There is a scene in the 2011 Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris in which the protagonist Gil Pender, a film writer turned aspiring novelist, becomes an object of mockery because of his enthusiasm for a past era. Gil is in love with the idea of Paris in the 1920s, convinced that his life would have been happier had he lived during that reified decade. Strolling through the grounds of Versailles with his fiancée and two of her friends, he is informed by one of them, the pompous self-styled intellectual Paul, that his fantasy is ‘a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present’, known as ‘Golden-Age Thinking’.Footnote 1 Much as we as scholars might like to consider ourselves level-headed enough to share Paul's scepticism, the impulse to take refuge in times past demands critical scrutiny by virtue of its cultural omnipresence today.
Just as the viewer of period film – the most overt example of cultural nostalgia – metaphorically travels back in time, so literally does Allen's protagonist: on fantastical night-time excursions, he meets his cultural heroes Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Dalí, Stein and others. Midnight in Paris is therefore itself a period film – albeit a highly postmodern one – which at the same time critiques the genre. It is also an extended exercise in self-scrutiny: Owen Wilson as Gil takes on the archetypal bumbling and neurotic ‘Woody Allen’ role. The film thus allows Allen to reflect by proxy upon his own earlier excursions into times past. His particular fascination with the 1920s has manifested itself both in art and in life, as exemplified, on the one hand, by making films such as Bullets over Broadway (1994) and, on the other, by playing the clarinet in his New Orleans jazz band.
One might then expect Allen to have sought familiar refuge in the 1920s in his first foray into opera directing, a Los Angeles Opera production of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi in 2008. Instead, he transplanted the action to what appears to be 1950s Florence, albeit with what one critic called ‘more than a nod towards Jewish New York’.Footnote 2 The staging of the opera, with its monochrome costumes and sets, suggestive of a black-and-white film, paid homage to the classic Italian cinema of Fellini, Loren and Mastroianni.Footnote 3 Despite his statement that ‘I have no idea what I am doing’, Allen exhibited in his production a keen understanding of recent trends in opera staging.Footnote 4 In adopting a mafia theme – Thomas Allen played Schicchi as a pin-striped mafia boss – he recalled celebrated earlier productions such as Jonathan Miller's Rigoletto for English National Opera (1982), together with stereotypical pop-culture associations between Italians (or Italian-Americans) and organised crime. The particular period setting demonstrated Allen's awareness that his fellow opera directors frequently indulge in ‘golden-age thinking’ and that their über-golden age, privileged above all others in the updating of comic opera, is the mid-twentieth century.
Updating operas to more recent times than those envisaged by their composer and librettist is, in a sense, old news. In particular, it is rare today for ‘historical’ operas to be staged in their intended period.Footnote 5 However, a particularly noteworthy trend may be discerned in the way in which, over the last decade, a loosely evoked version of the 1950s has become the default setting for staging Italian comic operas, at least in British and American theatres. Rarely has a particular repertory been so consistently and decisively shifted to a single historical moment. Moreover, although updatings of tragic operas often maintain something of an ‘abstract’ quality, as if to signal the universality of the subject matter (or, perhaps, to mask an uneasy fit between an opera and the period to which it is being shifted), the recent trend in updating comic operas plays upon and derives significance from its apparent specificity, although such specificity (as discussed below) is illusory.
To cite a few high-profile British examples, productions of Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore for Opera North (Daniel Slater, 2000), the Royal Opera, Covent Garden (Laurent Pelly, 2007) and English National Opera (Jonathan Miller, 2010) were set in the 1950s; Glyndebourne's (Annabel Arden, 2007) in the (presumably late) 1940s.Footnote 6 The Royal Opera also updated Rossini's La Cenerentola to the 1950s under the direction of Patrice Courier and Moshe Leiser (2000–01).Footnote 7 Verdi's Falstaff was shifted by Richard Jones to the immediate post-war years (Glyndebourne, 2009) and by Robert Carsen (Royal Opera, 2012) to an oak-panelled Windsor hotel in the late 1950s.Footnote 8 Even more striking, however – since one still occasionally finds a ‘traditional’ L'elisir or Falstaff Footnote 9 – has been the repeated and seemingly obligatory updating to the twentieth century of Gianni Schicchi, the Puccini opera set in the most distant past bar the fantastical Turandot. For an entire generation of younger opera goers, no other Gianni Schicchi exists.
