Nicholas Baragwanath has made a major contribution – one of the most major to date, in any language – not only to Puccini studies but also to the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera in general.Footnote ¹ The book's main title even may be read as something of a misnomer, in the most positive sense, in that the book is principally a study of the intricate web of pedagogical and compositional traditions that ruled musical life in Italy from the eighteenth through the early-twentieth centuries. The book's emphasis on Puccini is more of an historiographical move, intended to emphasize that the traditions that inform the music of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi (as well as music of earlier eras) function just as much as a foundation for the music of Puccini and others, such as Boito, in the late-nineteenth century and after. The book appears in the ‘Musical Meaning and Expression’ series edited by Robert Hatten for Indiana University Press, and at first this may seem an uncomfortable fit; but by the time of Baragwanath's tour de force ending (extended analyses of portions of Puccini's Edgar and La Boheme plus an equally probing examination of Bellini's famous ‘Ah! non credea mirarti’, from La sonnambula, Act 2) one is convinced that he has just as much to say about hermeneutics and expression as he does about the history of Italian music theory and composition.

The book opens with a preface that alerts readers to some of these issues: ‘…this book is not primarily about Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). It concerns the Italian musical tradition of which he remains, by common consent, the last great representative’ (p. ix). The preface then sets about contextualizing the rest of the book by cogently summarizing the historical-cultural split in the nineteenth century into, on the one hand, an Italian pedagogical tradition dating from the eighteenth century and remaining relatively unchanged since, and on the other, a separate, largely Germanic tradition born of Romanticism and the constellation of aesthetics that surrounded that movement (including the primacy of instrumental over vocal music in the artistic consciousness of the age). Both traditions continued throughout the nineteenth century, side by side; but the latter, of course, informs our modern attitudes and analytical approaches much more than the former: ‘Music history still belongs to the victors of this century-long struggle for cultural supremacy’ (p. x).

And herein lies the problem that motivates Baragwanath's sweeping project: the German-engineered lenses through which many commentators have trained their focus on nineteenth-century Italian opera have produced widespread misunderstandings of the compositional practices that defined the era and, as a result, have opened the doors not only to misunderstandings of this music and its cultural functions but to potential hermeneutic and interpretive errors as well. And while an awareness of these kinds of historiographical complexities informs the work of numerous towering figures in Italian opera scholarship (certainly it is evident in work of William Ashbrook, Paolo Fabbri, Michele Girardi, James Hepokoski, Roger Parker, Perluigi Petrobelli and Harold Powers, to only begin the list), nowhere more than in Baragwanath is the work grounded more firmly in a thorough, incisive, objective reading of the most important historical sources – treatises of Bonifazio Asioli and Francesco Galeazzi chief among them.Footnote ² For this reason, Baragwanath's book will stand as much as a contribution to the history of music theory in Italy (or simply the history of music theory, full stop) as to the musicological literature on Italian opera or Puccini.

Following the preface is a helpful ‘Note on Translation and Terminology’ (p. xvii) that initiates the extraordinarily complex task of explicating the meaning of the various Italian musical terms that figure regularly in these primary sources. In fact, the very presence of this glossary helps to reveal one of Baragwanath's central agendas, which is to demonstrate that a lack of understanding of such terminology impedes an understanding of compositional practice and thus encumbers any attempt at appropriate analysis and interpretation of the music. In this regard, Baragwanath's ability to decipher the contemporary treatises is rather remarkable; the Italian prose in a number of these documents can be absolutely baffling, even for Italian-competent readers.

The book's third chapter provides a number of representative examples of his skills in this regard. Following two introductory chapters, Chapter 3 comprises the longest chapter in the book; and it represents perhaps the book's most important contribution to the understanding of the intricacies of Italian verse and musical settings thereof. In it Baragwanath provides lengthy, nuanced discussions of the meaning of such terms as ritmo, accento musicale, ritmo melodico, ritmo armonico, tempo and movimento, all of which were central to the Italian tradition but all of which have meanings within that tradition that remain idiosyncratic at best by modern standards. That some of Baragwanath's explanations (such as that of Asioli's teachings on phraseology, pp. 101–5) will require multiple readings for full comprehension is no fault of his own: the inscrutable ambiguities in the original Italian would conceivably support a book-length study of their own, and Baragwanath often leads the reader through such problems in the space of only a few pages.

