Analysis of tonal, formal, and narrative elements in Italian opera generally, and in Puccini's works specifically, has become an important research agenda in recent years. Andrew Davis's ambitious study is a significant contribution to this literature. Building on a wide range of theoretical work, including the narrative theories of Carolyn Abbate and Robert Hatten,Footnote ¹ the formal theories of Abramo Basevi, Harold Powers, and James Hepokoski,Footnote ² and the rhythmic extensions of Schenkerian theory by William Rothstein and Carl Schachter,Footnote ³ Davis presents an analytic study in which methodological pluralism mirrors the stylistic pluralism of the music at hand.

The book is organized in six large chapters plus an epilogue. The two opening chapters define the scope of the study, limiting ‘late style’ to Il Trittico and Turandot, and also enumerating the theoretical apparatus for the book as a whole, which is derived mainly from the authors cited above.Footnote ⁴ While chronology supports Davis's limitation, it seems that practical considerations played at least some role in his decision. Puccini's modernist style, which is central to the analyses throughout the book, is hardly unique to the late works, originating no later than Tosca or Madama Butterfly. This style also forms the compositional background for La fanciulla del West. Davis argues reasonably that this latter opera deserves an analytic study of its own, but bracketing off the final operas chronologically seems arbitrary from a stylistic point of view. The epilogue revisits considerations of ‘late style’ in relation to work on other composers, and speculates on various definitions of this elusive concept as they relate to the specifics of Puccini's creative and personal life.

Chapter two provides an overview of Puccini's Romantic style, which is understood to be paradoxically atypical in the late works in spite of its familiarity. Davis divides the chapter into three sections: melody and orchestration, harmony and voice leading, and metric qualities. Each of these sections could warrant a book-length study, and eventually such studies need to be undertaken, for our understanding of tonal, metric, and melodic/orchestrational procedures in Puccini's music still remains at the level of René Lenormond's Étude sur l'harmonie Moderne Footnote ⁵: devices are enumerated, but a more rigorous theory of derivation is lacking, along with distinctions between grammatical and preference rules. That said, Davis offers a number of useful observations here, including his suggestions that Puccini avoids explicit dominant functions, even at cadence points that seem to require the presence of V, and that Puccini's harmonic language is strategically designed to undermine motion (p. 38). This latter statement is particularly important in relation to Davis's discussion of static and kinetic movements within his formal analyses.

The heart of Davis's study consists of four central chapters, one on each of Puccini's final operas (counting the three ‘acts’ of Il Trittico as separate works). Davis succeeds admirably in re-focusing our hearing of these familiar works in relation to Puccini's manipulation of multiple musical styles. In addition to examples that focus on local events, he offers complete formal readings of all four operas in chart form, and these will be essential references for anyone interested in the musical organization of these works. Davis demonstrates that Puccini's modernist non-lyric language is the normative background in all four operas, and that the more lyrical, romantic moments in the scores (as defined harmonically, melodically, and formally in chapter two) are ‘marked’ for consciousness by their contrast with the surrounding context (pp. 26–7).Footnote ⁶ He proposes a wider palette of stylistic plurality in Turandot, hearing that work as an interplay between the Romantic, Dissonant, and Exotic styles, with the Exotic further subdivided into Chinese, Primitive, and Persian dialects (p. 173ff). Davis is a sensitive listener, and his descriptions of individual moments of discontinuity within these works will be highly suggestive for readers; I was constantly driven back to my recordings and scores to verify individual readings of long-familiar passages, and the methodology is suggestive for a much broader repertoire than the four operas under consideration here. His discussion of the individual styles could be productively related to Ralph Locke's discussions of exoticism in opera.Footnote ⁷

Throughout the book, Davis urges readers to listen to Puccini's late music in relation to the nineteenth-century formal conventions of Italian operatic composition. These conventions are first referenced in Abramo Basevi's 1859 studyFootnote ⁸ of Verdi's operas, and they have found wide (if not universal) acceptance among modern scholars as an appropriate filter for parsing formal units in Italian opera from Rossini through Verdi. Davis summarizes the secondary literature admirably on this topic, and his contribution for Puccini studies is to combine work on la solita forma with James Hepokoski's conception of formal deformation.Footnote ⁹ In this way, Davis suggests that we should listen to Puccini's arias, duets, and ensembles in dialogue with the earlier nineteenth-century conventions, and that deviations from that form are intentional expressive markers within his late style.

Hepokoski's model has become extremely influential in music-theoretical circles, and it appears that scholars are attempting to re-map our understanding of stylistic conventions in relation to families of deformational strategies, with the history of stylistic change being understood as a process whereby a deformation from 1830, for example, becomes a normative option in 1850. One of the great dangers of this methodology is that misassigning the target convention can result in a skewed picture of the style. In the case of Puccini, it seems clear that nineteenth-century Italian opera is one important compositional background against which to measure his work. However, Wagnerian music drama and the harmonic/formal innovations of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande represent equally, if not more, important precedents for procedures found in Puccini's work; these have been acknowledged by numerous scholars. Theoretical studies on form in Wagner's music by Alfred Lorenz, Robert Bailey, Patrick McCreless, and Warren Darcy,Footnote ¹⁰ among many others, could provide important resonances for formal strategies that cut across the musical numbers enumerated by Davis in relation to Italian traditions. Most notably, the ideas of tonal hierarchy as opposed to tonal/motivic association, and their interaction across long time-spans in the music of Wagner, would provide a further level of nuance to Davis's discussions of the interplay of individual stylistic elements within and across formal units. This observation is intended not so much as a criticism of Davis's work, but rather as a suggestion for continued research on form in this music that includes additional or alternative perspectives.