British and American productions of Gianni Schicchi since 2000 have tended to evoke two moments in Italian twentieth-century history that have been much romanticised by popular culture. Some directors have shifted the action to Puccini's own time, the highly idealised terrain of the 1900s to the 1920s.Footnote 10 This is the picturesque, ‘heritage’ Italy so often seen in period dramas, constructed as a site of innocence before the historical rupture of the Second World War and brimming with familiar tropes about the transformative agency of the south.Footnote 11 Far more marked, however, has been the propensity to transplant Gianni Schicchi to the post-Second World War period, ostensibly the 1950s (the classic age of Italian cinema), with nods to the 1960s and 1970s. This tendency is exhibited by, amongst others, James Robinson's 2002 production for New York City Opera, Jack O'Brien's for the Metropolitan Opera in 2007, and Richard Jones's for the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, in the same year.Footnote 12
The recurrent updating of Gianni Schicchi seems all the more intriguing because Puccini is one of a small group of composers whose works seem to demand faithful stagings. So fastidious was Puccini in noting precise details of staging in his manuscripts and attempting to ‘compose the locale into the score’ that many of his operas could, arguably, be considered stubbornly ‘un-updatable’.Footnote 13 Although it has been done, it is rare for a Madama Butterfly or a La fanciulla del West to be shifted far from its intended setting: place, time and musical style evidently strike most directors as too closely intermeshed for updating to be feasible.Footnote 14 (La bohème, however, is regularly transplanted either to Puccini's own time or to the present, although these productions coexist happily alongside traditional nineteenth-century stagings.Footnote 15) In the case of Gianni Schicchi, a specific historical moment is, ostensibly, integral to the opera, although Puccini's attitude towards historical time in this work is more complicated than it might at first appear. Puccini and his librettist indicate a precise date: 1 September 1299, as the notary who arrives to change ‘Buoso Donati's’ will informs us. The opera is replete with topographical and historical references that seek to locate it in a particular place at a particular time.Footnote 16 Puccini certainly admired the historical detail in the stage sets designed by Galileo Chini for the premiere, writing to his publisher Tito Ricordi that he found the sketches ‘very beautiful … truly thirteenth-century’.Footnote 17
In these post-Barthesian days, directors should arguably feel no sense of obligation to respect composers' intentions regarding the staging of their works; scholars have convincingly made the case that, in an age in which opera functions predominantly as a form of museum culture, relocating operas to the present day is a welcome and necessary means of giving vitality to the art form.Footnote 18 This article does not revisit the well-trodden question of ‘authenticity’ in opera staging, nor does it aspire to debate the rights and wrongs of operatic updating. Rather, it treats stage productions as manifestations of the contemporary reception of Puccini's works, making the case for their inclusion among the broad spectrum of cultural artefacts to which reception historians refer as they increasingly move away from focusing solely (or even predominantly) upon the commentary of a small group of professional critics.
Sceptics may view staging, costumes and production values as rather shallow objects of study, and ‘traditional’, uncontroversial productions – as opposed to more radical interpretations – are perhaps particularly vulnerable in this regard. As Carolyn Abbate has noted with regret, staging has historically been regarded as merely an embodiment of the more important musical ‘work’, with the consequence that ‘someone who analyzes a specific operatic staging, performance, or recording appears to traffic in what is least important’.Footnote 19 In fact, updated productions are rich sources that can inform us not only about shifting perceptions of the individual opera in question – to the extent that in some cases it is no longer deemed possible to stage it in its original setting – but also about broader attitudes towards opera as a genre. Above all, stagings that update an opera consistently to a single historical era act as a form of ‘reception’ of the period to which the work is being transplanted. My aim in this article, then, is to explore why today's opera directors so persistently relocate Italian comic operas to the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, I analyse what such stagings can tell us about the present-day historical imagination and the uses it makes of culture to reflect on the relationship between past and present, as well as about current attitudes towards the generic concepts ‘opera’ and ‘Italy’. Finally, using recent stagings of Gianni Schicchi as a case study, I reflect upon the specific implications of shifting production styles for Puccini historiography: the recasting of Gianni Schicchi as a ‘twentieth-century opera’ alters our understanding of this work to the extent that it encourages us to consider larger questions about the place Puccini is customarily allotted in long-range musico-historical narratives.
