Alexandra Wilson's The Puccini Problem is not only a thorough exploration of the cultural context of Puccini's reception, but also a very enjoyable read. As she states at the outset, the book does not seek a musicological re-evaluation of Puccini's work; rather, it unveils the history behind the ongoing contradiction between his long-standing popularity with audiences and his mixed reviews from critics and academics. This Puccini problem, as Wilson defines it, is twofold. First, as Puccini gradually emerged to be Verdi's successor as Italy's leading opera composer, in the wake of Italian political unification in the late nineteenth century, there was much debate about whether his work truly expressed ‘Italianness’. Second, Italy's desire to find a less marginal place in the economic and cultural worlds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a discussion about whether and how Italianness could be balanced with a more modern internationalism. As Wilson's book unfolds, we gather that in many ways these two aspects of the Puccini problem added up, for the composer and his defenders, to a sort of ‘catch-22’. Both Italianness and internationalism were nebulous and hotly contested terms; as a result they tended increasingly to be defined in a polarised fashion, against each other. As a composer who sought to express both, or indeed to explore their articulation, Puccini could please no critic entirely, even as he found great favour with contemporary audiences. Finally, Wilson shows how the Fascist regime adroitly adopted Puccini as an Italian icon after his death in 1924, downplaying the more experimental aspects of his work (which as a result remain in need of further study).
The Puccini Problem examines Italianness and internationalism by focusing on a number of key moments and operas in Puccini's career. The book's organisation is generally but not too strictly chronological, as it analyses the discussions that each opera fostered upon its first performance and in later years. This sheds new light on Puccini's work itself, of course, especially as we read about modifications made by the composer in response to critics, or about his aspirations for his work. But this is not all. The wealth of materials Wilson brings to bear on this reception history is most impressive because she considers Puccini's academic critics, as well as reactions to his work in the popular press, in the context of contemporary Italian culture. She draws on literary, philosophical, political, and anthropological publications and discussions that do not directly pertain to music, but are extremely relevant in defining the key terms of the Puccini problem. She enriches her analysis of Puccini with a substantial overview of Italian culture's evolution from late nineteenth-century decadence, through various avant-garde and modernist aspirations, to the crisis of World War I, and finally to the beginning of the Fascist era. I was most impressed with Wilson's ability to work across disciplines in order to present to the reader a subtle and lively understanding of this changing culture, and then to connect it to the more specifically musical concerns expressed in reactions to Puccini's work.
The first chapter, ‘Inventing an Italian Composer’, sets the stage for Wilson's contextual approach to Puccini, by showing opera's, and Puccini's, place in the cultural crisis that followed Italian unification – a crisis emblematised by the notion that even as political unity had finally been achieved, Italian linguistic and artistic unity was sorely lacking. In a more broadly European context of decadence, or sense of the moral and creative decline of Western civilisation, Italians expressed great anxiety over their particular cultural and political inferiority; they felt Italy remained behind the other great powers of Europe economically and technologically, and had failed to maintain the artistic supremacy of the Renaissance. They sought regeneration by looking back to a more glorious past, be it in the works of Dante, or in the cult of romanità (‘Romanness’); at the same time, nineteenth-century psychology, sociology and psychopathology, with the work of Lombroso in Italy, ensured that Italian roots were understood in Darwinian terms of decay versus survival, contamination versus purity, and foreignness versus national or ‘Latin’ genius linked to landscape and climate. Opera, as ‘the supremely Italian art form’, with ‘a wide popular appeal’ (13) was a genre central to regeneration. Even though Puccini's subject matter was not political (and in general not even Italian), his publisher Ricordi succeeded in presenting him as Italy's national composer. Though we hear in later chapters about the details of his rise to fame, here Wilson emphasises that the cult of personality was also important: with some truth and a fair amount of embroidering, Puccini's story became one of rags to riches, and of the ‘ebullient Italian’ (34) with a taste for automobiles and speedboats, photographed ‘wrestling among the ruins of Pompeii’ (43).
Perhaps my only, rather mild, criticism of Wilson's book is that she does not explore this cult of personality in more depth in the following chapters. In particular, though she mentions Italy's premier writer at the time, Gabriele d'Annunzio, and later discusses how the Futurists, led by F. T. Marinetti, staged an attack on Puccini's La Fanciulla del West in 1914, she does not address the importance of how these two writers created public personas for themselves and became cultural icons through their careful management of publicity. Yet there is no doubt that Puccini's construction as an ‘ebullient Italian’ was a response to these in the context of opera. Moreover, in entirely different ways, d'Annunzio and Marinetti were seeking in those years a total art form that would combine theatre, poetry, music and painting, into a kind of mass and quasi-religious ritual: like Puccini, they were influenced by Wagner in this, yet sought to create something entirely Italian and new. Thus I am surprised that Wilson does not show how Puccini's career was influenced by his being both their imitator and their rival; in particular, I would have been curious to learn more about how contemporary Italian culture viewed a ‘Maestro’ whose popularity truly brought together ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in a way that d'Annunzio or Marinetti did not.