Returning to the concept of la solita forma, Basevi's definition (like Wagner's of the poetic-musical period) is extremely general, and scholars who have appropriated the term have found it necessary to provide more rigorous definitions. The most thorough explanation of the conventions is found in Robert Moreen's dissertation, Integration of Text Forms and Musical Forms In Verdi's Early Operas.Footnote ¹¹ Davis summarizes this work effectively, along with advances by Philip Gossett, James Hepokoski, Harold Powers, David Rosen,Footnote ¹² and others. What is not present here, nor in the other scholars mentioned, is an explication of the interface between formal function and tonal background. If la solita forma is a single number, should we understand it as the projection of a single background tonality? Does the answer to this question change from one composer or time period to another? Or, should the cantabile and cabaletta movements be viewed as self-contained numbers, with the tempo d'attacco and tempo di mezzo functioning as introductory or transitional sections within the tonal analysis? These questions cry out for attention within the theoretical literature.Footnote ¹³

The premise that Puccini's work is actively in dialogue with earlier Italian formal conventions is intuitively appealing, and Davis builds extensively on such applications in Turandot by William Ashbrook and Harold Powers.Footnote ¹⁴ Through the use of well-constructed charts, Davis places his own topical analyses in dialogue with Ashbrook and Powers’ formal analyses, and suggests a parallel formal reading of the opera in terms of episodes, defined by changes of musical style. The interaction between traditional set pieces, episodes (which may have an unacknowledged relationship to Wagnerian poetic-musical periods), and small formal functions (as defined by Caplin, Kerman, and others) are the analytical highpoints of the book, and reveal Davis's considerable ability to offer compelling and highly nuanced hearings of this repertoire.

Not all of the analyses are equally convincing, and one of the first large-scale analyses in the book, in the third chapter on Il Tabarro, falls short in important ways. The central analytic claim in this chapter is that a full-scale four-movement duet underlies Giorgietta and Luigi's music from reh. 41 through 54. Davis expends considerable energy amassing evidence for this reading, and he is surely correct in hearing Luigi's ‘Hai ben ragione; meglio non pensare’ as a static aria, and Giorgetta and Luigi's ‘È ben altro il mio sogno!’ as a static duet, with the use of lyric prototype and the melodic repetitions culminating in a due singing in octaves providing clear references to nineteenth-century cabaletta conventions. Davis anticipates and responds to potential objections to his analysis, but he fails to demonstrate convincingly that an aria can function as the adagio to a duet as cabaletta. I am unaware of any precedents in the Italian repertoire for combining an aria and a duet within a single number, and it strikes me that this procedure is too far removed from the prototype to be a plausible deformation. The analysis here is further undercut by an odd insistence on hearing the recurring music representing the river Seine in D, rather than in G; functional tonal relationships that follow from this misattribution weaken the analysis accordingly.Footnote ¹⁵

In the following chapter, Davis proposes that we should understand the music in Suor Angelica from reh. 60 through reh. 66 as a large-scale four-movement number for Angelica, projecting a scena (‘Senza mamma, bimbo, tu sei morto!’), adagio (‘Ora che sei un angelo del cielo’), tempo di mezzo (‘Sarete contenta, sorella’), and cabaletta (‘La grazia è discesa dal cielo’). His analysis is supported by clear breaks in the poetic scansion and syllable-count (one of Moreen's criteria), as well as elements of dramatic and motivic function. In all of this, I am in complete agreement with Davis's identification of formal breaks. My disagreement is the assignment of scena to the material at reh. 60, which I understand as the beginning of the adagio proper. The character of this music, with its sentence-like opening gestures, preceded by the repeated three-chord orchestral motto that underlies this section, suggest a greater musical stability in keeping with this music as the beginning of the adagio.

Assuming this to be so, how does one hear the disruption at reh. 61 (Davis's adagio)? It functions quite conventionally as a contrasting B section, in the key of VI. Strikingly, the music returns to the tonic key (a minor) at 61.17. Davis notes the key-change here, but surprisingly does not relate this to the tonal center at reh. 60. Further, he misses the return of the three-chord motto d minor – G Major – a minor at reh. 62ff. In my analysis, the return of this material from reh. 60 serves to close off the aria through tonal and motivic means. I understand reh. 62ff. as a coda. Rather than hearing this span of music as scena+adagio, I prefer to hear a three-part additive form: A (reh. 60), B (reh. 61), C overwriting A’ (reh. 61.17), Coda (reh. 62).

Davis's isolated reference to Robert Gjerdingen's work (p. 14) provided a missed opportunity in the application of deformational analysis of la solita forma. By assessing the fixed and fluid elements within one's definition of la solita forma, in the manner of Gjerdingen's enumeration of these for his schemata, Davis could have presented a much more rigorous explanation of exactly how Puccini manipulated the formal conventions.

In conclusion, I applaud Davis for his close readings of this much-loved but insufficiently studied repertoire, and for the pluralism of his methodology, which is in keeping with Puccini's seemingly conscious exploration of multiple styles, formal traditions, and harmonic dialects. The production values of the book are strong, with easy-to-read charts and musical examples and clear cross-references in the text, along with a minimum number of proofreading errors.Footnote ¹⁶ The book deserves a wide readership for the important questions it answers, and for the additional questions it raises that call for further research.