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One might speculate in rather glib terms about why Puccini's comic opera is today so routinely updated. The story of Gianni Schicchi's cunning ruse to trick the late Buoso Donati's materialistic relatives out of the inheritance they believe to be theirs is well known. The opera's theme of greed is one that cuts easily enough across generations, although resituating the action undoubtedly creates certain anachronisms. As a reviewer for Opera wrote after seeing the Metropolitan Opera's 2007 production, ‘In a Gianni Schicchi moved to 1959, it seemed a bit odd that anyone should worry about hands being severed as legal punishment, about banishment from Florence or about inheriting a mule.’Footnote 20 Perhaps directors, ever being urged nowadays to reach out to new audiences by making opera ‘relevant’, perceive the late Middle Ages as too alien to have audience appeal. Yet this seems unlikely, since popular culture has hardly abandoned its fascination with the period, and the enduring popularity of classic films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail or the British television series Blackadder testify to the era's potential for comic treatment.Footnote 21
How can we account, moreover, for the repeated updatings of Gianni Schicchi to the decades immediately following the Second World War as opposed to any other historical era? Might it be that in returning again and again to the mid-twentieth century, directors are explicitly seeking to appeal to the cosy childhood memories of a baby-boomer generation that increasingly forms the bulk of the audience for opera (or wallowing in personal nostalgia, in the case of Allen, if we read his production as evoking 1950s Jewish New York)? Could it be that updating Gianni Schicchi to this period has simply become a tried and tested strategy and is now the ‘safe option’?Footnote 22 Or is the answer to the question a more prosaic one still? Are updated productions simply more economical, with mid-twentieth-century clothes being comparatively cheap to source, whereas late thirteenth-century costumes require specialist design so as not to evoke the nursery dressing-up box?
There may be some substance to all of these theories but we may glean something of greater significance about the historical imagination of our present time in the relocation of this repertory to the mid-twentieth century. The first question is why directors, so enthusiastic about moving Italian comic operas from their intended historical periods, do not simply update them to the present. Setting Gianni Schicchi today would be no less anachronistic than setting it in the 1950s or 1960s. There seems to be a collective need among directors to imbue the opera with a sort of ‘modern sensibility’ and yet to hold it at one remove from the present. What, then, is the impetus for this quasi-historicism? Although directors evidently feel comfortable about shifting the action of operas to the present when they are reworked as musicals, they seem to feel squeamish about doing so when opera remains opera, as if the art form's ‘museum culture’ status obliges them to invoke a sense of ‘oldness’.Footnote 23 And yet, a setting in the 1950s only pretends to be historical.
The very term ‘updating’, of course, needs to be used with caution when discussing such stagings. This phenomenon is simultaneously an act of bringing up to date (from the setting originally intended) and an act of historical revivalism (from the present-day perspective). Significantly, several operas that have been subjected to this treatment were themselves exercises in historical revivalism, but it was revivalism of a very different sort, shaped by different values. When seeking to recreate earlier ages, artists from the nineteenth century tended to look back to the distant past, typically the Renaissance or earlier; recent decades were considered of little historical interest or scarcely viewed as ‘history’ at all. Nineteenth-century artists sought inspiration in legends or artistic styles from ‘nobler’ eras, such as Classical Antiquity or Medieval times, as a way of reinvigorating the arts of the current age. With regard to opera, examples aplenty may be drawn from French grand opéra or from nineteenth-century German operas that engaged directly with historical events in order to reflect upon current preoccupations.Footnote 24
Puccini, writing largely in the early twentieth century, does not comfortably fit this model. Many of his operas explore a comparatively recent past. Furthermore, he was famously a composer who steered clear of making overt political statements and we might, therefore, interpret his insistence upon historical fidelity in the first staging of Gianni Schicchi (as of his other operas) as being guided by an impulse that was more theatrical than nationalistic. Irrespective of Puccini's intentions, however, a ‘nineteenth-century’-style attitude towards historical revivalism can be observed in the contemporaneous reception of the opera. When Gianni Schicchi was first performed in Italy in 1919, critics and audiences interpreted it as an attempt to aestheticise the ‘Italian’ past in a spirit of national regeneration. Since Unification, the new nation – still in practice divided by regional differences and allegiances – had repeatedly appealed to history, and the Renaissance in particular, in a quest for glorious patriotic symbols around which Italians might rally. In the aftermath of humiliating defeat in the First World War, the need to do so was all the more pressing. Gianni Schicchi's geographical and historical setting, far from being merely picturesque, thus contributed in no small part to the rapturous patriotic terms in which the work was received. Even avant-garde critics customarily hostile to Puccini's works – many of whom saw the potential to appropriate the opera for their own stridently nationalistic political ends – praised it.Footnote 25 Puccini, the much derided ‘international’ composer who seemed to this group to symbolise the bourgeois values of the despised Giolitti regime, had finally, after so many foreign ‘excursions’, produced an opera in which two culturally symbolic and privileged phenomena came together – Tuscany, constructed as the cradle of Italian civilisation, and the much mythologised birth of the Italian Renaissance – even if the specific dramatic episode depicted in the opera was hardly heroic.Footnote 26 Particularly important was the opera's derivation from a work by Dante, a figure who, having been hailed as a patriotic freedom fighter since the Risorgimento, was being appropriated for political purposes with renewed vigour around the time of the First World War.Footnote 27
What we see here, however, is a profoundly different historicist mindset from that exhibited in twenty-first-century opera stagings. Although eras from the distant past have not lost their appeal, the current moment is, to a large extent, fascinated with the recent past – often one within living memory.Footnote 28 Many present-day historical references, whether in the visual arts, design, fashion or music, self-consciously style themselves as ‘retro’, a multi-faceted term that emerged during the 1970s and became co-opted into postmodern theory during the 1980s.Footnote 29 As Elizabeth E. Guffey has argued, ‘“retro” suggests a fundamental shift in the popular relationship with the past’.Footnote 30 It is this ‘retro’ aesthetic – categorically different from a nineteenth-century-style historical revivalism – that characterises many of the recent productions of Gianni Schicchi and of Italian comic operas in general.
