eighteenth century. Indeed, no one at that time thought it strange to force gardens to grow in geometrical shapes, either. But soon the race was on to find a more natural flow between recitative and aria. The debate over which should have primacy is literally as old as opera itself. Puccini came as close as anyone to solving the problem. He did not hide from writing arias (hardly!), but their relation to the recitatives is natural and organic. If Puccini’s arias were all excised from their operatic bedrocks and existed in a discrete universe, he would still be among the most celebrated tunesmiths in history. Yet his true genius was in his arias’ relations to their dramatic and musical surroundings.
arpeggio: Playing the notes of a chord, or some of them, in succession in either direction. Repeats of these are often used by composers (even overused) to create atmospheric effects.
baritone: The middle, “normal” voice range for a man. The word actually means “the sound of a man” in Italian. Baritones in Italian opera vary between loving fathers, best friends, brothers, and horny villains. Puccini’s two greatest baritone roles, Scarpia in Tosca and Rance in Fanciulla, are of the latter variety. (In all fairness, Scarpia is true hypocritical evil while Rance is more of an embittered and misunderstood sort of loner.) Michele in Il tabarro is also a remarkable, if relatively brief, baritone role. Otherwise, Puccini gave them short shrift compared to Verdi, who gloried in baritone roles. Gianni Schicchi, Marcello and Schaunard in Bohème, and Lescaut in Manon Lescaut all have a good deal to sing but seem to have gaping holes in their parts where an aria should have been (by normal Italian opera standards).
bass: The lowest male vocal register. Basses in Italian opera are generally fathers, old men, and scary clerics. Puccini seemed less interested in the bass voice than almost any other of the great opera composers. There is Geronte, the “dirty old man” of Manon Lescaut, who is actually a bass-baritone. The small role of Colline in La bohème gets a one-minute aria, “Vecchia zimarra,” which is a standard of the bass repertory. And there is the Bonze in Butterfly. Otherwise, Puccini seemed to have avoided them. Any other opera composer would have made the role of the emperor in Turandot a bass (Busoni actually did in his opera on the, roughly, same subject). Puccini made the emperor a squeaky high tenor.
bel canto: The genre of Italian opera prevalent in the early nineteenth century and typified primarily by the works of Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini. More recently, scholars have come to understand much of the earlier work of Verdi as an evolution of, rather than a break from, this genre, and even Wagner’s revolutionary creations have come to be seen as a progression out of the bel canto tradition. The phrase simply means “beautiful singing,” and indeed the bel canto operas rely squarely on the dazzling technique of the soloists and the wealth of melodic line. Bel canto resurfaced in the mid-twentieth century when a host of great artists (Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills, Marilyn Home, and others) demonstrated the dramatic depth and power previously unsuspected in these operas.
bitonality: A method of harmonizing using two strains each in different keys. The first use of this technique that impressed European musicians was in Igor Stravinsky’s creepy and marvelous ballet Petrouchka. Puccini was a bit puzzled by bitonality, as was most everyone who heard it in 1913. Initial puzzlement for Puccini, however, often led to deeper examination of the work in question, and he used some phrases of bitonality to great effect in the score of Turandot. Neither Puccini nor Stravinsky was yet probably aware of the wild and wonderful contemporary experiments in bitonality by the American Charles Ives, whose interests included the effect of several marching bands playing clashing tunes in parades.
canaries: A not-very-complimentary categorization of the lightest soprano voices. Mimì in Bohème is a role that, for some reason, canaries think is within their realm (it isn’t). Puccini always has unexpected moments of heft in his singers’ parts. Canaries would do best to avoid this composer altogether, although they might be able to land a gig as one of the novices in Suor Angelica.
celesta: A keyboard instrument first appearing in Paris in the 1880s, producing tone by hammering steel plates. Early notable uses included Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Puccini used it frequently and with great effect, particularly in Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and, most notably, Turandot.
chest tones: As opposed to head tones. It must be understood right away that these are terms of convenience, not anatomical fact. Both men and women have a lower voice, which seems to resonate more in the chest, and an upper voice, which seems to resonate more in the head. Now here’s the strange part for some reason, in the operatic tradition, men generally sing with the chest voice, even in the higher ranges, while women tend to favor the head voice even in the lower ranges. In contemporary popular music, women almost always sing in the chest voice while men often favor the head voice. This is, of course, a sweeping generalization and there are notable exceptions in popular music, especially among the males (Barry White, for example, made a career out of wallowing in chest tones), Yet any woman who ventures into the head voice will be labeled “operatic,” no matter how often you explain to people that opera is a form of drama rather than a genre of music. The best singers, operatic and pop, know when to delve into the “other” range. Many sopranos drop into lusty chest tones at the end of Act II of Tosca for the line “Ed avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma.” Indeed, some overdo it. Conversely, Linda Ronstadt sang all of her hit “Blue Bayou” in plaintive chest tones until the very last note, when she floated into a single note in a dreamy head tone (a device she learned from the great Mexican female vocal tradition, which revels in jumping between the two “realms”).
children’s choruses: Generally speaking, an invention of Satan to afflict the serenity of the world, although never failing to elicit a chorus of “awwws” from sentimental sectors of the audience. Puccini’s indulgence in the vice is limited and brilliant, generally as a contrast to some subsequent or simultaneous other action. Children make an appearance in the crowd scene in Act II of La bohème, along with the rest of teeming humanity. The choirboys of Act I of Tosca create a noisy background contrast for the ominous entrance of the evil Scarpia. But his ultimate use of the form is in Turandot, where an unexpected boys’ chorus intersects the bloodthirsty crowd’s call for an execution. Nobody in the crowd mutters, “Aren’t they cute!” at that point.
chromatics: A fancy way of saying a scale that uses only semitones. That is, go to the piano and play all the notes, black and white, in succession. You will have a chromatic scale. It seems simple enough, but composers of the late nineteenth century caused a scandale every time they indulged in this curious habit. Liszt and Wagner, naturally, shocked and appalled everyone with their chromatics, but even a composer as popular as Camille Saint-Saëns used chromatics effectively and to great public approval. (The mezzo’s great aria in Samson et Dalilah is a study in chromatics.) In Puccini’s day, the use of chromatics was still considered cutting-edge. The fact that he used them effectively forced some critics to consider his music seriously despite its popularity. It can be found throughout his mature works, but most strikingly in Tabarro and Turandot.
cognoscente (It., “knowing”): A know-it-all. Generally speaking, musical cognoscenti (pi.) do not plague Puccini’s world, but there is a subset of Puc-cinian cognoscenti. Fortunately, these will generally confine themselves to reminiscences (real or imagined) of legendary singers.
col legno (It., “with the wood”): An instruction to the string players to turn their bows around and play with the wooden part rather than the horsehair part. In Puccini and in most composers, it is synonymous with “col legno bat-tuto,” meaning “struck” with the wood, although contemporary composers sometimes differentiate between the two and ask the musicians to run the wooden part of their bows up and down the strings. Whatever the details, musicians deeply loathe this instruction and always complain of the damage to their instruments. Rossini once took this idea a step further in the overture to his opera II signor Bruschino (1813), he asked the violinists to strike their music stands with the back of their bows to signify the ticking of a clock.