Some of these terminological problems are worth considering at greater length. Ritmo, for instance, far from the modern conception (as in ‘rhythm’) of an orderly arrangement of regular durations and the notational tools for indicating as much, referred in theory to ‘fluid subjective movements of the individual mind or “soul” in terms of emotions and feelings’, and in practice either to a series of mostly two-bar rhythmic patterns (the ritmi melodici – literally ‘melodic rhythms’, a concept for which there is no real modern equivalent) onto which a composer could map the poetic rhythms of the standard Italian verse metres, or to a regulated succession of strong and weak ‘impulses’ (p. 66) in the instrumental accompaniment underneath a vocal melody (the ritmo armonico – literally ‘harmonic rhythm’ but corresponding in almost no way to the modern definition of that term). For ritmo melodico Baragwanath draws (p. 80) mainly on Friedrich Lippmann's codification of ‘rhythmic-musical types’,Footnote ³ in which, for example, the figure would be understood as a quinario ritmo: a five-note structural pattern onto which a composer could easily fit a single line of quinario, or five-syllable Italian verse. For ritmo armonico Baragwanath draws on theories of figures such as Asioli and Giuseppe Staffa, whose own 1856 analysis (p. 88) of Donizetti's ‘Via caro sposino’ from Act 3 of Don Paquale – apparently intended to show a succession of two-bar, weak–strong impulses in Donizetti's idiomatic accompaniment pattern – would be impenetrable for a non-specialist without Baragwanath's help.Footnote ⁴ Such concepts intersect with the notion of the accento musicale, which refers to the ‘expressive nuances generated through a variety of devices that together determined the contours and fluctuations of the vocal phrase’ (p. 72); according to the contemporary authors, such ‘nuances’ were usually dictated by the text, and the ‘devices’ apparently included what modern readers would regard as essentially a series of surface variations, both rhythmic and melodic, on the underlying structural rhythmic pattern. Thus, to provide a simple example, the quinario ritmo given above can become, in the hands of Verdi and in response to a series of lines on the fickle nature of women, the ironically jaunty , familiar to any Italian opera enthusiast as ‘La donna e mobile’, from Rigoletto, Act 3 (in which the original is notated in a ‘smaller’ #8, instead of #4).

From such explanations comes Baragwanath's widely applicable concept of ‘structural verse meter’ (introduced on p. 104), in which an underlying ritmo regulates a longer passage of music even while surface-level expressive deviations (usually more complex than those in ‘La donna e mobile’) obscure its presence. Such thinking leads Baragwanath to one of the most highly nuanced understandings I have read of Puccini's own contribution to the development of aspects of the Italian style in the late nineteenth century. That is, he compellingly demonstrates that Puccini successfully adapted the compositional procedures associated with conventional treatments of ritmo, accento musicale and other related concepts for his own specific musical needs – many of which were dictated by the highly unconventional librettos penned by such figures as Ferdinando Fontana, Luigi Illica and, later, Giuseppe Adami.

For example, Puccini often adopted one of the common structural ritmi melodici to regulate a melody deployed in the orchestra, then superimposed on top of this a separate (though often related, and often more declamatory) vocal melody, in which he could set various individual lines of a libretto that, at the largest level, was irregular with regard to its use of the traditional verse metres. The result is the readily identifiable Puccinian style apparent in pieces such as ‘Nei cieli bigi’, from La Bohème, Act 1: here the orchestra sounds a complete endecasillabo ritmo (eleven notes, mapping onto eleven syllables) over which the voice declaims a series of six-syllable lines, with the voice thus ‘tripping lightly over the top’ of the ‘more structurally significant’ ritmo melodico passing by underneath (pp. 135–6; see also p. 234 for more on the same passage). After taking the time to digest this and numerous other examples (many of them far more complex, and many dealing with separate but related issues, including Puccini's use of written-out rubato), I challenge any reader to slip into the tired, worn-out stereotypes of Puccini as a simplistic ‘tugger of heart strings’ whose creativity pales in comparison to the genius of his predecessors.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore issues associated with, respectively, harmony, counterpoint and form (the latter known in Italian as condotto – literally ‘conduct’), the Italian understandings of which can be difficult to reconcile with modern (again, Germanic) understandings of similar concepts. As is the case with Baragwanath's treatment of rhythmic issues, most important here is perhaps the way an historically informed understanding of compositional procedures can enable appropriate interpretation. In this regard much of what Baragwanath writes in these chapters serves as a corrective for earlier analyses published either before enough of the relevant historical documents came to light, or certainly before scholars reached an adequate understanding of whatever documents may have been available. Here I refer mainly to documents connected to the Neapolitan tradition of the partimento (‘most often an unfigured bass line that provided a linear guide to the realization of a keyboard piece’ [p. 141]) as well as to the traditions of sung counterpoint exercises (solfeggi and vocalizzi), stock bass schemata (movimenti del basso) and their melodic and contrapuntal elaborations (attacchi), and others. For example, an understanding of the idiosyncratic contemporary notion that a given movimento del basso was, despite its name, regarded as an intervallic pattern that might be deployed either in the bass or in the melody, or both, leads to a more historically informed understanding of certain passages – common in Puccini – of apparently ‘bass-less’ melodies, or melodies that lack the support of a more conventional, functional bass line. Puccini's ‘D'entrambi nel sangue’, from Edgar, Act 1, and his ‘Sono andati?’ from La Bohème, Act 4, are representative examples (pp. 184–7 and 268–71, respectively): both feature a bass that mostly does little more than double the melody, and the situation in both instances arises directly from the principle that the music's supporting harmonies ‘are secondary to, and regulated by, the essential melodic-contrapuntal framework furnished by the regular progression in the soprano part’ (p. 187). Thus the ‘bass line’, to the extent that such a concept is even relevant, simply serves to ‘reinforce the guiding scale’ (p. 269) in the upper voices.Footnote ⁵