Crucially, the moral motivation for evoking ages past has largely been lost. A desire for culture to appropriate historical references for didactic, nation-building or similarly ‘honourable’ purposes is now rare. Today when popular culture turns its gaze to eras hitherto singled out as ‘glorious’ – the Roman and the Tudor eras, notably – it does so primarily for voyeuristic rather than moralising reasons, focusing on the perceived spectacle, licentiousness and cruelty of such eras.Footnote 31 ‘Retro’, then, is conspicuously uninterested in high-mindedness: it ‘does not seek out proud examples of the past: it shuffles instead through history's unopened closets and unlit corners’.Footnote 32 ‘Retro’ references to the past are unencumbered by any ‘improving’ or nationalistic agenda (indeed, ‘retro’ often invokes a bland Americana even when created by and for the benefit of non-American constituencies). Above all, they are ironic, playful and consciously ‘theatrical’, in the latter regard particularly well suited to the genre of opera.
Since the turn of the millennium, the ‘retro’ tendency has become ever more present in general discourse and observable in popular culture, even in genres that ostensibly privilege novelty. Simon Reynolds has lamented the lack of originality in much recent popular music, observing that in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the pop present became ever more crowded out by the past, whether in the form of archived memories of yesteryear or retro-rock leeching off ancient styles. Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.Footnote 33
Similarly, post-2000 opera stagings literally ‘stage’ a sense of historical anxiety, as if the current historical moment can find no identity for itself except via an incessant ‘replaying’ of a comfortingly familiar recent past.
Although the term ‘retro’ has multiple subtleties of meaning, Guffey argues that it can serve specifically as ‘a shorthand for a period style situated in the immediate post-war years’, while Reynolds points out that ‘The fifties just kept on coming back [from the 1970s onwards], wave after wave of never-ending revivalism.’Footnote 34 As a greater amount of time has elapsed, the mid-twentieth century has been constructed as desirably innocent, picturesque and ‘cute’. The visual signifiers used to suggest the post-war period have been reduced to a few stylised gestures (with fidelity comparatively unimportant), whilst our idealisation of what the era ‘means’ often departs sharply from the mundane reality of life for most ordinary people of the time.Footnote 35
The current fascination with the post-war period is manifested in numerous guises. A quick glance at British trends since 2000 reveals a mid-twentieth-century influence in fashion, both in the craze for ‘vintage’ clothing (authentic or pastiche) and in fashion retrospectives such as the Victoria and Albert Museum's 2012–13 exhibition Ballgowns: British Glamour Since 1950. Similarly, a 1950s inspiration is immediately observable in current furniture design, in car design (the marketing of the Fiat 500 as ‘pure retro’),Footnote 36 and even in foodstuffs (the trend for cupcakes and whoopie pies, evoking a cutesy world of 1950s American housewives).Footnote 37 The current moment even constructs civic events through a nostalgic lens, as exhibited by the retro-style street parties throughout Britain to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in June 2012.