In the chapters on La bohème (1896) and Tosca (1900), Wilson addresses the issue of organicism from two slightly different perspectives. The first explains how Wagnerian opera was seen as a model of ‘organic unity’ according to ‘biological and evolutionary metaphors [applied] to all aspects of modern life’ (47). Italians feared German ‘contamination’, yet at the same time felt that the tastes of the Italian public needed ‘educat[ion]’ (62) through contact with European art. Similarly, they wanted Puccini to reinvent the Italian tradition of the aria, yet criticised La bohème as ‘accidental and superficial’ rather than organic (51), giving him backhanded praise as a ‘miniaturist’ (52). A few years later, with Tosca, this lack of organicism was taken further to be a sign of ‘insincerity’ (67). Missing was emotional sincerity or immediacy, as one critic claimed, ‘in Tosca there are no feelings, but only the reflection of feelings’ (84); interestingly, distance and self-reflexivity would be praised by decadent and modernist art alike, and this critique shows how much nostalgia for ‘Italian passion’ (85) was projected onto Puccini. On the other hand, insincerity was also attributed to Tosca's subject, the ‘sex, violence, politics, and lies’ (73) which were associated with ‘the worst excesses of French decadent literature’ as well as with ‘gratuitous sensationalism’ (74). Overall, these two chapters show how Puccini's work was seen as symptomatic of Italy's own lack of organic wholeness, making it hard for critics to see tendencies towards experimentation and fragmentation positively, even as they might have been an alternative to the Wagnerian model.
The chapters on Madama Butterfly and on the publication of Fausto Torrefranca's Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912) are fascinating in that they show how aesthetic concerns became politicised. Puccini himself was not a political figure, unlike Verdi, yet both the critical reactions to Madama Butterfly (1904) and Torrefranca's scathing book depict his style as an expression of moral and political degeneration. As Wilson argues, Madama Butterfly was Puccini's most modern work to date, reflecting contemporary interest in Japonisme, in the eclecticism and fragmentation of Italian Divisionist painting, and in the literary work of Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet these aesthetic decisions were condemned for their internationalism, seen as an unhealthy hybrid: Madama Butterfly was perceived to be too mannered, ‘all surface detail’ (111); exceedingly ‘decorative’ in a ‘feminine’ art nouveau fashion (113); and seduced by the false allure of the foreign (115). Ironically, as Wilson rightly points out, it was attacked for being ‘a frame without a canvas’ in an era when avant-garde modern art was questioning the very separation of art and frame; and paradoxically this anxiety about an unhealthy modernity created a sense of an ‘eclecticism that is perhaps more adventurous than it seems’ (123). These same concerns emerge more pointedly in Torrefranca's book, published by Fratelli Bocca, ‘a platform for the burgeoning disciplines of psychology, sociology, criminology, and sexology’ (126), and one that clearly endorsed an attack on European decadence. Wilson shows with great accuracy how Puccini's aesthetic was wilfully interpreted as an expression of the classic symptoms of such decadence: its popularity was associated with the disorderly crowd in contrast with strong leadership (though I disagree with her claim that La Voce, Papini, Prezzolini and Soffici, were uncritically allied with such a view); its emphasis on sexuality, femininity and decoration were read in terms of Weininger's misogynist Sesso e carattere (translated into Italian in 1912), which depicted woman as artificial, childlike, neurotic and insincere; and Puccini was even attacked for being part of a sort of ‘Jewish’ internationalism (143).
Wilson is most compelling in her attention to metaphor in these chapters and the following. In particular she illustrates how the language used by Torrefranca echoes that of major works at the time, from Paul Bourget's Essais de psychologie contemporaine and Max Nordau's Degeneration, to Weininger's Sex and Character and Sighele's Eva Moderna. Here a whole discourse is developed whereby ‘sickness, fluidity, formlessness and dependency’ (147) are associated, leading to Torrefranca's accusation that Puccini's characters are ‘invertebrates’, ‘mollusks’, ‘medusas’ or ‘hydras’ (147). Interestingly this is exactly how d'Annunzio, in his 1900 Il Fuoco, depicts – but in positive terms – a crowd of admirers listening to the great poet and art critic who is the protagonist of the novel. It is evident that Torrefranca, and like-minded critics, especially as Italy veered towards bellicism and interventionism in World War I, sought to banish Puccini into a decadent past yet ironically, in doing so, recognised many of his most modern tendencies.
