‘If there’s a musician fashionable in all five continents of the world, capable of gaining the approval of each and every theatre audience, it is precisely Puccini’, declared Fausto Torrefranca in his notorious 1912 monograph-cum-character-assassination Giacomo Puccini and International Opera.Footnote ¹ For Torrefranca, such popularity was merely a symptom of Puccini’s superficiality and degeneracy: ‘Puccini’s artistic passivity, his indolent domestic character, his intellectual mediocrity are all most readily revealed to us when we consider this: he is not a true composer, but only a composer of operas’. While Puccini was firmly established as Italy’s most famous composer by 1912, then, his music could be considered Italian only in its vestiges of a sentimental late-eighteenth-century style; it was at best ‘a compromise between lyricism and high drama, enacting well-worn sentiments at average intensity’.

Attitudes such as these have long coloured the reception of Puccini’s works. As Emanuele Senici reminds us in his introduction to Giacomo Puccini and his World, Puccini’s career coincided with the emergence of modernist thought, with the result that his operas have typically been assessed within this aesthetic framework. If Torrefranca’s comments manifested a specifically Italian set of concerns about cultural decadence and effeminacy, later critical responses have tended to reinforce his image of Puccini as a composer of overblown melodramas largely out-of-step with his own historical epoch. In recent years, a number of scholars have nonetheless sought to challenge Puccini’s reputation as a reactionary figure, while also uncovering the origins of Puccini’s negative reception within contemporary debates in Italy and abroad.Footnote ² Giacomo Puccini and his World gathers together several of the authors of these interventions, in what constitutes a long-overdue re-assessment of Puccini’s cultural and aesthetic contexts. As Senici elegantly outlines, the book’s aim is to offer a range of new perspectives on Puccini’s work by considering his engagement with modern life more generally: not Puccini the Modernist, then, but Puccini and Modernity.

The extraordinary international popularity of Puccini’s operas during his own lifetime might make a study of his world seem an insurmountable task. In practice, however, the majority of the essays in this collection confine themselves to the study of one opera, offering a new historiographical or analytical framework to consider a given work. In addition, Giacomo Puccini and his World follows the usual format of the Bard Festival series by supplementing these essays with a selection of historical documents. Here these consist of a selection of extracts from Torrefranca’s book (translated by Delia Casadei), early reviews from the Italian and German press exploring the phenomenon of ‘verismo’ opera (translated by Arman Schwartz and Elaine Fitz Gibbon), extracts from letters by Puccini to his interpreters (translated by Senici), and a group of excerpts from Albert Carré’s staging manual for the 1906 production of Madama Butterfly (1904) in Paris, which would become the standard version of Puccini’s much-revised score (translated by Steven Huebner). These are preceded by introductions by Alexandra Wilson, Arman Schwartz, Walter Frisch and Michele Girardi respectively – introductions that usefully outline just how contested the ‘realist’ compositional trends of Puccini and his contemporaries were, as well as the careful coordination between orchestra and stage on which these realist experiments relied. As the extracts make clear, the emergence of these trends prompted a widespread debate over the tenability of realism in an operatic context: debates that – as Schwartz observes – continue to resonate in discussions of Regietheater in the twenty-first century.

The difficulties surrounding operatic realism are explored further in Schwartz’s opening contribution, ‘Realism and Skepticism in Puccini’s Early Operas’. Situating Manon Lescaut (1893) and La bohème (1896) against the background of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1876), Schwartz offers what might be called a Bloomian reading of Puccini’s early works, arguing that they revisit and rework the final scene from his teacher’s most celebrated opera. Schwartz focuses particularly on the breakdown in communication portrayed in La Gioconda’s denouement, and he enlists Henrik Ibsen alongside Ponchielli to provide a broader context for Puccini’s sceptical explorations. The idealist inheritance of nineteenth-century opera, Schwartz proposes, was fundamentally at odds with the disenchanted culture of the fin-de-siècle, and Puccini’s early operas can be heard as meditations on precisely this tension. Des Grieux in Manon here emerges as an idealist figure haplessly searching for a transcendental encounter with an ordinary woman; La bohème similarly contrasts the philosophising Rodolfo with the avowedly everyday figure of Mimì. Lost in his own drama, Rodolfo does not notice Mimì’s death, and thus discovers too late that ‘the true cost of his self-theatricalization is exile from the surrounding world’ (p. 44). Voyeurism and emotional excess – familiar tropes of Puccinian censure – thus emerge to fascinating effect as central preoccupations of the operas, offering an exploration of modern subjectivity by exploiting some of opera’s most fundamental mechanisms.