coloratura: The elaborate and rather athletic ornamentation of vocal melody, characterized by rapid runs up and down the scale, trills, and a great ability to produce a huge number of clear and distinct notes within a brief amount of time. Coloratura was popular in baroque and, especially, bel canto opera. The higher the voice, the more agility is present for excursions into this device, although there are cases of coloratura passages for all vocal ranges including bass. When a singer is laying on the coloratura, the words (if indeed there are any beyond “ahhhhh!”) are virtually incomprehensible. It fell out of fashion, therefore, in the late nineteenth century, when composers were seeking greater dramatic truth as they understood it. (Leoncavallo, however, managed to sneak some into I pagliacci by the clever ruse of having the soprano sing about her envy of the birds in flight.) Puccini managed to avoid it altogether, although Musetta comes precariously close to using some in her waltz “song.” The word, incidentally, is not Italian but rather “opera-ese.” The Italian word for this technique is fioritura. Please don’t use fioritura in an English conversation unless you want to be thought of as someone working too hard at all this.
commedia dell’arte: The term really just means “professional actor” in Italian, but it has come to stand for a great tradition of Italian theater. Stock characters (such as Harlequin, Columbine, Pantalone, Pulcinella, etc.) appeared in various situations and created different sorts of havoc while always retaining recognizable traits. Improvisational comedy with topical allusions was mixed with songs and acrobatic feats. The tradition flourished in Italy and beyond from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, although it survived as a primary source of public entertainment in rural southern Italy into the twentieth century. The influence of these troupes was astounding the English Punch and Judy shows derive from them, as do our modern clowns (although let’s not hold that against them). The Marx Brothers can be traced directly back to the tradition. In late eighteenth-century Venice, Carlo Gozzi wrote plays incorporating the commedia dell’arte figures, usually on fantastic fairy-tale themes in direct response to the success of his rival, the realist Goldoni. From at least that point on, the commedia dell’arte became a stylized alternative to realism. Leoncavallo managed to meld the two genres brilliantly in I pagliacci, which features actors performing commedia dell’arte and the fatal intersection of reality and make-believe. Shortly thereafter and perhaps spurred on by the success of Pagliacci, there was a surge of interest in the quaint old form in painting and the other arts, but especially in opera. Richard Strauss used a troupe of commedia dell’arte players in Ariadne auf Naxos, a work Puccini knew well. References to them appear in Erich Korngold’s hit Die tote Stadt (1922) and Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935). Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges (1922) was based on a Gozzi play, as was Busoni’s Turandot. Busoni stayed closer to Gozzi’s play the actual Italian figures show up in the imperial Chinese court and become ministers, à la Marco Polo, contrasting their plain Venetian speech with the etiquette of the Celestial Kingdom. Puccini opted to forego this plan, and instead created Ping, Pang, and Pong for his Turandot.
comprimario (It., “with the primary [roles]”): The secondary or “character” roles in an opera. Virtually all operas have comprimario parts, but in Puccini they can make or break the opera. Think of La bohème, with its emphasis on life’s “little things” there is Schaunard, Benoit, Alcindoro, the kid who wants a trumpet and a toy horse, and others. Each one is important. Puccini also relies heavily on the “passing effect” of people who walk by in a seemingly random appearance, which does so much to place his stories within a given atmosphere the lamplighter in Manon Lescaut, the shepherd boy in Tosca, Jake Wallace in Fanciulla, the lovers in Tabarro. Suor Angelica lists eighteen characters—all but two are comprimarii (pi.). So while small opera companies must base their seasons on Puccini favorites, the larger companies actually have the advantage in this area as well. Remember, since the time of Edgar, Puccini had the advantage of the Ricordi “machine” behind him, and later the forces of the Metropolitan as well. He did not have to write operas that were necessarily cheap to produce—a concern of many previous and subsequent composers. Some of the most interesting singing and interpretation is done by comprimarii, who generally do not have the most “stellar” voices but often compensate with superb musicianship and almost invariably a better sense of acting than the stars. One case in point that jumps to mind is Anthony Laciura of the Metropolitan. He has played Spoletta (Tosca), the Goro (Butterfly), Nick the Bartender (Fanciulla), and Pong (Turandot)—and that’s just what I can remember offhand. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stepped in as one of the novices in Suor Angelica one night. He almost stole the show as Nick, which is no mean feat. When you see someone of Laciura’s caliber in a Puccini performance, it reveals the amazingly detailed construction of Puccini’s operas.
concertato, also pezzo concertato: One of the standard gimmicks of traditional opera, the concertato is an elaborate ensemble with several vocal solo parts and perhaps choral accompaniment. They are usually to be found at a climactic moment—the finale to Act III in a four-act opera, for example. Critics long carped about the artificiality of the form, which effectively froze the action while indulging in the artifice of writing mere [!] involved polyphony. Even Rossini, who was a master of the form, complained that he had to do it because the audiences expected it. He called it “the row of artichokes,” referring to the motionless singers standing in a line at the footlights staring desperately at the conductor. The trouble is that the concertato, for all its structural problems, is, in its best manifestations, one of the glories of Italian opera. More than indulging in complicated polyphony for its own sake, it can reveal various points of view simultaneously, and can draw the audience along by its melodic force and allow them to follow each contrasting development. We in the audience, silly creatures that we are, were right to have “forced” Rossini and the others to provide us with our needs. Verdi struggled with the idea throughout his career. Having acquiesced to the convention in the earlier part of his career (the Act III finales of Ernani and of La traviata being superb examples), he began to explore ways to alter the form to suit his perceived dramatic needs. But he was never able to abandon the convention altogether. His mature masterpiece Otello incorporates a concertato right where one is expected, at the end of Act III. Verdi had two of the characters running among the otherwise motionless populace whispering dastardly plans to each other in an attempt to make the set piece more modern. The result is not entirely satisfactory in terms of Verdi’s goal of a complete integration of drama and music. The characters “talking” in real time only accentuates the stiff formalism on the rest of the stage. (This is, of course, theoretical nitpicking, since the moment remains, like the rest of the opera, overwhelmingly magnificent.) Puccini, born later and therefore at greater liberty to fiddle with forms, was able to accomplish a more seamless union of the concertato’s power with an organic dramatic flow on the stage. The very arresting Act III ensemble in Manon Lescaut is a sort of combination of concertato and dramatic movement, although it is smaller in scope than Verdi’s later attempts (four solo and up to six choral parts, compared to, for example, seven solo and twenty choral parts in Verdi’s Act II concertato in Aida). “Musetta’s Waltz” is a complicated concertato in its reprise, although few would think of it as such. The finale to La fanciulla del West is an awesome example of Puccini’s skill in adapting old forms for new purposes and one of the most successful moments in opera. The end of Act I of Turandot is a monster concertato whose scale would have made Verdi gulp, and is thoroughly successful by any dramatic standards.