Even more significant is the recent glut of American and British films set in the post-war period, as we might surmise that where film goes opera is bound to follow (increasingly so as operas are ever more frequently relayed in cinemas with movie-style close-ups and directed by film directors). Looking back to the 1990s and earlier decades, film historian Julianne Pidduck argued that period films ‘return again and again to mythical points of origin for Anglo-American culture: the Victorian era as a period of sexual and social repression [… and] the Edwardian period of increasing sexual and social openness’.Footnote 38 In the twenty-first century, however, the period-film genre has increasingly shifted its ‘mythologising’ gaze to eras ever closer to our own, as we seek to understand the present through an exploration of the recent past. The spotlight currently rests upon the later 1950s or upon an idealised, pre-counterculture early 1960s.Footnote 39 (The film industry also increasingly references and celebrates its own post-war ‘golden age’, a strategy Woody Allen borrowed for his opera-directing debut.Footnote 40)
Beyond the current nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s in period film, there are specific filmic and televisual cues from the post-war period that seem to be suggested in recent updatings of Italian comic operas. The tendency of some post-2000 stagings to revel in the aesthetics of mid-twentieth-century interior design – Alice Ford's dayglo-yellow fitted kitchen in Carsen's Falstaff or the blowsy floral wallpaper in Jones's Gianni Schicchi – resonates with the British situation comedy, wherein humorous events take place in domestic interiors that now seem to us comically dated yet worthy of nostalgic affection. The fast pace inherent in late nineteenth-century examples of comic opera and particularly in their stereotypical chaotic elements – the concealment of Falstaff in the laundry basket, for example – are aptly matched by a manner of staging that appears to reference this genre (as well as a particular brand of farce-like, post-war British comic cinema epitomised at its crudest by the ‘Carry On’ films).Footnote 41 A chintzy twentieth-century staging serves to highlight the debt such genres owe to late Italian comic opera. For instance, few British audience members could watch the scene in Jones's production of Gianni Schicchi in which the relatives ransack Buoso Donati's house in search of his will without thinking of the frantic hunt for ‘Basil the Rat’ in the eponymously named episode of Fawlty Towers. The slapstick involving Donati's dead body recalls a further episode from the same series (‘The Kipper and the Corpse’). Recent stagings can therefore present a complex layering of intertextual references to well-known ‘retro’ cultural products in order to establish a reassuring comedic frame of reference for our interpretation of the operas in question. Such a framing – seemingly aimed in this instance at British audience members aged over thirty, who would be well acquainted with the films and sitcoms mentioned above from countless television re-runs – seeks to instil a sense of audience ‘familiarity’, an important factor in creating humour and accessibility.Footnote 42
An even more specific filmic allusion can be found in several recent productions of L'elisir d'amore which reference a particular film that encapsulates the Hollywood vision of 1950s Italy: Roman Holiday (1953). I am referring here to a single iconic ‘retro’ image: that of the Vespa. In the film's pivotal scene, Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck cause chaos by riding a Vespa around Rome. Vespas feature prominently in the Slater and the Pelly productions of L'elisir d'amore and, just as the vehicle was foregrounded on American and British posters for Roman Holiday (less frequently on Italian posters), opera companies have also used it as a selling point. The Royal Opera House's publicity for its recent revival, ‘set in the sun-drenched countryside of 1950s Italy, complete with haystacks, Vespas and even a stray dog’, constructs an image of a charming, yet somewhat chaotically quaint vision of clichéd Italianness.Footnote 43
This filmic influence tells us much about perceptions of both Italy and opera that are marketed to British and American audiences. An Italian opera director staging an Italian opera in Italy would feel no need to invoke a sense of ‘Italianness’, but in the popular Anglo-American imagination opera is so closely allied with simplistic notions of the Italian nation and character that such references seem obligatory. The choice of a mid-twentieth-century staging for this repertory can be explained at least to some extent by popular conceptions of ‘Italy’ – shaped in large part by film – being closely bound up with this particular historical period. Perhaps as a consequence of the post-war opening-up of Italy as a destination for middle-class tourism, popular culture repeatedly constructs a charming, naïve Italy suspended in the 1950s, as manifested more broadly in nostalgic Italian ice-cream parlours (the European equivalent of the American 1950s diner, a defining motif of ‘retro’ culture) or in ‘traditional’ British-Italian restaurants with their checked table cloths and candles in straw-wrapped Chianti bottles.