Chapter 8, ‘The Italian Composer as Internationalist’, takes a short step back to Puccini's La Fanciulla del West, which premièred at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1910 (this was the Met's first world première). In New York, the opera was seen as ‘the perfect blend of two worlds’ (160), the old and the new; in contrast, at its Italian première in 1911, in the context of Italy's ‘Giubileo’ or celebration of fifty years of national unity, it was described as ‘rootless’ (161), fragmented (165), and also too bourgeois and unpatriotic (167) for a nation embarking on its first colonial war (Libya, September 1911) and about to intervene in World War I. Puccini's 1915 La Rondine, first performed in Monaco, was similarly received by critics as ‘neutralist’ and even ‘disloyal’ (172). Yet by 1918, Puccini's fortunes would take a sudden good turn with Il Trittico, which also premièred at the Met, but then came to Rome in January 1919. Though critics expressed some concern over its first two parts, Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica, the third, Gianni Schicchi, was praised for the very things Puccini had previously been thought to lack: ‘a reaffirmation of positive, healthy Italianness’ (181), ‘the revival of a “purer” Italian music’ (183), and arias that finally had ‘patriotic significance’ (183). Though Wilson does not delve into it, the contrast between 1915 and 1919 shown in this chapter leads one to speculate about the effects of World War I on Italian culture as well as on Puccini himself: it is well known that the war brought a kind of cultural ‘return to order’ with respect to pre-war experimentation, and Wilson's analysis suggests that Puccini's reversal of fortune was tied to a wilful desire to deny pre-war factionalism.
The last chapter, ‘A Suitable Ending?’, deals with Puccini's funeral in 1924, which was a grand national event, and with the posthumous première of Turandot in 1926. Wilson shows how wreaths from Benito Mussolini and from the King of Italy were concrete expressions of a reappropriation of Puccini by cultural conservatives: bypassing the accusations of decadence by an intellectual such as Torrefranca, critics in 1924 chose instead to celebrate Puccini's popular appeal, claiming him as ‘the most representative and the most universal of our musicians’ (190). Quite accurately, Wilson observes that ‘Puccini's music and persona acted as blank canvases upon which any number of ideological ambitions could be projected’ (193), precisely because he had refused to take sides, and that his music strove to combine experimentation with tradition. All this was most visible in the reception of Turandot. Mussolini did not attend the première because Toscanini refused to conduct the Fascist hymn ‘Giovinezza’ in his honour; yet later Puccini's approval of the Fascist party was apparently fabricated piecemeal. In terms of aesthetics, Turandot takes up some extremely modern issues, as Wilson convincingly shows: ‘the apparent decline of the human in the machine age’ (195), the use of marionettes and masks in modern theatre to reflect on alienation (204), the exploration of the fluid boundaries between reality and illusion (208; in a vein reminiscent of Pirandello). Yet audiences and critics preferred to emphasise the character of Liù, ‘la donna veramente donna’ (214), whose death made audiences weep (216) – and I would point out that this popular sentimentality was not only proto-Fascist, as Wilson argues, but a direct result of mass death in World War I, and the lack of proper rituals for mourning. As Wilson points out, the atmosphere of Turandot's première, however mechanical its heroine may have seemed, was ‘reverential … [that of] a memorial service’ (194).
The Puccini Problem's brief but strong epilogue brings us to the present day, noting that the terms of the debate have not shifted much: in particular, Puccini's popularity and sentimentality, whether they are attacked or appropriated, are still seen as a barrier to his modernity. Wilson argues provokingly, and compellingly, that Puccini's mix of the progressive and the popular is best viewed in the context of a new genre that was developing during his time, that of film music: his stitching together of scenes, his cinematic sense of drama, which have led him to be termed ‘manipulative’ (226), are, she asserts, a sign that ‘Puccini's operas seemed to function in a new way’ (226), one that highly politicised contemporary criticism could not properly understand.
Overall, Wilson's The Puccini Problem is a rich investigation of how a major cultural figure's impact cannot be divorced from a complex and dynamic understanding of his time. As such, it is a compelling book not only for musicologists and music critics, but for anyone interested in the history and culture of modern Italy in its European context.