contralto: The lowest female voice, much favored by British composers, among others. Though Italian composers have used contraltos, especially for witches and other scary women, Puccini avoided them. His one notable contralto is reserved for his most extreme shrew of a character, the Zia Principessa in Suor Angelica.
crescendo (It., “growing,” as in the “crescent” moon, and hence related to the humble French “croissant,” which is actually Austrian): Getting louder. The term used for everything from individual notes to entire acts of operas. James Levine has explained to singers that every note longer than a quarter note must either be a crescendo or a decrescendo, or else one is not singing but rather stringing along notes. Conversely, Ravel’s famous Boléro is a single crescendo. Puccini preferred to contrast loud and soft moments, most extremely in Turandot. One also sees crescente, a slightly different verb form of the same idea. The Act I finale of Turandot is marked con calore crescente, which was about as lurid as you could be in print in 1925.
crooning: To sing softly and in a sentimental style. In the opera world, it means to float sound in an unsupported manner, and is considered a very bad thing. Tenors are often accused of crooning. Of course, Bing Crosby and half the island of Ireland have shown that crooning can be an art form of its own, but to croon in Italian opera is synonymous with cheating. If a tenor croons convincingly, however, it is forgiven and then is called mezza voce (q.v).
diatonic scale: The educated way to say “Do, re, mi” and so on.
fermata: Officially, a fermata means a pause. But ask any tenor the meaning of fermata—it means hold on to the note until you become blue in the face. The fermata is not only used by tenors, but they’re notorious for making the most out of them. Puccini was careful to mark his scores with a fermata where he wanted them, so we can safely assume he did not want them in other places. Try telling that to a tenor with a good high note in his arsenal! “Nessun dorma” in Turandot has a particularly famous fermata.
forte, piano: Loud and soft, respectively. Early composers never wrote down the expected dynamics of passages either they expected to be there to explain the music, or they didn’t care what happened when they weren’t around. The baroque singers wouldn’t have paid any attention anyway. Who was a mere composer to tell them how a passage would be most effective? Improvements in music publishing technology combined with an increased stature for the composer to make dynamic marking both possible and worth noting throughout the nineteenth century. Also, instruments were capable of a much wider dynamic range (cf. the “pianoforte,” the keyboard instrument [our “piano”], which could play loud or soft while the previous harpsichord could not). The superlatives of the words are fortissimo and pianissimo, and fortississimo and so forth. By Puccini’s time, every detail of how music should be played and sung could be found in the printed score, supervised by the composer himself. Puccini employed Verdi’s advice on these markings if he wanted piano, he had to write pianississimo. (Did Verdi understand singers, or what?) Puccini was quite uninhibited about marking passages fortississimo and emphasizing the point by writing “con tutta forza” above that marking (cf. Tosca finale, the soprano’s line at the end of Act II of Fanciulla, and almost every other page of Turandot).
furore (It., “furor”): A combination of an ovation and a communal panic attack that hits opera theaters once in a great while when all the elements come together. It is well beyond a success or even a triumph. This demonstrates the fine line between great art and madness, especially in the world of opera. Puccini experienced several nights in his career that could be classified under this term, but only two opening nights that were indisputably furori (pi.) Manon Lescaut in 1893 at Turin and Fanciulla in 1910 at the Met. The rest varied Rondine was a success, Bohème a lukewarm success, Tosca and II trittico barely successes, and Butterfly an out-and-out fiasco (which is the polar opposite of a furore). This shows how little effect an opening night reception has on an opera’s destiny. Puccini did not live to see Turandot’s premiere. No doubt it would have been even more of a furore had he been there.
glissando (It., “gliding”): A musical direction to glide the run of notes as much as possible without differentiating between individual notes. With some instruments, like the trombone, this can actually be done. With others, such as the harp, it is an instruction to make it sound as if this were actually happening. The score of Turandot is replete with glissandi (pl.).
glockenspiel: The ubiquitous handheld xylophone-type instrument in marching bands is actually played vertically in orchestras. Puccini heard otherwordly rather than quotidian vibes in this instrument, and used them (often in addition to the similar celesta and the regular old xylophone) in all of his mature operas except Manon Lescaut and Gianni Schicchi.
Grand Opéra (Fr.): In the specific sense, a genre of opera prevalent—in fact, mandated by law—at the Opéra in Paris. The format was thus an opera in five acts on a historical subject, with an elaborate ballet usually in the third act. The Paris Opéra had a huge budget and an unheard-of amount of rehearsal time (too much, Verdi thought). The chorus and orchestra were unsurpassed and the budget allowed for the best singers. The chorus, therefore, was featured prominently throughout productions at the Opéra. The great soloists each had at least one big opportunity to display their talents. The fourth act tended to be a “hit parade” of arias. Rossini was one of the founders of the style with his famous Guillaume Tell, and Donizetti also had some success there. Verdi wrote two actual Grand Opéras for Paris (Les Vêpres siciliennes and Don Carlos) and one very clearly influenced by the style, Aida. The format had obvious problems but clear strengths as well, and operas written in this genre for Paris remained popular in Italy long after they had faded elsewhere. So it would not have been outrageous for Puccini to have attempted writing one. Tito Ricordi Jr. was forever trying to get Puccini to write a Grand Opéra, and turned to Zandonai for Francesca da Rimini when it became obvious that the mule of Torre del Lago was not about to budge from his “little” heroines. Many scholars, however, see distinct traces of the tradition in Turandot.