Whereas Allen's Gianni Schicchi specifically evokes Italian films in the mould of Mario Monicelli's crime caper I soliti ignoti (1958), the stagings of L'elisir d'amore that reference Roman Holiday remind us that many of the clichés about Italianness that abound in recent opera productions are Anglo-American constructions.Footnote 44 Jonathan Miller recently made this idea explicit, dispensing with any pretence at Italianness in his production of L'elisir d'amore by shifting the action to the American Midwest. Yet, despite the apparently drastic change of locale, the iconographical tropes are constant between ‘American’ and ‘Italian’ settings: Miller substitutes a Cadillac and a vintage motorbike for Pelly's lorry and Vespa; a diner run by a Marilyn Monroe-esque Adina fulfils the same function as a roadside trattoria. Miller's production suggests an America frozen in time just as other directors have evoked an Italy frozen in time: America in the 1950s and Italy in the 1950s, as constructed in film, have become reified and to some extent interchangeable sites of the ‘retro’ ideal.
In the stagings under consideration here, clichés about Italianness intermingle with clichés about the operatic genre. We might also account for the tendency to update this repertory as a means for overcoming a certain embarrassment about the perceived excesses of opera in general and of Puccini's operas in particular. On the first count, I refer particularly to the UK, where opera's reception has historically been problematic and where today's media is fixated on opera's supposed ‘elitism’. Productions such as those discussed here establish a deliberate clash between the ordinariness of the staging and the ostensibly ‘high flown’ nature of opera. This tension between opera and ‘the everyday’ is the crux of many of today's British pop-culture commentaries on opera.Footnote 45 Much Italian opera of what is commonly viewed as the ‘long nineteenth century’ (i.e. up to Turandot, 1926) occupies a space in the popular imagination as the archetypal ‘excessive’ brand of opera. All the clichés of this repertory, encompassing florid vocal writing, gaudy naturalistic staging and (often) faux medievalism, can be characterised in today's terms as ‘camp’.
To these characteristics we might add, in Puccini's case, a seemingly overt sentimentality which may nowadays prompt in the listener a certain discomfort.Footnote 46 Although the emotional honesty of Puccini's operas undoubtedly remains key to their ongoing appeal today, it can simultaneously be hard to take at face value (even more so for the knowing listener conscious of a century of Puccini criticism). Throughout the twentieth century, a taste for Puccini's music has repeatedly been constructed as one that ought to be indulged only in private. Constant Lambert reported (in 1929) that he frequently bumped into friends at performances of Tosca or Turandot who were so embarrassed to be seen at a Puccini opera that they claimed to have mixed up the performance date with that for another work.Footnote 47 Peter Franklin argues that Richard Specht's 1932 biography of Puccini was an attempt to make amends ‘for his readiness to subscribe to the discourse of German modernism which demonized Puccini as a populist whose operas one might only enjoy, as it were, in private, or with suitably condescending irony in public’.Footnote 48 And more recently, Caryl Flinn has written that: ‘tasteful people don't buy into, or rather, publicly admit buying into, the hamfisted pining of Rudolfo [sic] for Mimi’.Footnote 49
This construction of Puccini's music as a taste that should be indulged only behind closed doors may be read in two ways. On the one hand, it points to a snobbery about Puccini's music – its frankness in straddling the boundary between art and entertainment and its apparent rejection of the idealistic tenets of modernism – which took root in Puccini's own lifetime and still lingers today. On the other, it hints at the unbridled emotional (perhaps even erotic) responses that Puccini's works have often been perceived to unleash, even against the listener's better intentions.Footnote 50 Aware of such implications, some directors – forced to bring Puccini out from behind ‘closed doors’ – have consciously striven to remove the sentimental aspects from his works.Footnote 51 Present-day directors, therefore, get around the problem of their/our ‘embarrassment’ about the emotional frankness of Puccini's works and indeed about the perceived excesses of this sort of opera per se by turning to ‘distancing strategies’. Some have gone to considerable lengths to ‘rescue’ a repertory that spoke to generations whose ethos about art and sentiment was very different from our own – to strip it of its clichéd ‘operatic’ qualities or to render it less ‘camp’ – by shifting it to the recent past and (in the case of the comic repertory) allying it to more ‘acceptable’ comedic genres. And yet, popular constructions of past eras often have a ‘camp’ quality to them – as Woody Allen observes in Midnight in Paris – and, of all periods of the twentieth century, the 1950s and early 1960s have been characterised as among the ‘campest’.Footnote 52 The fashions and the design of these decades – much ridiculed in the immediate passing of the era and for some time after – now seem to lend themselves particularly well to ironic postmodern appropriation. These productions, therefore, create a comically stylised vision of the mid-twentieth century, where overblown emotions are rendered ‘acceptable’, restoring a deliberate element of ‘campness’ to the operas but on twenty-first-century terms.
