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Maestro's Essay

Puccini – a puzzle

Have you ever heard the music from La Boheme or Madame Butterfly and figured the composer was probably some cultivated, artistic type who never strayed far from the capital cities of Europe? Not so. A crusty Old Italian duck hunter named Giacomo Puccini wrote those operas. Puccini had his fill of city life by the time he graduated from the Milan Conservatory in the 1880s. He settled in Torre del Lago, a tiny village on the shore of Lake Massaciuccoli in western Tuscany, and there spent his years composing operas and shooting ducks. The maestro also had a reputation as a poacher and philanderer, and was adept at dodging angry game wardens and still angrier husbands. Puccini died in 1924 and is entombed in his lakeside villa. The house is open as a museum and includes his gunroom, complete with shotguns, hunting gear, and trophies. The next time you hear some of that music, listen a little closer. It came from a man who loved water fowling as much as you do. Even though the works of Puccini have helped keep many an opera house running during the past century, only recently has the composer begun to get the kind of unbiased analytical attention he deserves. It seems that musical criticism is finally learning what the opera going public has known for a long time: Puccini was much more than a talented audience-- pleaser with a gift for vocal writing. This shift in attitude is evident from the number of scholarly articles devoted to the composer in recent years and from the ongoing critical edition of his works. Giacomo Puccini was the world’s most successful opera composer. When he died in 1924, he was worth around 125m in today’s money, and his music is at the core of every opera house’s repertoire. His love life was as tortuous and tormented as that of any of his heroes, as Puccini e la Fanciulla (Puccini and the Girl). The composer’s boast was that he was “a mighty hunter of fowl, opera librettos and attractive women”. He had cuckolded an old friend to obtain Elvira, the common-law wife with whom he shared his lakeside villa at Torre Del Lago in Tuscany. The price Elvira paid for her central role was the “little gardens”, as he called his lovers. One of the women on whom her jealous eye fell was Doria Manfredi, who worked for them as a house cleaner. Convinced that Doria was Puccini’s new love, Elvira vowed, “sooner or later, I will drown her in the lake”. She did not need to: in January 1909, Doria killed herself. Her dying wish was that her body be subjected to an autopsy - which established that she had died a virgin. Elvira was convicted of instigation to suicide, and only escaped jail when Puccini paid huge damages to Doria’s family. However, as was later discovered, that was only the half of it. At the time Doria died, Puccini was working on his opera La Fanciulla del West, about Minnie, the rambunctious owner of a Wild West saloon. It was discovered that “while writing an opera, Puccini tended to fall in love with a real-life person similar to his protagonist”. Poor Doria was nothing like Minnie, but the gossip was that he had had an affair with Doria’s cousin, Giulia Manfredi, who worked in the local tavern. She was reputed, like Minnie, to be “independent and commanding, but at the same time humble and affectionate”. It was only gossip - but then Nadia, a great-niece of Giulia’s, showed a suitcase full of explicit letters between the composer and Giulia. All of these discoveries enraged Simonetta Puccini, the composer’s grand- daughter. She tried to prevent Nadia from taking a DNA test to establish whether she, too, is a descendant of the composer. And so, the controversy and never ending scandal seeking goes on and on concerning the last of Italy’s great opera composers. 