grand scena: In traditional Italian opera, the grand scena is a specific form used at climactic moments. It entailed a soloist, sometimes (although by no means usually) accompanied by a chorus in a distinctly background role. The soloist would begin with a recitative, and then sing a cavatina, which is a melodic aria, in a slow and stately tempo. Suddenly, there would be a plot development—a messenger with bad news, perhaps—and the soloist would launch into a cabaletta, which is a fast and florid aria. Castrati and soprano divas were much addicted to the form, often putting clauses in their contracts demanding a specific number of grandi scene (pi.) per opera. It allowed them to show the full range of their talents, musical and histrionic. Thus an archtypical grand scena might run thus Our heroine wanders on the stage, alone and dressed to the teeth, declaiming her joy on this, her wedding day. She sings placidly and in lengthy melodic lines of the fulfillment of her pious prayers. Polite applause. The court herald rushes in to inform her that her true love has been killed in battle. She resolves to avenge his death and then to kill herself (all this in recitative, which encompasses action) and then sings a fireworks aria with runs, trills, octave leaps, and a generous dollop of the words “vendetta” and “morte.” She sweeps her ample skirts with a flourish and exits amidst torrents of applause and shouts of acclamation from the balcony. She returns before the drawn curtain and prostrates herself before the ovation, right hand folded before her breast like St. Teresa in agony and left hand greedily collecting the floral tributes. The audience bounces to the bar in a state of rare satisfaction. As thrilling as a successful grand scena can be, the utter artificiality of the form (exaggerated a bit in my account to stress the point) was thoroughly unacceptable to the composers of Puccini’s generation, the disciples of verismo. Verdi, earlier, had also chafed at the form, even though he had written some great ones. His later works sought to incorporate the power of the grand scena into a more organic whole. Puccini continued in this manner, achieving an admirable seamlessness in his climactic solo (or quasi-solo) scenes. He did not dispense with the form altogether—he was too sensitive to effective theatrics to do that. Instead, he noted the effectiveness of the plot/reflection/plot change/climax formula and incorporated it into his own, less segmented style. It was similar to his approach to that other great standby of traditional opera, the concertato (q.v.). Thus, while no one in their right minds would say there is an actual grand scena in Puccini’s operas, we can easily detect descendants of the form in such moments as Butterfly’s triumphal outburst at the return of Pinker-ton’s ship in Act II and Liù’s suicide in Turandot. In many ways, even “Musetta’s Waltz” in Bohème can be understood as a sort of grand scena. Of course, in very general terms grand scena can refer to any scene-chewing moment on the operatic stage, of which there are many. As the bearer of both a technical and a campy definition, Grand Scena has been the name for many years of a famous opera company in New York, comprised entirely of men and women in various gender-bent guises, and headed by the redoubtable Ira Siff (aka Mme. Vera Galuppi-Borshkh). Their comedic gifts can only be imagined, matched only by their obvious dedication to and love for the source material. Among the Grand Scena’s greatest “hits” are a brilliant rendition of the poker scene in Fanciulla, and an equally brilliant, if more irreverent, account of the finale to Act II of Tosca. Best moment Tosca sips the wine offered her by Scarpia. “Quanto?” she asks, examining the label on the wine bottle. “Il prezzo?” Somebody here knows their Tosca, and many “serious” directors could learn much from la Galuppi-Borshkh.
grisette: The legendary working girls of nineteenth-century Paris—shopkeepers, artisans, and so on. They were not prostitutes, which were another class altogether, although they generally needed to augment their meager incomes as best they could. Their name derives from their gray dresses, gray being the color of undyed and therefore cheaper cloth. Grisettes appear at Bullier’s in La rondine, and Magda “disguises” herself as one. Mimì is a grisette in La bohème. In Mürger’s novel, so is Musette, as she is called, although it is hard to imagine her operatic incarnation in a gray dress. Mürger’s novel has a cynical summation of these grisettes he helped immortalize “those pretty girls, half bees, half grasshoppers, who sang at their work all week, only asked God for a little sunshine on Sunday, loved with all their heart, and sometimes threw themselves out of a window.”
leggiero (It., “light”): A category of the tenor voice (primarily), reserved for a light voice of sweetness and grace rather than power. Puccini did not explore this category much, although the role of the young Rinuccio in Gianni Schic chi has sometimes been sung by leggiero tenors. The famous tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini managed to be called a leggiero tenor and still make a mark as Rodolfo in Bohème and even, more surprisingly, as Cavaradossi in Tosca.
longueurs (Fr.): The “boring parts.” Leave it to the French to come up with the definitive word for this. It is a handy phrase, particularly in some second-rate French operas, which can become vague to the point of torture. Despite being crucial around the opera house, I cannot imagine this term’s use regarding Puccini, whatever other shortcomings he may have had. Anyone who finds “boring parts” in a Puccini opera is either attending really bad performances or requires immediate, generous infusions of Ritalin.
libretto (It., “little book”): The “play” that is set to music to form an opera. Libretti (pi.) have long been the source of derision, getting blamed for the supposed absurdity of operas. Indeed, some opera composers have been remarkably blithe about the quality of the libretti they have set. Rossini once famously remarked that he could set a laundry list to music. Puccini, conversely, experienced the tortures of hell to get the libretti the way he wanted them. It might even be supposed that the problems of the libretto to his final opera, Turandot, actually killed him. A successful libretto can be an original story (e.g., Gianni Schicchi), an adaptation of a stage play (e.g., Tosca, Butterfly, Fanciulla), an adaptation of a stage play so different it might be regarded as an original composition (Bohème, Turandot), or an adaptation of another medium, such as a novel (Manon Lescaut). It must be a successful drama of one form or another on its own terms. Also—and this is the point that tends to elude our contemporary librettists—it must be composed of the sort of language that has an inherent acoustical value. That is, the words must create some sort of impression by being sung rather than by what they actually mean. Hence the much-maligned libretto to Verdi’s Il trovatore by Salvatore Cammarano gets dissed for its tale of crazed gypsies throwing the wrong baby (oops) on the fire. Agreed, not exactly our contemporary notions of dramatic truth, but the words contain explosive power that Verdi’s music catapults into the stratosphere. Admittedly, this is inherently easier to accomplish in Italian than in English. (See also versification).
lyric: As a vocal type, it refers to the lighter type of voice one might find in the opera house. It is not the lightest, which is leggiero. Please remember that all these categories are quite subjectively defined and seem to exist for the primary purpose of providing opera fans with conversation material on long road trips. But since the category does exist, we can say that Rodolfo and Mimì in Bohème, Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi, and Liù in Turandot are the primary Puccinian representatives of this category.
melody: Like love, it is impossible to define but everyone knows it when they are confronted with it. The Oxford Dictionary of Music gamely offers “A series of notes, varying in pitch, which have an organized and recognizable pattern.” Well, yes, that’s a start. The fact is that some successions of notes (simultaneous notes are called “harmony” and are another subject) seem to resonate with people more than others. Even though people around the world use different “scales” (series of notes), melodies cross cultural and racial divisions. People either like a melody or they don’t, and there is a surprising amount of unanimity in this judgment that should be, by all theories, subjective. People will complain about the production or the arrangement or the development of a melody, but it is rare that people complain about an actual tune—a unit of melody—itself. Melody fell afoul of the intellectual thought-leaders throughout much of the twentieth century. And out it went, with all who considered themselves instructed by such worthy thinkers. The vast majority of humanity ignored this decree, and the only tangible result was that the institutions that teach musicians have been forever separated and isolated from the general (and paying) public, to the detriment of both sides. The gift of creating melody cannot be taught, and those who have it often shun musical education for fear (justified) that it will be beaten out of them. Puccini was among the last humans who had both the gift of melody and a traditional musical education. For this, he has been much despised by many. Go figure.
