Salute to Puccini

"Almighty God touched me with His little finger," wrote Giacomo Puccini, "and said: 'Write for the theater . . .' I have obeyed the supreme command."

He obeyed so successfully that he became one of the four alltime opera masters, alongside Verdi, Wagner and Mozart. Though some critics dismiss him as sugary and sentimental, no opera house can hope to stay in business long without including in its repertory the three major monuments to Puccini's career--La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly. Puccini himself once made a list of the houses where his operas were playing; Tosca alone was then being given in 73 cities. His works steadily draw both dedicated opera buffs and occasional fans who might not recognize another note of opera but cherish every note Puccini wrote. Last week, with special performances of The Girl of the Golden West in the composer's home town of Lucca, the musical world was busy honoring Puccini in the centennial year of his birth.

Musical Millionaire. Surprisingly, every one of his biographies in English is out of print, including the best recent one, the 1951 Puccini, by George R. Marek (which draws much of its material from previously unused letters). The reason perhaps is that Puccini's life seemed to sound a few simple themes, uncomplicated by the frailty of a Mozart or the herculean sufferings of a Beethoven. He looked less the popular image of an artist than of a successful banker, and he probably made more money from his music ($4,000,000 at the time of his death) than any serious composer before or since. He surrounded himself with yachts and expensive motorcars, maintained several estates and a game lodge, dyed his hair, and made fun of "artists who think they have to have dandruff to be geniuses."

But the public Puccini was not the whole man, as Marek and others have shown. As a child, he lived with his widowed mother and seven brothers and sisters in harsh poverty. His father, one of a long line of musicians, had been a church organist, but Giacomo started studying organ with little enthusiasm ("Your son," said an early teacher to his mother, "is meat which does not wish to be salted"). In time he showed a talent for composition, was shipped off on a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory. He was a good but not brilliant student. After graduation he stayed in Milan, ran up such debts with his good friend, Pietro Mascagni (Cavalleria Rusticana) that the two of them got a map and inked out in red the sections of the city they could not walk through for fear of meeting creditors. Puccini scored a critical success with his first opera, a one-acter entitled Le Villi, but he did not win a large following until at 34 he collaborated with his two most successful librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, to produce Manon Lescaut. After that his popular success was secure.

Frenzy of Remorse. Away from his public, Puccini was a painfully shy man, given to periods of black depression accentuated by a stormy family life. He had met Elvira Gemignani when he was 26, lured her away from her husband (and Puccini's old school chum), had a child by her. He married her 19 years later when her husband died. Their affair fluctuated between periods of passionate affection ("little mouse," he called her) and her storms of insane jealousy. Once he was famous, Puccini had a string of affairs with his more shapely Mimis, Musettas and Butterflys ("I am guilty," he wrote, "but it is my destiny that I must be guilty"), and Elvira was driven to following him, dressed as a man. As a last resort, she slipped camphor in her husband's pocket on the theory that it had a debilitating effect and would diminish his ardor. It didn't. Finally, when he was 50, Elvira unjustly accused a servant girl of being his mistress, drove her to suicide -- and Puccini to a frenzy of remorse. When he died in Brussels at 65 after an operation for cancer of the throat, his last words to his stepdaughter were: "Remember that your mother is a remarkable woman."

Puccini once showed a friend a French lithograph of a nude girl pressed against a grated window in Venice. "This," he said, "is the kind of libretto I want for my next opera." Failing in his lifelong search for a girl who combined frailness with sensuality, he built those qualities into a procession of operatic heroines -- Manon Lescaut, Mimi in Boheme, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly, Liu in Turandot. His obsession with swift love followed by swifter death gave his work a narrow emotional range, a failing of which he was conscious. He envied Wagner his heroic themes and majestic brasses, idolized Verdi's poetic tragedies, in later life even made an effort to understand the moderns (although on first hearing he thought Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps "the creation of a madman").

But he also knew where his genius lay, wisely rejected both the Wagnerian influence and the broader version of the Italian verismo style as practiced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Instead, he clung to his own romantic, melodious, bittersweet tales shot through with a uniquely warm lyricism and underscored with lushly singing strings. A painstaking workman who admired clarity ("The black scores," he said, "are the easiest to fake"), he left as his legacy only eleven operas. But 34 years after his death, the world of opera has not found a composer who can speak to the universal audience Puccini commands.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.