The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      Once he was regarded as a member of a group of brilliant and sensational representatives of Young Italy. The comparatively early death of Leoncavallo, the failure of Mascagni to follow up the meteoric success of Cavalleria, and the lack of any decisive characteristics in Giordano enabled Puccini to outdistance his companions in that group, and Italian opera still has the advantage in the world over that of any other country in that it rallies to its standard the great voices, whether those voices are the product of Italy or of Australia, or Ireland or America.

      Puccini was born at Lucca in the same year as Leoncavallo (1858) and was, like Bach and Mozart, the inheritor of a family tradition of musicianship. He represented the fifth generation of musical Puccinis, the earliest of whom, his great-great-grandfather, bore the same Christian name, Giacomo, and, was a friend of Martini, the master of Mozart. Puccini’s father dying when the boy was six years old, it was through the determination and sacrifice of his mother, who was left poor, that he was given the opportunity of study at the Milan Conservatory. There he worked at composition with Bazzini and with Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda. The production of a student work, a Capriccio for orchestra, called forth praise of his possibilities as a symphonic writer, but Puccini never mistook that as an indication that he should write symphonies. He subsequently put his powers in this direction to good use in devising those running orchestral commentaries which, supporting the dialogues of his characters on the stage, form the links between the great lyrical outbursts.

      For some time Puccini lived in Milan with his brother and a fellow-student, enjoying the delights and sorrows of a Bohemian existence, enduring a sufficient amount of hardship to give him a place in the long roll of struggling geniuses, and incidentally storing up memories which were to give him the right local colour for his first accepted masterpiece.

      His first opera, Le Villi, a modest work suggested to him by Ponchielli, was given at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1884. Its production was an important moment in his career and the success was considerable, even if one discounts something from the tone of the telegram which he sent off to his mother after the first performance: ‘Theatre packed, immense success; anticipations exceeded; 18 calls; finale of first act thrice encored.’ The substantial part of it was that Le Villi was bought for a small sum by Messrs. Ricordi, who published it eventually, but not until Puccini’s fame had been established by his subsequent works.

      Le Villi in an enlarged form brought Puccini on to the stage of La Scala in the following year, but it was not until 1889 that his second opera, Edgar, arrived and was actually produced there. Edgar was a failure, the one decisive and permanent failure which Puccini ever encountered. Possibly it helped him, as many such failures have helped, to realize the necessity of making ‘every stroke tell’, as Weber said in another connection. At any rate, Puccini must have seen in it the error of accepting too readily a weak libretto, for he became exceedingly fastidious, and each one of the works by which he is known is the result of a personal choice of subject framed to his wishes by his librettists, of whom L. Illica and G. Giacosa have been the chief.

      The first was Manon Lescaut, which was produced at Turin in 1893, the drama of which, like its successor, La Bohème, is treated rather as a series of episodes than as a whole. Considering how well known the Abbé Prevost’s novel was, the operatic version might have carried this treatment further. Indeed, the attempt to remodel the story so as to make the deportation of Manon in the third act consequent upon the events of the second produces considerable incongruity. As the opera stands there is either too much or too little connection between its parts to be dramatically satisfactory. Outside Italy it had at first to contend with the popularity of Massenet’s opera, but in this country at any rate it has steadily increased in popularity, and its success rests largely on the skilful musical handling of details, such as the scene of Manon’s levée, and on the passionate love music of the last act, which Caruso first realized to the full.

      From the time of the production of Manon onwards Puccini’s most famous operas follow in a series with three to four years between each. La Bohème, also at Turin, came in 1896, La Tosca at Rome in 1900, Madama Butterfly at Milan in 1904. The Carl Rosa Opera Company first brought La Bohème to England and performed it in English a couple of years before it was produced at Covent Garden at the instigation of Mme Melba. Puccini came to England for the first performance of The Bohemians at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, on which occasion, it may be remarked, he was much amused by the makeshift fashion in which the brass and drums of the orchestra had to be accommodated in boxes. La Bohème having won its way both in London and the provinces, La Tosca was quickly secured and was given at Covent Garden in 1900 with Mme Ternina in the principal part. The extraordinary ill treatment which Madama Butterfly received from the Milanese public on its production at La Scala in 1904 really had very little effect on Puccini’s position with the wider public. The performance under Signor Campanini had scarcely begun when it was interrupted by hisses and cries of disapproval; it was carried through in spite of continued disturbance, and at the end Puccini took the score away with him, refusing to risk a second performance there. Yet so firmly fixed was he in the estimation of the English public that the Covent Garden authorities did not hesitate to stage it in the following year with the distinguished cast (Mme Destinn and Signori Caruso and Scotti) who were its most famous interpreters.

      It is on these three works that Puccini’s fame most principally rests, and, while each of them possesses to the full his salient characteristics of glowing melody and strong characterization, the variety of their subject matter brings wide differences of musical treatment. There is a freshness and simplicity about La Bohème which does not fade with frequent repetition. La Tosca, at first rather looked askance at by serious musicians for the crudity of its melodrama, yet contains some of the most forcible musical moments in the whole of Puccini’s work. The broad tune with which the orchestra pictures Tosca’s sense of horror after the murder of Scarpia is in itself enough to proclaim Puccini’s genius for emotional melody. The whole of the music of the later scenes of Madama Butterfly, depicting the phases of hope, fear, disillusionment, heroism, shows an insight for which neither of the previous operas prepares us.

      After this there was an interval of seven years before Puccini wrote another opera. He was said to have considered a number of subjects, including the story of Marie Antoinette. When one thinks of the increasing power with which he had delineated the characters of women, it seems a pity that he turned aside from his subject. When the opportunity came of a production in America he was seized by a play of David Belasco’s, which had been successful in New York, one of those hectic romances of California, in which rascality and sentiment alternate with bewildering rapidity. La Fanciulla del West was announced in the autumn of 1910 for simultaneous production in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and the composer went to New York to superintend the performance there, for which Mme Destinn and Caruso were engaged. In the circumstances it is hardly necessary to say that the arts of advertisement were used to the full and that the work was clamoured for in the principal opera houses of Europe. It is refreshing to find that the benefits of advertisement are, after all, comparatively short lived, for the boom given to The Girl of the Golden West, to quote the original title, did not blind anyone to the fact that, in spite of moments of beauty and a wealth of striking detail, it was not to be placed in the same class with its predecessors.

      A still longer interval divided it from the set of three one-act operas which was completed in 1919 and which was given at Covent Garden in 1920 after performance in Italy and America. In planning his triptych, Puccini sought an opportunity to display again his power of dealing with widely different situations, involving strongly contrasted types of emotion. Il Tabarro is one of those pieces of sordid violence which have attracted all Italian composers since Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Suor Angelica aims at an atmosphere of religious mysticism, and Gianni Schicchi is caustic comedy. In the first he was doing again what he and others had already done with success. In the second he failed by mistaking a self-conscious sentiment for a real emotion. In the third he succeeded in what for him was an entirely new genre and produced a masterpiece of opera buffa which captivated every one; that this was the general opinion in England was shown by what happened at Covent СКАЧАТЬ