Metropolitan Opera of New “four:” One of the world’s “Big Four” opera houses, the Mighty Met has defined opera in America roughly since its founding in 1883. It is the world’s largest opera house, and is still perhaps the most technically elaborate despite its present home being forty years old. It is distinctly “major league.” The Met’s reputation almost since its opening has rested on star singers, as much to the delight of audiences as to the opprobrium of stern critics within and beyond the opera world. At certain times in its history, the Met Orchestra has also soared to great heights. This can be said of our day, but during Puccini’s time it was perhaps even truer, if contemporary accounts are to be believed. The musical direction was shared for a time between Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini, the rivalry shortened by Mahler’s untimely final illness. La fanciulla del West was premiered there, which was the Met’s first world premiere. Il trittico also received its premiere there. Puccini remains by far the most performed composer at the Met—perhaps a bit too performed, by many accounts. While it is true that too many pro forma performances of the warhorses have created a sense of ho-hum around the name of Puccini, the Met must also be credited with some historic performances that have justified the composer’s ubiquity. The Turandot performances of 1961, with Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli, did much to rehabilitate that opera with the public. The Live from the Met series, while it was on, brought many legendary performances of Puccini’s works to a few million television sets the initial Pavarotti/Scotto Bohème, the Scotto/Domingo Manon Lescaut, the Stratas/Carreras Bohème, the Stratas Suor Angelica, and many others.
mezza voce: Crooning, when done well, is honored with the appellation mezza voce, which means “half voice.” A score is very rarely marked with this direction—one depends on feeling and tradition to judge when to use it. Cavaradossi’s first statement of the “big theme” in “E lucevan le stelle” (Tosca, Act III) is almost always sung in mezza voce, although the score only says “beautifully, with much feeling.” Besides sounding inherently dreamy, it also forms a good contrast for the next statement of the theme, coming only a few seconds later. A good tenor will use the mezza voce the first time around to make you think he’s blowing the lid off the Castel Sant’Angelo in the repeat. By the way, make sure you pronounce this word right METS-a-voh-chay (the double “z” is a “ts” sound, like in “pizza”). Otherwise, people will think you are mumbling messa di voce, which is “placement of the voice,” describing a diminuendo after a crescendo, popular in the bel canto style and devilishly difficult to accomplish.
mezzo-soprano: Literally, a “half soprano,” although few mezzos of my acquaintance would appreciate that reading of the word. The lower-voiced female range, though not so low as a contralto, which is relatively rare. Italian opera has a great tradition of writing for the mezzo even many of Rossini’s greatest coloratura roles were written for mezzo. Verdi also had a knack for wringing exciting drama out of mezzos, although his mezzos tended to be darker, more ominous roles than their soprano rivals (cf. Trovatore, Don Carlos, Aida). The French composers have greatly excelled in writing for the mezzo predictably, “bad girls” like Dalilah and Carmen are written for mezzo, but so are “nicer” (though no less toxic) girls like Charlotte in Massenet’s Werther and the enigmatic title woman in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Puccini was a sort of descendant of both Verdi and the French composers, which makes his avoidance of the mezzo voice more remarkable. Anybody else would have made Musetta in Bohème a mezzo-soprano—in fact, Leoncavallo did in his version of the opera. Having two leading sopranos of such similar voice types sharing the stage is virtually unique in Italian opera. He does it again in Turandot, although the two sopranos are of such different vocal character that it almost doesn’t count. Still, Busoni wrote his version of the Liù role for a mezzo. Puccini’s only lead role (as opposed to comprimario role) for a mezzo is Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, and she doesn’t get an aria.
modes: The scales of European music from about the time of the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. There are many arcane explanations of the various modes, but the simplest way to get an idea is simply to go to the piano and play eight notes in succession using only the white keys, starting with C, then D, and so forth. Each of these variations received an intimidating name based on a supposed Greek origin (Lydian, Ionian, etc.), adding to their mystique. The issue is where the scale moves a whole-tone and where it moves a half-tone. Our standard modern major scale is whole/whole/half/whole/whole/whole/half, while minor scales vary the placement of the halftones. The major scale is the ancient Ionian mode, while the most common minor is the old Aeolian. Most European music since about 1600 has been in these two scales. Where variations were used, it was deemed easier to write them with accidentals (extra sharp or flat notes) than to change the whole piece into another mode. Only the Roman Catholic Church continued to use the mode system until quite recently, and many hymnals still use it. Partly because of this, several twentieth-century composers took an interest in the mode system for its ancient and religious sound, even though originally modes were used in popular music as well as religious. If my analyses are correct, Puccini played with modes in the score of Tosca to create a musical depiction of Church power run amok. Girardi noted the use of the same “churchy” modes in the riddle scene in Turandot (Act II, Scene 2), conferring a sense of ritual.
morbidezza (It.): Delicacy, both in the refined and the sickly sense of the word. Therefore, Renata Scotto could boast in an interview that she was an excellent soprano because she had morbidezza, a comment that raised a few eyebrows even among those whose Italian was fluent. But Manon Lescaut can also sing of her chambers being morbide, meaning both soft and sapped of energy. Be careful when complimenting someone’s voice on its morbidezza.
ostinato: A musical phrase that repeats. The Italian word literally translates as “obstinate,” which is an excellent description of the orchestra seemingly tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “Hello! We’re saying something here!” Puccini used the technique frequently and usually in muted phrases, notably in the “dripping blood” moment of Fanciulla’s Act II and the odd little “change your hat and makeup” moment in Act I of La rondine.
Opéra-Comique: Traditionally, the second most important opera house in Paris, a position it retained for many years without rival after the demise of the Theatre des Italiens in the latter nineteenth century. “Comique” originally referred to dialogue, not comedy, as “comédien” means “actor” in French. In systematic French thinking, one found different forms of opera at different theaters. Therefore, one found grand opera at the Opéra (eventually the Palais Garnier, that extravaganza in the middle of Paris), Italian opera at the Théâtre des Italiens, and opera with dialogue—a sort of forerunner of the musical—at the Opéra-Comique. So it was all very Gallic and ordered, except when it wasn’t (like the French language, which is 100 percent logical and phonetic, except when it isn’t). In effect, the Opéra-Comique became an alternative to the impossible bureaucracy of the Opéra, and many of its most important premieres (Massenet’s Cendrillon, 1899 and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, 1902) were operas without dialogue. Madama Butterfly was introduced to Paris at the Comique, much to Puccini’s dissatisfaction. It is open today and hosts operetta and even some Broadway musicals. The theater is well worth a visit.
passaggio (It., “passage”): Every voice has a place where it tightens as it runs up the scale. This is particularly notable in tenors, whose passaggio tends to be around the notes E, F, and F-sharp. This is a perilous area. It is remarkably easy to “lay an egg” when trying to attack these notes without proper preparation. On the other hand, if it is handled properly, notes in this zone have an inherently emotional appeal. The great composers knew how to make the most of it, at least for tenors who knew how to deliver on it. Puccini was a master of the art. The aria “Recondita armonia” from Tosca, for example, lives almost entirely in the passaggio.
parlato (It., “spoken”): A direction in musical scores to speak rather than sing a given word or passage. It was a device much used, even overused, by the verismo composers. The final lines of both Cavalleria rusticana and I pagliacci are spoken rather than sung. The verismo performance tradition has determined many lines to he parlato even if this is not indicated in the score Tosca’s Act II exit line, “Ed avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma,” is not marked parlato in the score, though most fans would be surprised to know that. On the other hand, Puccini was not afraid to use the direction elsewhere. Mar-cello’s poignant final “Coraggio!” to Rodolfo in Bohème is parlato. Minnie’s great presentation of her winning poker hand, “tre assi e un paio!” is parlato. And so on. Even in such a nonverismo work as Turandot, the chorus indulges in parlato phrases frequently, most predictably during Liù’s torture scene where they urge her “Parla! il suo nome!”