In the case of the Gianni Schicchi productions, the shifting of the action to the mid-twentieth century serves an additional purpose. As well as masking anxieties about the ‘campness’ of the operatic genre, as imagined in clichéd terms, such stagings bear witness to a lingering anxiety about the aesthetic premises of late Puccini and thus to a deeper historiographical problem. Puccini operas of the 1910s and 1920s have prompted discomfort among commentators both then and now. Whereas Puccini's earlier works, even in his day, seemed easy to classify – as crowd pleasers that appealed to audiences and the ‘popular’ press and were derided by ‘serious’ critics – his later works have proved more vexing to categorise. By the 1910s, commentators well disposed to Puccini and determined to celebrate his achievements struggled to disguise their disconcertion at the more modern aspects of his later scores. Modernist critics, meanwhile, disparaged such elements in his operas from La fanciulla del West (1910) onwards as unconvincing pastiche, music posing as something it was not.Footnote 53 Commentators, varyingly, perceived late Puccini either as too modern or else as not modern enough – as a repertory that seemed not to know where it stood, historically speaking.
During the 1960s, Adorno found an interesting way of characterising the distinction between Puccini's early and late operas. Arguing that some musical works that start out as fulfilling a pure ‘entertainment’ function can, with hindsight, take on a more important cultural value, he asserted that ‘Puccini's extraordinary talent was expressed far more convincingly in unpretentious early works such as Manon Lescaut and La bohème than in the later, more ambitious works that degenerate into kitsch because of the disproportion between substance and presentation.’Footnote 54 Adorno's definition of kitsch – as ‘art that cannot or does not want to be taken seriously and yet through its appearance postulates aesthetic seriousness’ – thus plays into a long tradition among Puccini's critics of denigrating his operas as insincere or, in the case of the later works, pretending to be something they were not. To label Puccini's works as kitsch is seemingly to demean them in the strongest terms. What is particularly interesting in the present context, however, is that opera producers today also detect something about late Puccini, and Gianni Schicchi in particular, that is aptly met in a ‘kitsch’ manner of staging. Gianni Schicchi – widely held up as the Puccini opera beloved even of Puccini detractors – seems kitsch in a way that appeals to the contemporary imagination. The postmodern attitude towards kitsch is entirely different from that held by earlier twentieth-century thinkers. ‘Kitsch’ is no longer necessarily a derogatory byword for aesthetic inadequacy and falseness. Rather, the seemingly distinct and incontrovertible boundaries between kitsch and ‘high art’ have eroded, as postmodern art often quotes elements of kitsch playfully to find new modes of expression.
Recent directors of Italian comic opera have embraced kitsch as something simultaneously humorous (therefore appropriate to the works being staged) and so unstylish as to come full circle and become chic. The costumes used for Richard Jones's production of Gianni Schicchi, for instance, form a typically postmodern agglomeration of random mid-twentieth-century styles: gaudy full-skirted 1950s prom dresses and 1960s beehives intermingle with 1970s kipper ties, while floral prints jostle haphazardly with checks, stripes, leopard-skin and abstract graphics in a riot of clashing colour. All that is tasteless about mid-twentieth-century fashion seems on parade here and yet we are aware that it is not so far removed from the fashions being displayed on the catwalk today. The three most sympathetic protagonists – and those whom Puccini and his librettist Forzano characterise most distinctly as individuals within what is predominantly an ensemble piece – are, however, somewhat distanced from the sartorial chaos. Gianni Schicchi becomes an ‘everyman’ figure in his plain t-shirt and jeans, while Lauretta in her candy-striped sundress and Rinuccio in his dapper pinstriped suit seem to evoke everything that we have been conditioned to find romantic and ‘sexy’ about classic Italian film.
Productions such as Jones's are inherently postmodern in their visual eclecticism. They create a generalised ‘retro’ look, yet absolute fidelity to a particular period – a ‘conservationist’ approach – is avoided.Footnote 55 Although we are presumably meant to assume that the setting is the 1950s, some of the costumes and accessories, such as the kipper ties, seem to suggest the late 1960s or 1970s. Likewise, James Robinson's 2002 production for New York City Opera is supposedly set in 1952, yet the monochrome geometric graphics evoke the 1960s style of British fashion designer Mary Quant.Footnote 56 Such productions hazily evoke a particular decade so that the era in question is both idealised and stylised: if one scrutinises the details, historicism is revealed to be merely a veneer.