It follows from examples such as these that one of Baragwanath's most important contributions is to lay out a framework in which there can take place a truly text-adequate interpretation of the style and the individual works in which we find it manifested. In essence his approach reveals aspects of the structural syntax underlying a highly complex and seldom fully understood linguistic universe, so that we may acquire many of the tools we need in order to become competent readers of the texts at hand – in order to enter into, in other words, the role of what Peter J. Rabinowitz has called the authorial audience (the hypothetical audience for which any author writes, one that possesses all the technical and cultural knowledge necessary for successful interpretation).Footnote ⁶ It almost goes without saying that this helps guard against over-interpretation of the music and its expressive substance, or against the construction of interpretations where perhaps none are warranted. The case of the ‘bass-less melodies’ mentioned above may be an example of this kind of over-interpretation, as would, for example, the measuring of some of Puccini's idiosyncratic three-bar hypermetric units against the common two- or four-bar units normative in the German instrumental tradition. Regarding the latter, many might be tempted to read the opening of Puccini's ‘Questo amor, vergogna mia’ (p. 84), from Edgar, Act 1 as deformational in terms of phrase-rhythmic norms; but such a reading would misconstrue what is ‘normative’ in this music and, as a result, would overlook some of the more important features of text setting in this phrase.

But just as importantly, in reading Baragwanath and in studying his examples one is also struck by how his approach seems to have far-reaching implications that extend well beyond Italian opera and into other styles, genres and repertoires – including (indeed!) German instrumental music. Consider, for example, his discussion of Puccini's ‘Sia per voi, l'orazion’ (see Ex. 1), Tigrana's ‘thigh-slapping display of vulgarity’ from Act 1 of Edgar, in which she ‘attempts to enflame Edgar's passion’ by strumming her lute to the tune of a standard vocalizzo exercise lifted, perhaps, straight out of one of the century-old methods from which Puccini himself might have trained.

Ex. 1

Puccini, Edgar, Act 1, reh. no. 29, bars 1–16 (after Baragwanath, The Italian Traditions and Puccini, example 6.4, p. 272: truncated, with scale-degree numerals added)

Baragwanath's interpretation touches on principles of topic theory, in that he reads the vocalizzo – in this case a series of descending-fourth or descending-sixth leaps ‘attached’ to two E♭-major scales, one descending from its tonic (bar 1) and the next from its third degree (bar 9) – as a topos, in the sense of a conventional figure or stylistic gesture recognizable within a circumscribed semantic and cultural field and for which ‘no text or title is necessary’ for the interpretation of its meaning.Footnote ⁷ According to Baragwanath, the reference literally evokes music Tigrana may have learned in a singing lesson, eminently appropriate for her sung celebration of freedom and sensuality (‘The sermon is for you, the song is for me! I want to sing …’).

The example brings to mind a moment from the F-minor rondo finale (fifth movement) of Brahms's Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 5 (1853), in which the first episode (bar 39; see Ex. 2) opens with a beautiful, F-major realization (delivered piano, con espressione) of nearly the same vocalizzo Puccini used for Tigrana's song. Brahms renders it as a series of descending-sixth leaps (more plangent, perhaps, than Puccini's fourths, and similar in any case to the sixths Puccini deploys at bar 9 in ‘Sia per voi’) attached, as in the Puccini, to a major scale (now F major) descending from its tonic. Perhaps one might wish to interpret the topical reference similarly, despite the obvious differences in the generic, historical and cultural environments: as in Tigrana's song, Brahms's vocalizzo may well signify the kind of freedom and liberation afforded by the most heartfelt, abandoned, carefree singing. Such an interpretation would certainly be consistent with the theme's reference to Joseph Joachim's personal motto, ‘frei aber einsam’ (‘free but alone’ – apparently his attitude toward bachelorhood), encoded musically in the first three notes of Brahms's melody, F–A–E.

Ex. 2

Brahms, Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 5, v, bars 37–45

Baragwanath's book is beautifully and carefully produced, with few errors (the bars are misnumbered in example 3.17 [p. 128] and the caption is missing from table 5.1 [p. 225]); some readers might wish to skip immediately to the explanatory note on Italian prosody (p. 76), which will make crucial features of the book accessible even to non-specialists; and, finally, readers interested in further study will not want to miss the ‘Note on Online Resources’ at the back (p. 390). I commend Baragwanath on a deep, wide-ranging study the influence of which will surely be felt in the field for years to come.