pentatonic: A scale that divides the “octave” (or what we Westerners call the “octave”) into five notes, rather than our usual eight. Play only the black notes on a piano and you will experience a common pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is favored in China and Japan, and Puccini made use of pentatonic melodies in Butterfly and Turandot. The pentatonic scale is also the basic division of music in many other places, including Scotland (cf. “On the Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond”), and much indigenous music of the Americas. The “Minstrel’s Song” in Fanciulla is pentatonic, and is now said to have a Zuñi provenance. Now, before any modern-day Thor Heyerdahls get on a raft to prove that prehistoric musicians sailed between China, Peru, and Scotland, carrying their scale with them, be warned that the pentatonic scales of those various places are all quite different from each other.
pizzicato (It., “plucked”): Plucking a string on the violin or any string instrument, as opposed to using the bow (“arco”). Puccini uses the effect powerfully, either in a single note (i.e., when Rodolfo’s hand touches Mimi’s in Act I of La bohème), or in rather Byzantine configurations (the chromatic pizzicato scale toward the end of the Ping, Pang, and Pong scene in Turandot). In other spots in the Turandot score, musicians are required to alternate pizzicato and arco notes, a difficult effect to achieve without sounding like a train wreck.
phrasing: The difference between notes on a page and the thrill of performance lies mostly in the art of phrasing—that is, interpretation of the written notes. The individuality of voices and conductors depends largely on their ability to bring a phrase of music alive. Tastes change with the times, though. What was considered “artistic” fifty years ago is often considered excessive today. It is a subjective science, yet it remains a science. There are techniques one can use to add spice, so to speak, to the written page of music. There is rubato, portamento, parlato, head tones, chest tones, the coup de glotte (a little sob Caruso perfected), and those are just the ones singers have revealed.
plosives: The consonantal sound that separates the Germanic from the Latin languages. In English, for example, the K, P, and T sounds are accompanied by a little burst of air emitted from the mouth hence the name. In Italian, there should be no discernible emission of air. Singers can practice this with a candle held up toward the mouth. The flame should not waver when speaking Italian. British singers, who are taught proper English locution as children, can almost never master euphonious Italian. We Americans, who are generally taught nothing at all about the English language, have an advantage here and should do better than we do. Unfortunately, diction coaches will spend days on proper German, French, and Russian pronunciation (as well they should) and ignore Italian altogether. All opera singers think their Italian is perfect anyway, and it rarely is. Why is this important? Because it will have an effect on the musical sounds being produced. Puccini was well aware of phonemes (spoken sound units) when he composed, often sending “dummy verses” to his librettists to work with for various passages. The consonants shape the subsequent vowels, which in turn affect the tone. Compare the Met or Covent Garden chorus to La Scala’s in, say, Act I of Turandot. Anyone sitting in the first ten rows of the Met when the chorus calls “Pu-Tin-Pao!” will be covered with spit. Both choruses will have fine musicality but La Scala’s will sound better at that moment. It’s because of the plosives. Attention, vocal coaches!
portamento: “Carrying” a note from one to the next. Puccini marked his portamenti (pi.) more carefully and thoroughly than any other standard operatic composer, yet often singers feel moved to add additional portamenti of their own.
prima (It., “first”): Obnoxious term used by cognoscenti (q.v.) to refer to the first performance of a repertory work during a given season (as in, “You mean you weren’t at the prima?”). A premiere is the first performance of the work itself or of a new production.
recitative: Opera began as an attempt to re-create ancient Greek drama in a (then) modern Italian idiom. The gentlemen involved in the project knew, as we know now, that Greek drama was sung to an extent. What they didn’t know, as we still do not know, was to what extent the words of the drama were sung. Judging from the structure of the dramas, it seemed that the singing in the Greek dramas amounted to a sort of exaggerated speech pattern rather than a string of actual songs. The wailing of the muezzin from the minaret and the cadences of the synagogue cantor provide hints to how melodic such “sing-speech” can be. The gist of this idea is to emphasize the words, which are sacred to the cantor and the muezzin, and were sacred also in a sense to the Florentine scholars poring over their Greek texts. Some wanted more moments of melody in the new creation, thinking rightly that the absence of melody would be absurd in an Italian work. An argument started that has been raging for over 400 years. How much of opera should be emphasized speech and how much should be, when you get right down to it, song? The “talky” part in between the arias, duets, ensembles, and choruses is called recitative. The “opera seria” genre of baroque opera became quite formalized, with recitative done by one or perhaps two characters, followed by a solo aria, and exit, and repeat the whole formula until an evening was filled out. The recitative was where all the action happened; the aria was a moment to “stop time” and reflect on the action. Accompaniment to the recitative was, of necessity, very sparse since the words had to be understood clearly. One of Puccini’s greatest accomplishments was a superb integration of recitative within the melodic structure of his scores.
regietheater (German, “director theater”): The current term for director-driven theater, which would seem to apply to all theater these days. In opera, it unfortunately tends to mean the music is given very little attention, at least in the press.
Royal Opera, Covent Garden: The main opera house of London, and one of the world’s “Big Four.” The Royal has had its share of offstage drama over the years, no less than the Paris Opéra, and has been teetering on the edge of closing entirely for much of its history, yet it has been, and continues to be, the site of some of opera’s most exciting nights. The current building dates from 1858, with much remodeling. Puccini had a great deal of trouble with the management of the house, finding it too dedicated to its star performers and not enough to the quality of the productions, but he could never break with the house because of its stature and its fat paychecks.
rubato (It., “stolen”): A technique of phrasing, involving taking liberties with the lengths of individual notes. Literally, one steals a bit of time off of one note and gives it to another note. Without any rubato, a piece of music on a page can sound clinical and soulless. Think of the famous hymn “Amazing Grace.” If one doesn’t linger over some of the notes and rush others, the tune loses its power and becomes trite, Yet applying too much rubato makes singers sound like Bill Murray’s hilariously cheesy lounge singer jazzing up “Silent Night.” As with portamento, Puccini wrote his scores in so much detail that it is possible to sing them with feeling and not add any more rubato. Indeed, the famous tenor Roberto Alagna raised many eyebrows when he announced to the world that he never did and never would use any. Puccini sometimes marked phrases rubato, notably Suor Angelica’s desperate final prayer.
schmaltz (German/Yiddish, “chicken fat”): Too little, and the soup has no flavor. Too much, and queasiness occurs. Schmaltzy (adj.) is a criticism often used against Puccini, at least in New York.
slancio: The big, gushing theme, gushed forth without inhibition. The dictionary translates slancio as “rush, impetus.” For more on the term and one of its most notable uses, see the chapter “The Myth of Tosca.”