One finds a neat parallel between this stylistic miscellany and the eclecticism of the score of Gianni Schicchi: what is being paraded in front of our eyes draws attention to what our ears are hearing. Cycling through a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting musical voices, some parodistic, as he engages in an ironic interplay of different musical styles – now dissonant, now lyrical – Puccini seems to offer a commentary on music past and present. He demonstrates a ‘pick-and-mix’ approach, creating a proto-postmodern collage of musical styles, invoking nineteenth-century drawing-room song here (‘O mio babbino caro’), the foxtrot there (‘In testa la cappellina’, which Michele Girardi characterises as ‘like something out of a smoky Berlin cabaret’);Footnote 57 this is indicative of what Tom Sutcliffe identifies as a quintessentially twentieth-century mindset of ‘international art tourism, of browsing through all ages and civilizations, of cultural self-consciousness and promiscuous consumerism’.Footnote 58
This raises interesting historiographical questions, offering a sharp riposte to the customary history-book designation of Puccini as a ‘nineteenth-century’ throwback and demonstrating that operas of this period can often be served better if considered outside the framework of traditional periodisation. Such a discussion is far too broad-ranging to be treated fully here but what is particularly interesting for the present discussion is that Puccini's ‘historicism’ is so markedly different from that of many of his predecessors. Puccini was in no meaningful sense being ‘historical’ in Gianni Schicchi, either at the narrative or musical level. Audiences and critics revelled in what they perceived to be the opera's glorification of a heroic past; Puccini treated the opera as a means of exploring his contemporary musical preoccupations. Analysing mid-twentieth-century stagings of this opera exposes not only the artificiality of constructed historical narratives (both in the opera itself and in its treatment since 2000), but simultaneously the artifice of music historiography.
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Close to the end of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, even his ‘eternal romantic’ protagonist Gil is starting to have doubts about ‘golden-age thinking’. He and Adriana, his would-be girlfriend from the 1920s, travel back to Adriana's own imagined ‘golden age’, the belle époque. In a quintessentially 1890s Parisian café, they meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin, who are discussing how much better it would have been to have lived during their golden age, the Renaissance. Incredulous, Adriana insists that ‘This is the golden age!’ and proposes to Gil that they remain in the 1890s. But visiting somebody else's ‘golden age’ prompts a revelation in Gil (already troubled by the realisation that ‘these people don't have any antibiotics’), who says, ‘If you stay here … and this becomes your present, then pretty soon you'll start imagining another time was really the golden time. That's, you know, what the present is: it's a little unsatisfying, because life's a little unsatisfying.’ At the end of the film, then, the idea of historical periods as something with which one might personally identify has indeed been revealed to be rather flimsy: merely a refuge through which to act out our anxieties and aspirations about the present. Similarly, this idea of history as nothing more than a façade is observable both in Gianni Schicchi itself and in recent productions of it, including Allen's own: Puccini was no more serious about the Middle Ages than today's producers are about the 1950s. It is this shared attitude towards historicism, across the divide of almost a century, which makes the pairing of Puccini's opera and a ‘retro’ staging work so effectively.
Moreover, there is something particularly intriguing in the 1950s and early 1960s having been so repeatedly selected for reification by directors of comic opera. Those decades were, after all, a historical moment with an ethos of self-conscious modernity, characterised by home improvements, man-made materials, labour-saving devices and a comprehensive renunciation (indeed, often demolition) of everything that was Victorian.Footnote 59 By contrast, subsequent decades would fetishise ‘period detail’, going to considerable lengths to conceal modernisation. Thus, that we are particularly fascinated by an era that saw itself as categorically modern says something important about our current notion of history. Within the operatic context, a 1950s or early 1960s setting allows a producer to present an opera as ‘historical’ while revelling in the simultaneous ‘modernity’ of the period in question, in doing so making a commentary upon the postmodern notion of the death of history.Footnote 60
In retro opera productions, therefore, a 1950s staging functions as merely a free-floating, ironic mask that allows directors and audiences to conceal their anxieties about enjoying a repertory that seems, within an early twenty-first-century context, to be potentially problematic – a guilty pleasure. Rather than staging Gianni Schicchi either in its own time or in the present, directors style it as 1950s kitsch to duck the question of whether it is a remnant of nineteenth-century kitsch. Presented in this manner, the opera becomes ‘postmodern’, the self-conscious manner of the staging and the flagging up in capital letters of knowing intertextual references allowing the audience to indulge in enjoying it without embarrassment. Such productions, in short, allow us to have our cupcake and eat it.
