1 February 2003
Sydney Morning Herald - Click here for
link to original source
Taken From -
PUCCINI: A Biography
By Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Northeastern University Press, 343pp, $50
Puccini: A Biography
By Desmond O'Grady
Giacomo Puccini was five when his father died,
leaving a pregnant wife of 37 with seven children. To help her, Giacomo, heir of a family
that had dominated music in the Tuscan town of Lucca for four generations, was immediately
ensured the post of choir master and chief organist of the cathedral "as soon as he
is able to discharge his duties".
But his musical career was to take him far beyond Lucca.
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz is an American musicologist familiar with Italy, where she was
manager of the Spoleto Festival. She describes the world of opera when it was a blood
sport, with Pietro Mascagni as Puccini's main rival composer and the conductor Arturo
Toscanini, despite turbulent relations, as his great ally.
Puccini's first success was Manon Lescaut. Then, in little more than a decade, he composed
his winning trio: La Boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly (which had a leaden premiere in
Milan but continues to fly today, even in new forms such as Miss Saigon). They are among
the five most-performed operas.
They made him wealthy, but not immune from criticism and self-doubt. His operas were
derided as "little weepers" - slight, sentimental and raffish compared to the
noble, patriotic epics of his older contemporary, Giuseppe Verdi.
If Verdi is the Shakespeare of opera, Puccini is its Tennessee Williams. Puccini feared
the public was tired of his "sugary" works. But his plangent arias were haunting
and he came to represent Italian opera worldwide, particularly with the triumphal premiere
of La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) at the Met in New York in 1910.
Librettists claimed that working with Puccini was a nightmare because he constantly
changed his mind. Phillips-Matz finds that this is an example of his general
indecisiveness. But it seems due also to an instinct for what would work - "poetry,
affection, love, flesh, searing and surprising drama and a rocket sent up at the
end".
This was his formula for opera, but much of it also applies to his life. His mother did
everything possible to launch her Giacomo on his career. As well, Giacomo had seven
sisters. He was surrounded by affection.
There was also love and flesh and drama: tall, handsome Giacomo made a married piano
student, Elvira, pregnant. Divorce was illegal. By the time Elvira's husband died 20 years
later, Puccini was in love with another woman, a young teacher. He was obliged, however,
to marry Elvira, whom, by this time, he referred to as "the policeman". She was
madly jealous, sometimes with good reason, but not in the case of a domestic help whom she
hounded until the girl committed suicide.
Puccini later had a six-year affair with a German aristocrat and then with a German opera
singer, Rose Ader. But he remained married to Elvira.
Phillips-Matz gives an objective account of these affairs. But I would have welcomed more
from the many letters that are available and an attempt to link his emotional life with
his operas, rather than the detailed performance history she provides.
Puccini remained an unassuming Tuscan. He was apolitical, uneasy at receptions, happy to
spend his days hunting or playing cards with fishermen and peasants near his villa at Lake
Massaciuccoli, and he composed from 10pm to 3am or 4am.
He smoked 30 cigarettes, or many smelly Tuscan cigars, each day, and loved driving his
Lancia car or his motor boat - fast.
He enjoyed boisterous jokes but had a strong melancholy streak. He was ordinary but for
his extraordinary music. Puccini was within a few bars of completing a valiant attempt at
an opera of large scope, Turandot, when he was strangled by what he had called "the
tiny pimple on my throat".
Those 30 cigarettes a day had caught up with him.
Unlike his operas, his life ended not with a rocket but with a hoarse whisper.
After an operation for throat cancer and a heart attack, he died in Brussels on November
29, 1924. He was both the culmination of his family's musical tradition and the end of the
Italian opera tradition that furnished melodies which remained with audiences as they left
the theatres.