song: In opera, where everything is sung, a song refers to a set vocal piece that is meant to be understood as a separate performed piece. That is, even if everyone onstage were talking instead of singing, the song would still be sung. If that sounds confusing, it is meant to be, since one of the purposes of songs within operas is to blur the boundaries between music and “reality.” Puccini included many songs in his operas the madrigal in Manon Lescaut and the “Minstrel’s Song” in Fanciulla, for example. Sometimes the line between aria and song becomes even hazier. Are we to understand “Tra voi belle” in Manon Lescaut as Des Grieux singing to his friends, or just talking in such a poetic and performative tone that his “speech” becomes an aria? “Musetta’s Waltz” in Bohème clearly begins as a song she stands among a crowd and sings in order to draw attention to herself. But what happens when other soloists and then the chorus pick up her vocal line without any discernible break? Puccini was especially adept at incorporating fragments of songs passing in the background, as we see in Manon Lescaut, Tosca, and Tabarro. However hazy the boundaries may be, though, not all arias are songs.
soprano: The highest female vocal range, and one of the pillars of the Italian operatic tradition. There are specific characteristics to this vocal range that define the characteristics and roles written for them. The high soprano “head voice” can be heard clearly even when sung softly. All those pious prayers and demure arias of Italian opera are more than nineteenth-century notions of idealized submissive womanhood no other voice can express the same idea and still be heard. Conversely, a single soprano voice in full force can be heard over anything—literally anything—including a jumbo jet taking off. It’s more a matter of the quality of the sound than mere decibels. The sound slices through other sounds. The best way to look at vocal types is as aspects within each one of us. Though I may not be a soprano, I have certain thoughts and, moreover, feelings that could only be truly expressed by a soprano voice. And so do you. And the same for every other type of voice. But the soprano voice, in its ability to pierce all other noise, is uniquely qualified to represent the individual who demands to be heard against the opposition of the whole world. Verdi knew this in the Triumphal Scene in Aida and especially in the finale to his amazing Requiem. Puccini knew it too think of Butterfly’s outburst when Pinkerton’s ship returns in Act II. The words may say simply, “I won!” but the sheer vocal declamation says, “I was right and all of you so-and-so’s in the whole world were wrong, damn it!” A tenor voice singing the same notes would imply a very different emotional state. Whatever the actual details, there is no denying that Puccini was absolutely addicted to the soprano voice at the expense of all others. Although he wrote exquisitely and extensively for the tenor, the sopranos rule his world. All of his mature operas except II tabarro and Gianni Schicchi are named after the lead soprano roles.
spinto (It., “pushed”): A categorization of voice, officially called lirico spinto. This refers to heavier voices than “lyric,” but not full-on artillery-voice, which is categorized as “dramatic.” Most of Puccini’s fall within this character, although many have also been successfully portrayed by the lighter lyric voices. Discussing which lyrics were successful in which spinto roles keeps opera fans amused for hours. Case in point Minnie in Fanciulla is distinctly a spinto role. Even some heavier dramatic sopranos (we’re talking about voices here, not physical size) have found it unmanageable. The greatest dramatic soprano of recent times, Birgit Nilsson, recorded the role but avoided it onstage. However, Dorothy Kirsten, a lyric soprano, had a great success in the role. It’s this sort of illogic that makes opera a great refuge in an otherwise clinical world.
Teatro alla Scala, Milan Italy’s most important opera house, and still one of the world’s “Big Four.” Puccini’s career at Milan’s La Scala was generally stressful. Edgar failed there in its much-vaunted premiere, Manon Lescaut was only moderately successful in its initial run, while Madama Butterfly, premiered there, was one of the great disasters of opera. A thirtieth anniversary production of Manon Lescaut, led by Toscanini in 1922-23, did much to break the ice between Puccini and the Scala public. Turandot received its emotional, posthumous premiere there in 1926. Any visitor to La Scala will be overwhelmed with the history, the beauty, the acoustics, and the downright fun to be experienced there. The audiences are not always friendly in the traditional ways, but they are rarely boring. Some nights are a genuine riot. There is “attitude” aplenty there, as there is in much of Milan, but at least this spot has the goods to back it up. The Scala Museum is also well worth a visit. It is not, as one would expect, in the theater but a little distance away. In fact, it’s across the street from The Last Supper. It is well worth a trip. Turandot is, predictably, well represented there Nicola Benois’s gold and coral costume for Turandot would not disgrace the most over-the-top drag queen.
Teatro Argentina, Rome The oldest extant opera house in Rome, and one of the most striking theaters in Italy. It was the site of Bohème’s half-successful Roman premiere, where only Acts III and IV met with general approval. In Sardou’s La Tosca, we are told that the diva is engaged at this theater, singing an opera by Paisiello (who was not only away from Rome in 1800, but who sided with Napoleon and remained out of favor with the Bourbons). It is a quick walk from the Argentina to the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle. Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung received its Italian premiere in this baroque jewel box, which must have been cozy in the extreme. It was also the site of the premiere of Rossini’s Barber of Seville, which was, before Madama Butterfly’s premiere at La Scala, the most notorious fiasco in Italian operatic history. Conversely, it witnessed one of Verdi’s giddiest triumphs with the premiere of La battaglia di Legnano around the time of the brief Roman Republic of 1849, when one audience member was so transported that he leaped from a fourth-tier box into the orchestra pit and escaped unhurt. Most tourists miss the Argentina, which is a mistake. It is now the home of an excellent state-run theater, presenting spoken dramas. For non-Italian speakers, there are also chamber music concerts there on Sunday mornings, making it one of the few open venues, other than churches, in the city at that time.
Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires Arguably (but only somewhat) the world’s most beautiful large opera house, built in 1908. Puccini never saw it, but was at the previous theater of Buenos Aires also called simply the Teatro de la Opera. A season he and Elvira attended there in 1905 amounted to a veritable Puccini Festival, with even the difficult Edgar succeeding relatively well there, and Madama Butterfly with Rosina Storchio was a great success there while its future was still in doubt elsewhere. The great tradition of traveling to Buenos Aires (with optional stops in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo, and Montevideo) in the (northern) summer faded with the First World War and the rise of summer festivals in Europe and the United States, although the Colón still benefits from the relative availability of singers during the months of June, July, and August.
Teatro Costanzi (Rome Opera): As the capital of Italy and the fabled Eternal City, Rome should, in theory, have the greatest opera house in the world. It doesn’t, and in fact opera has had a long but tortured history in Rome. The Teatro Costanzi, now the Teatro dell’Opera, was originally built in 1879, with a capacity of 2,212. In Rome’s first flush as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, many looked to the Costanzi as a venue for the renewal of Italian opera, free, as it was, from associations of “old Italy” like La Scala and the San Carlo. Mascagni’s triumph there with Cavalleria rusticana (1890) seemed to confirm this new status. Puccini always held the Costanzi in high regard Tosca received its famous and nerve-racking premiere there in 1900, and both Fanciulla (1910) and Trittico (1918) were given their Italian premieres there. Toscanini, however, avoided the place, and in the end La Scala, under his direction, firmly retained its traditional primacy. The Costanzi was bought by the city council of Rome and reopened, after much redesign, as the Royal Opera House in 1928. In the 1950s it was renamed the Teatro dell’Opera and thoroughly redesigned again, this time in a sort of midcentury modern, and not a very successful example of that genre. In fact, most Americans assume it is the post office. The square in front of the opera house was converted into a parking lot at some point, and an infestation of drug dealers and gap-toothed prostitutes completed the lovely picture. The parking lot was recently reincarnated as a public garden—a very rare commodity in downtown Rome. It is a welcome improvement and with luck a harbinger of better times for opera in Rome.
