GIACOMO PUCCINI (1858-1924)

Unlike the other major opera composers — Mozart, Wagner, Rossini, Verdi — Puccini is totally unknown in the symphonic concert hall. Because his is a talent purely of the theater, critics and academics, especially in his native land, have always tried to deny him his proper place in the pantheon of serious composers. The public, however, feels differently, and Puccini remains one of its favorites.

Born in Lucca, Puccini was descended from several generations of professional musicians. Initially little interested in carrying on the family tradition, he was compelled by his mother to study music. As a teenager he had acquired proficiency enough to hold down two jobs as a church organist. Drawn to gadgets and machinery, he was intrigued by the organ and by the mechanics of music, doodling and improvising during services. Several factors combined to push him into his career: some church pieces and a cantata he wrote enjoyed a favorable reception; he heard Aida, the latest novelty from Verdi’s pen; finally, stipends from a great-uncle and Queen Margherita of Savoy enabled him to study at the Milan Conservatory, 1880–83, where his teachers were Bazzini and Ponchielli.

Big-city life never really agreed with Puccini, but it stimulated him. His bohemian existence as a poor student later found expression in La Bohème. In 1884 he entered a one-act opera, Le Villi, in a competition sponsored by the publisher Sonzogno. Though it did not win, it attracted the attention of Sonzogno’s rival, Ricordi, who thenceforth played a large role in advancing Puccini’s career. A first commission produced Edgar (1889), whose shortcomings prompted the composer to be extremely selective about his librettos from then on. For this reason his next operas, Manon Lescaut and La Bohème underwent difficult birth pangs but were rewarded with public enthusiasm. Though loosely associated with the verismo movement, a drive toward more natural and believable opera theater, Puccini did not hesitate to write period pieces or to exploit exotic locales. In Tosca he wrote an intense melodrama set in Rome during Napoleonic times. For Madama Butterfly he chose an American story set in Japan.

Having enjoyed consistent and gradually expanding acceptance up to that point in his career, Puccini was totally unprepared for the utter failure of Madama Butterfly when it was first presented, in 1904. But he had faith in the work and revised it until it was accepted. The travail over Butterfly delayed him in beginning his next work and undermined his confidence, but during a visit to New York he agreed to write La Fanciulla del West, based on David Belasco’s popular play The Girl of the Golden West, and returned for its world premiere at the Met in 1910. Though reluctant to embrace “modernisms” — Strauss’s Elektra confused and repelled him — Puccini cautiously adapted to changing times in La Fanciulla, absorbing the influence of Debussy’s Pelléas, which he admired.

The next major hiatus in Puccini’s creative life was brought about by World War I. Hostilities found him in the midst of negotiations to write an operetta for Vienna, which was now enemy territory. The operetta became instead a light opera, La Rondine, produced at Monte Carlo and welcomed coolly at the Met as “the afternoon off of a genius.” Puccini never regained his youthful eminence and romantic spontaneity, but he continued to work seriously, broadening his horizons. Experimenting with the one-act format, he created the trilogy Il Trittico, a second world premiere for the Met (1918).

A chain smoker, Puccini developed throat cancer and was taken to Brussels in 1924 for treatment by a specialist. Though the surgery was successful, Puccini’s heart failed, and he died shortly afterward. At the time of his death, he had been working on the most ambitious of his operas, Turandot, based on Schiller’s romantic adaptation of a fantasy by Carlo Gozzi, the eighteenth-century Venetian satirist. In Turandot for the first time he wrote extensively for the chorus, and he provided an enlarged, enriched orchestral tapestry that showed an awareness of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka and other contemporary scores.

Sadly, he could not summon strength to write the difficult final scene (dissatisfaction with the text had caused delays), which would have been quite unlike anything he had previously attempted. After his death a diffident colleague, Franco Alfano, was persuaded by Ricordi to complete the opera, using  Puccini’ s sketches. The world premiere, at La Scala in 1926, conducted by Toscanini, ended as Puccini had requested, without the final scene. Toscanini found Alfano’s conclusion too lengthy and insisted it be cut by 30 percent, after which he conducted it at future performances. Though Alfano’s music makes Turandot performable, it is anticlimactic. Like Süssmayr’s completion of the Mozart Requiem, it serves only to emphasize a dying composer’s inability to complete his life work with a worthy testament.

— John W. Freeman

© Copyright The Metropolitan Opera Guild 2007. Reprinted with permission.