There’s a knock at the door.
A poor young poet is struggling to write in his attic apartment when he is interrupted by the sickly seamstress who lives downstairs. Her candle has gone out; can he light it?
Barely 15 minutes later, these two strangers are singing ecstatically about their love. Implausible, right? But when a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” is working its hot magic, nothing could be more believable.
And nothing could be more essentially operatic than such a scene, with the emotions compressed and heightened through music. Puccini, who died 100 years ago, on Nov. 29, 1924, proved himself again and again a master of moments like this: unleashing a Technicolor extravagance of feeling while at the same time conveying plain, simple truth.
A painter assuring his jealous girlfriend that her eyes are the most beautiful in the world. A prince, pursued by a city desperate to know his name, promising that it will remain a secret. A teenage geisha convinced her husband will come back to her.
Once you know these passages, just thinking about them can bring you to tears. Spoken, the texts would be generic, sentimental, even laughable. Set to Puccini’s music, they suggest the most sincere and profound experiences that humans are capable of.
A century on, it can be said confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.
Out of the vacuum left by the 19th-century giant Giuseppe Verdi, whose final opera premiered in 1893, Puccini emerged just in time for — then dominated — the twilight of the art form’s mainstream centrality. His career coincided with social, political and cultural upheavals that calcified the canon and brought modernist styles to the forefront of fashionable composition. Stunning operas were written in that mode, but few that spread beyond connoisseurs.
What made Puccini the Dickens of opera, able to manage the elusive combination of nearly universal accessibility and deep sophistication? His melodies are sumptuous yet irresistibly straightforward; the propulsive activity in his scores is dotted with seductive oases of breathtaking emotional expansiveness. His music pours forth, never square or regular — a near-continuous flow that shows the influence of Wagner.
But Puccini wasn’t interested in the mythic scale and symbols, the portentous poetry, of Wagnerian opera. He placed himself at the service of the concrete, the everyday, the intimate.
He often rued these limited ambitions, and mulled taking on the kind of grander canvases, with their political and philosophical reverberations, that had become inextricably linked with Verdi. But Puccini’s modest scope — his gift for what he called his “cosettine,” his “little things” — is what has made his operas instantly approachable across the globe, for newcomers and aficionados alike.
From the first, bounding bars of “La Bohème,” you’re inside it, embraced and immersed. But it isn’t grand. Criticized throughout his career for relying on small-scale, precious subjects rather than sweeping historical plots, he has something in common with Jane Austen, who teased that she wrote her novels on “a little bit of ivory, two inches wide.”
Puccini wasn’t taken seriously by scholars until long after his death. Like Dickens, he was dismissed by many critics as a trashy hack, a guilty pleasure. Mahler and Britten disdained his work. The influential musicologist Joseph Kerman notoriously panned “Tosca” as a “shabby little shocker.”
Puccini’s listeners (like Dickens’s readers) have never been fooled. But the art form drifted away from him. His sound world and techniques, fused with the aesthetics of Viennese operetta — a coupling he tried in the wistful “La Rondine” — gave rise to the mass popularity of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The home of Puccini’s truest descendants was Broadway.
With opera’s classics remaining stubbornly constant over the past 100 years, variety has come in their presentation. Works by the likes of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner offer ample grist for stage directors eager to update and deconstruct, because their themes transcend the particulars of their settings. But Puccini’s “Tosca,” for example, is not about anything other than what it’s about; when a production places it in another place or time than its three very specific locations in Rome in June 1800, it seems to miss the point.
Like Richard Strauss, the other titan of opera’s dusk, Puccini had one foot in the 19th century and the other in the 20th, balancing — sometimes uncomfortably — romanticism and modernism. His music is always direct, yet cloaked in complex, sensuous harmonies that he learned from progressive contemporaries like Debussy, and splashed with the local color of a wedding day in Nagasaki, Gold Rush California or fairy-tale Peking.
Through subtle command of the orchestra, he created uncannily persuasive atmospheres. At the start of the third act of “La Bohème,” winter grips Paris. The shock of the cold is there in the loud, abrupt pair of notes as the curtain sweeps open — a slap across a frozen face.
A soft but terse march in the flute and harp is a pricking chill, which deepens in a muted chord that builds from the bottom to the top of the strings, then the woodwinds. The cellos shiver, almost inaudibly, below. In just a few seconds, Puccini conjures February, frigid and lonely.