Leoncavallo – an enigma

Even an operatic illiterate is likely to recognize the melody of “Vesti la Giubba,” but its composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919), remains opera’s mystery man - cursed to go down in history as a one opera wonder. Physically “short and fat and round-about"- five-foot-six with an enormous head, neck and hands - Leoncavallo had bad business sense and even worse skills with people: he alienated publishers and impresarios by playing one against the other in the most transparent ways, lying to the press and promising major works that failed to materialize. He bore a life-long grudge against Puccini, who beat Leoncavallo to the punch when they were both creating opera versions of La Boheme, and against the publishing family Ricordi, who favored Puccini and aggressively promoted his works. Leoncavallo was better educated than many of his contemporaries among composers within the VERISMO school. He was versed in literature and the classics and spoke French and German (though not English) with considerable fluency. The immediate early success of Pagliacci (1892) turned out to be a double-edged sword: Leoncavallo became a household name in opera but sold the rights too early to benefit in later life. His La Bohème (1897) suffered by comparison with Puccini’s, and even his second-best work, ZAZÁ (1900), was not produced at the Met until after his death. His short masterpiece Pagliacci, which lasts less than an hour and a half, has been a hit since first hitting the boards in Milan in 1892. It is one of the prime examples of operatic VERISMO—realism—a movement that began in literature two decades earlier. Leoncavallo wrote his own libretto, looking at a situation he supposedly experienced as a child based on a case he heard from his father in a tawdry tale lifted from the pages of a Calabrian newspaper The son of a Naples magistrate, the well-educated Leoncavallo drew upon two theatrical conventions in creating his text—a play within a play and commedia dell’Arte. Leoncavallo’s opera, written in the same year as Puccini’s “La Boheme,” offers the rougher sensations at the height of verismo intensity. “There’s more in-your-face flair and beautiful melodies. It’s not atmospheric, like Debussy, but is written in terms of the raw emotions of the individual characters and situations involved.” Written in the same year as Puccini’s La Boheme, it offers the rougher sensations at the height of verismo intensity. There’s more in-your-face flair in the beautiful melodies. It’s not atmospheric, like Debussy, but is written in terms of the raw emotions of the individual characters and situations involved.

In Pagliacci, a troupe of Comedia dell-arte players arriving in a Calabrian village set the pace. The players are led by the psychotically- jealous and abusive clown Canio. He fears his girlfriend Nedda has someone else. Moreover, she does love someone else - she is in love with Silvio. The catalyst in this drama is Tonio - deformed and slow and who is interested in Nedda. Now in the opera within the opera - Canio playing Pagliaccio loses sense of reality and the opera they perform masks the reality that the performers themselves experience. Canio loses it all on stage and during the dramatic sequence of the opera he goes berserk and slaughters Nedda and Silvio before a horrified audience. Of course the story with its drama and extended arias of declaration of love might tire the beginner, but the opera does it have its moments when Nedda and Silvio sing their bits. It has cheesy lines that go like this. What a fire in his glance! I lowered my eyes for fear that he read my secret thoughts. Oh, if he ever caught me, brute that he is! But, enough of that. There are mere fearful dreams and folly. Oh, beautiful midsummer sun! And I bursting with life, languid with desire, and yet not knowing what it is I long for!’ sings Nedda in her moment of dilemma. Pagliacci premiered on May 21, 1892 in Milan’s Teatro Del Verme - with Arturo Toscanini as the conductor - and that brought on the wild excitement any opera needs for publicity. ‘’La Commedia e Finita - The comedy is over’’: The final words of Leoncavallo’s tragic opera ‘’I Pagliacci’’ were the ones Sir Rudolf Bing chose on April 22, 1972, to ring down the curtain on his lordly and controversial 22-year tenure as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The most famous Canio of all was of course Enrico Caruso. Ninety-four years have passed since Enrico Caruso walked into the Victor Talking Machine plant in Camden, N. J., called out a greeting to everyone he met, shed coat, waistcoat, collar, tie, shut his eyes and became for a few moments the brokenhearted clown in Pagliacci. Vesti la Giubba, the clown’s song that Caruso sang that day, helped more than any other to put his record royalties over the million-dollar mark. Victor says that no other voice has recorded so brilliantly, so exactly as Caruso’s. The mechanics of record making have undergone many a change since he died. The old discs sound thin now and the accompaniments particularly inadequate. Victor’s Raymond Sooy was responsible for the new version of Vesti la Giubba which, with M’Appari from Marta on the reverse side, was put-on sale in record shops all over the U. S. Raymond Sooy who engineered the making of the original Caruso records; felt that full justice had to be done to his friend’s voice. He consulted Conductor Nathaniel Shilkret, Victor’s able repairperson, who proceeded to memorize Caruso’s interpretations, each long held note, each sob and sigh. Conductor Shilkret donned earphones, and then summoned his orchestra and. listening to the old records, conducted new accompaniments which would time with them exactly. Through two loudspeakers in a separate control room Engineer Sooy listened to the tenor’s rich tones. Shilkret’s new setting. He combined them to produce a record which gives fresh luster to the voice, completely obliterates the old tinny accompaniment. It is still a best seller today.