The New York Times‘ Arts and Leisure section had an interesting piece on Puccini yesterday, bringing all of us up to date on a current scandal involving this composer, whose 150th birthday is being observed this year. Apparently, he might have had another love child than the boy he fathered with Elvira, the married woman who later became his wife.
The piece says this issue will be explored in a new movie about the composer, and I’m sure it will make diverting viewing. But Anthony Tommasini also points out something scholars have noted for many decades: That Puccini was a far more sophisticated composer than he gets credit for, though doubtless that credit gets withheld partly because of his popularity. Puccini had been a wildly successful composer since La Boheme premiered in 1896, and he died in late 1924 with an estate worth about $250 million in today’s dollars, according to Tommasini.
Julian Budden’s 2002 study of Puccini for Oxford’s Master Musicians series, which offers a good deal of musical analysis of each of the composer’s operas, also points out that he was beloved by the musical community of his time. “No composer received more affectionate posthumous tributes than he,” Budden wrote. “Affable, well-mannered, gifted with a broad sense of fun (reflected in his doggerel verses and Tuscan love of word-play), he rarely failed to charm all who met him.”
(Here’s a recording of his voice, made in 1907 when he was in New York; it can be found on the Puccini Institute site.)
There are a couple moments that stand out for me as evidence in particular of Puccini’s great skill; I concur with Tommasini about the Ping, Pang and Pong trio in Turandot, but one that really grabbed me once I actually heard what was going on was the finale of Act I of Tosca, the so-called Te Deum scene featuring the evil Baron Scarpia in one of the great bass-baritone set pieces in opera.
After the beginning of the scene — Tre sbirri, una carozza — Puccini combines ringing of church bells, a congregation saying Mass, the Scarpia’s machinations (Va, Tosca!), cannon fire, and then a chorus singing the Te Deum, all over a back-and-forth motion in the orchestra that slowly grows to a titanic conclusion.
Listening to it one day, it suddenly dawned on me that the climax of this act was nothing more or less than a unison sung line, supported only by horns and trombones. And yet it sounds gigantic.
Now, that’s the work of a skilled writer. He’s bringing everything he’s got to this massive ending, and then at the high point, the very peak, when Scarpia realizes that Tosca has made him forget God, almost every orchestral instrument drops out, leaving only the singers, all intoning the same notes. I’m sure a less imaginative composer would have kept the orchestral guns blazing right through it.
There are a number of performances available for viewing on YouTube, and the one from 1976 with Sherill Milnes is the most impressive vocally; it’s an unbelievably big and powerful sound.
But I like this performance just as much, maybe because the tempo’s a little bit more to my liking (Zubin Mehta is a very good Puccini conductor). This features Ruggero Raimondi in fine voice in a compelling TV (?) production from 1992:
1 Comment
August 19, 2008 at 6:23 pm
what a great source of information your blog is.
Puccini, well, what can I say?
nessun dorma and gelida manina…that’s what I’ll say, for now.
Like Rodolfo, I believe we are all millionaires in words…but I better save them… “times is hard”