Of the important opera composers, Puccini may be the one who depended least on text; the music and visual-theatrical spectacle are what define his works. At a performance early in the life of “Tosca,” the soprano Maria Jeritza tripped during her cat-and-mouse fight with Scarpia, and ended up prone on the floor for the aria “Vissi d’arte.”
This became a traditional position for singers of the aria, to the point that audiences might have assumed it was indicated in the libretto. There’s no customary way for sopranos to stand when they sing “Dove sono” (from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro”) or “O patria mia” (from Verdi’s “Aida”). The fact that we see Puccini’s operas as much as we hear them was crucial to their popularity through the rise of film and television.
Just before Christmas in 1858 in Lucca, a city in Tuscany, Puccini was born into a dynasty of professional musicians and composers that went back four generations. When his father died, just after Giacomo’s fifth birthday, one of the eulogies made clear that the boy, the oldest son, was expected to carry on the family tradition.
He was not, at first, a particularly promising student. If his mother, Albina — who was widowed in her mid-30s, with seven children and another on the way — had not been extraordinarily driven on her son’s behalf, Puccini might well have fallen through the provincial cracks.
But she pressed him on and supported him completely, and he responded with utter adoration. (Some have detected traces of their relationship in the heart-rending mother-child plots of “Madama Butterfly” and “Suor Angelica,” in the maternal Minnie of the wild west romance “La Fanciulla del West,” and in the idealized women who appear in almost all his operas.)
Puccini studied scores as part of his teenage lessons. But it was only after he traveled to Pisa in 1876 to see “Aida” — then just a few years old — that, he later recalled, “I felt a musical window had opened for me.”
His sense of discipline grew as he entered the conservatory in Milan, with a commitment to his craft that helped him endure the money-scraping lifestyle that he would later draw on to make the bleak yet merry poverty of “La Bohème” so endearingly vivid.
His early opera “Le Villi,” based on the story that also inspired the ballet “Giselle,” lost a major competition, but was rescued by a successful run in 1884 that established Puccini as a rising star. The eminent publisher Giulio Ricordi took him under his wing, sticking by him even as his next opera, “Edgar,” foundered and his decision to live with a married woman mired him in scandal.
Ricordi’s stubborn support paid off when “Manon Lescaut” (1893) became a celebrity-making hit. It was Puccini’s first collaboration with the librettists Luigi Illica (who was adept at scenarios and initial drafts) and Giuseppe Giacosa (who massaged them into poetry). Illica and Giacosa worked on the mighty run that followed: “La Bohème,” which premiered in 1896; “Tosca,” in 1900; and “Madama Butterfly,” which had an infamous first-night fiasco in Milan in 1904.
Even as these works are crowded with bits of business and blocking, the whole machine of realism, they are always moving. “Keep it fast, and easy to stage,” he wrote to Illica as they worked on “Bohème.” “Lighten up the stage action.”
Puccini’s later operas demonstrate his increasing taste for rueful melancholy over melodramatic brutality. Neither “La Fanciulla del West” (1910) nor “La Rondine” (1917) ends jovially, but neither ends with deaths. While his trio of one-acts, “Il Trittico” (1918), begins, in its usual order, with the grim “Il Tabarro,” it moves on to the transfiguration of “Suor Angelica” and the witty farce of “Gianni Schicchi.”
Puccini was a chain smoker, and eventually developed cancer of the throat, a particularly tragic outcome for the creator of some of the most glorious music ever sung. After he died in Brussels, where he had traveled for treatment, the Corriere della Sera newspaper mourned a “gentle maker of melodies of sorrow and grace.”
“Turandot,” his last opera, set in a fantastical ancient China, melts an ice princess into a radiant lover, and its ending was to be Puccini’s most plainly celebratory. Coming in the wake of World War I, at a moment when culture was moving on — Schoenberg was developing his 12-tone technique at the same time — the whole thing was a throwback to the lavish, old-fashioned exoticism of “Aida,” the opera that had opened the window of music to Puccini nearly half a century earlier. But he was not able to finish it.
While the last scene of “Turandot” was completed from Puccini’s sketches by the composer Franco Alfano, those final minutes were not played at the premiere on April 25, 1926. At that first performance, the put-upon slave girl Liù killed herself, the chorus murmured its regret, and then the conductor, the devoted Puccinian Arturo Toscanini, stopped the orchestra and put down his baton.
With words that could speak for the three-century Italian tradition, he said the performance was over. “Here the opera ends,” Toscanini announced to the audience, “because at this point the maestro died.”
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