Teatro Massimo Palermo This beautiful theater had the honor of being the first place where La bohème was an unqualified success, after the opera’s hesitant successes in Turin and Rome. This was in the theater’s inaugural season, 1897, after a thirty-two-year process to design, build, and complete it. Puccini basically ignored the theater after that. The Massimo continued to have troubles after its opening, sustaining damage in the war and then remaining closed “for repairs” for twenty-five years more recently. It is finally back to its former glory and is in fact one of the centerpieces of the “new Palermo.” The Massimo can be seen to full advantage in the movie The Godfather III, where it is the site of one of the most elaborate multiple killings in film.
Teatro Regio, Turin; This theater was important in Puccini’s early career, and in fact was briefly one of the most important theaters in Italy. Le villi, in one of its incarnations, received a successful premiere there, as did Manon Lescaut (a furore) and La bohème (a bit of a disappointment). Toscanini was associated with the theater at this juncture, and gave an important Italian premiere of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung there despite the poor acoustics. In 1906, Toscanini had a bit of an argy-bargy with Richard Strauss over the Italian premiere of Salome, slated for the Regio, and never really bothered with the place again. He hardly needed it after he took over the Met and La Scala, in any case. The Regio languished and burned down in 1936, replaced by a bit of Fascist realism that pleased nobody. In 1973, a new theater, designed by Carlo Mollino, was unveiled, and the new, new Regio is working hard, with some success, to put Turin back on the list of operatic capitals.
Teatro San Carlo, Naples; Italy’s second most important opera house, after La Scala, and a beautiful theater. Puccini never had much luck there—Edgar was a disaster early in his career, which forever rankled him, and he avoided the place. Verdi also found the place uncongenial, as did even Caruso, a native Neapolitan.
Te Deum: A service of the Roman Catholic Church, giving praise to God. For some reason it became traditional to employ the Te Deum after military victories, which is how it is used in Tosca. Since we in the audience are expected to know that Marengo was not, in fact, a victory for the Allies against Napoleon, there is an inherent dig on Puccini’s behalf against the pomp of the Church. The libretto directs Scarpia to kneel and cross himself after the first two lines of the hymn are intoned; the congregation usually does the same. The Roman Breviary, however, insists that the congregants stand during the Te Deum and are only permitted to kneel during the recitation of the later line “Te ergo quaesumus,” not included in Tosca. You read it here first.
tenor: The highest natural range of the male voice in chest tones. There are also countertenors, who are a sort of specialized falsettist, and there were the castrati, neither of which enters into the Puccini discourse. If the soprano voice is uniquely qualified by nature to depict the Voice That Must Be Heard, the tenor voice also has unique traits. There is a very old cliché about tenors being stupid. Of course, there are stupid tenors and smart ones, but there is some insight in the old cliché. First of all, the tenor voice is not natural for a man, like the baritone’s is. Tenors must first be born, and then trained. They are a rare breed, and (inexplicably, although there are many theories) become more rare year by year. If one is found who can sing with some beauty, it doesn’t matter if he can dissect the inherent contradictions of Nietzsche, or even walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s awesome when a tenor can act, look good, and be a thinking musician (Plácido Domingo being the obvious example of this), but the voice is precious and must be cherished where it is found. The voice itself does not sound as if it represents the intellect. It sounds inherently urgent, like it is operating on urges other than the brainy ones. Great opera composers know how and when to use this voice type. Besides always pushing for sex, tenors therefore have the voice composers turn to when there is a call to arms, a political authority figure to be insulted, or a fire to be extinguished. The temperament of some of history’s leading tenors is as legendary as that of the sopranos or even the castrati, usually to the delight of the audience. In the movie All About Eve, Thelma Ritter names tenors as the only people in show business more temperamental than the wardrobe mistresses. Puccini wrote magnificent music for tenors even if the core of his heart was with the sopranos.
versification: The process of setting plain speech into poetic meters, with or without rhyme. The practice was all-pervasive in Italian opera until quite recently. Zandonai’s curious opera I cavallieri d’Ekebù (1922) was the first Italian opera whose libretto was written in prose. It will also be noted that the date of Zandonai’s opera corresponds almost directly with the demise of Italian opera as an international force. The Italian language, with its flexible syntax and typical consonant/vowel alternations, lends itself extremely well to poetic meter. It is possible to write flawlessly metered Italian and still sound very near conversational (Dante achieves this frequently even in so exalted a piece as the Divine Comedy). Rhyme, too, which always sounds a bit comical in English, is much more natural in Italian. Thus even the ne plus ultra of verismo, Cavalleria rusticana, is written with a metered libretto and a hefty dollop of rhyme. Versification fell into disrepute among academics and other arbiters of taste in the twentieth century, being considered as archaic and artificial as the furrowed hedgerows of formal gardens. Ironically, we masses, in our infinite ignorance, appear to have disregarded the academics’ attempts to liberate us from our lower instincts and have held on to meter and rhyme in popular music. In fact, the current surge of rap music is built on a strict adherence to formal meters and rhymed couplets that would have made baroque librettists gag with envy.
Vienna State Opera: One of the “Big Four” of opera, in Puccini’s day as well as our own. Although marginalized for a time by the relative indifference of the Vienna Opera’s director, Gustav Mahler, Puccini achieved a true triumph there after the war. It was, in fact, the only house in which Il trittico was an unqualified success, due largely to the talents of Lotte Lehmann as a superb Suor Angelica. The present opera house is a re-creation of the previous, which was destroyed in the war.
whole-tone scale: The whole-tone scale is comprised exclusively of, well, whole-tones between the notes (as opposed to the diatonic scale, which is made of combinations of whole- and half-tones). On the standard piano, a whole-tone scale can only be played in two keys C and C-sharp. This means the notes used are C, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A-sharp, and C, or C-sharp, D-sharp, F, G, A, B and C-sharp, respectively. Very few techniques in music were “invented” by any one person, but the whole-tone scale is very closely associated with Claude Debussy, who explored the technique more thoroughly than any other composer. Music composed on the whole-tone scale has an innately otherworldly feel to it, and as such has been used (and overused) in film sound tracks. Horror flicks, science fiction, and ghost stories tend to be addicted to the whole-tone scale. Puccini used it at various points in Butterfly and Turandot, but his primary use of the whole-tone scale is in Fanciulla, whose central motif is a whole-tone chord.