The relationship between Puccini’s operas and fin-de-siècle preoccupations with materiality are investigated further in the essays by Ellen Lockhart (‘Laggiù nel Soledad: Indexing and archiving the Operatic West’) and by Alessandra Campana and Christopher Morris (‘Puccini’s Things: Materials and Media in Il trittico’). For Lockhart, the extensive documentary evidence surviving from the premiere of La fanciulla del West (1910) – including photographs as well as peculiarly detailed verbal accounts of the sets – offers a suggestive counterpart to the kaleidoscopic musical fabric of Puccini’s score. Efforts to preserve the Metropolitan Opera premiere shared with Puccini’s opera a commitment to capturing seemingly random details, in a score characterised by perpetual flux. At the same time, Lockhart argues, both the orchestral score and the opera’s characters display a penchant for underlining onstage objects with vivid mimetic gestures: from the melismas that accompany Minnie’s description of her horse-riding, to the deictic movements that featured in Ricordi’s photographic archive. Reframed thus, Puccini’s approach to operatic realism intriguingly seems to reflect a sensibility shaped by contemporary photography: one that attuned audiences to an experience of modernity marked simultaneously by contingency, and by historical preservation.

Campana and Morris’s stimulating contribution by contrast looks forward, exploring the ways in which Puccini’s audio-visual aesthetics in Il trittico (1918) anticipate the cinema of Jean Vigo and Alfred Hitchcock. Proceeding from the noisy and visually-compressed stage pictures in all three operas, Campana and Morris interpret the prominent use of ostinato, and the semiotically promiscuous leitmotifs in these works through the lens of ‘thing theory’. Whereas Colline’s coat in La bohème was loaded with nostalgia, they suggest, Michele’s cloak in Il tabarro becomes a tool to sever the relationship with the past, in turn also shedding its former associations. In similar fashion, Campana and Morris identify a schism between orchestral accompaniment and soundscape in Gianni Schicchi, as the orchestra breaks its bonds with the onstage action and instead asserts its ‘thinghood’ in the manner of a soundtrack. The audio-visual practices pursued by composers writing for the silent cinema during Puccini’s own lifetime are a surprising lacuna in this chapter, an addition that might have helped illuminate the medium specificity of Puccini’s approach even further. The authors’ main concern, instead, appears to be to offer an exploratory account of shifting attitudes towards individual agency, as manifested in Il trittico’s various configurations of objects and sounds. For Campana and Morris, Puccini’s proto-cinematic practice ultimately reflects a commitment to materiality that at one level is ‘a progressive and courageous reconfiguration of what theatre and music can do’ (p. 155). Envisioned differently, however, this will-to-automatism would also seem to suggest a nihilism very much in tune with contemporary futurist movements.

Senici speculates in his introduction on the new readings of Turandot (1926) that Campana’s and Morris’s approach might open up: in particular, an attention to the opera’s hieratic, museum-like qualities. Turandot’s emphases on spectacle and male heroism have instead been interpreted more often through the lens of contemporary fascism, an historiographical trend that Ben Earle revisits in his contribution ‘Puccini, Fascism, and the Case of Turandot’. Puccini certainly demonstrated sympathy with the fascist movement; yet as Earle demonstrates, contemporary reception of Turandot was markedly unpolitical, notwithstanding efforts to incorporate Italian opera more generally into mass populist event. Existing political commentary on Turandot from the 1930s in fact reveals a variety of readings of Puccini’s work; for Earle, however, fascist readings of the opera ‘would simply have made no sense’ to an Italian audience in the 1930s, for whom Puccini was already a figure from the musical past (p. 177). Pursuing this further, one might ponder precisely the meanings Turandot did then have in this new political regime; and the resonances carried both by its ritualistic dimensions and its strikingly exotic sounds.

The emphasis on Puccini’s engagement with new technologies and representational modes in several of these chapters thus offers an important refinement to familiar perceptions of fin-de-siècle Italy as an old-fashioned and relentlessly inwardly-looking nation.Footnote ³ Indeed, Puccini’s fascination with diverse soundscapes and locales – as well as his interest in international styles – suggests precisely the kind of engagement with modernity that earlier studies of the period have tended to overlook.Footnote ⁴ Puccini’s internationalism is explored further here in essays on Madama Butterfly (1904) and La rondine (1917). Arthur Groos’s contribution, ‘Madama Butterfly Between East and West’, offers an especially subtle account of the influence of diverse authorial voices on the final text of Madama Butterfly, particularly the tension between its two librettists in shaping a heroine at once explicitly orientalized yet unprecedently tragic. These tensions are traced via the diversity of musical styles in the score, with Butterfly’s occupation of a ‘no man’s land, an inter-national space’ (p. 66) contextualized in terms of contemporary fears of miscegenation. Groos’s exploration of what he terms the ‘complex and even contradictory historical discourses in which [the opera] is imbricated’ (p. 81) thus offers a refreshingly nuanced account of Butterfly’s position within orientalism, while also suggesting reasons for the opera’s continued popularity in varied geographical contexts.

Micaela Baranello’s essay, ‘The Swallow and the Lark: La rondine and Viennese Operetta’, explores transnational connections (and anxieties) of a different kind. Retracing La rondine’s famously troubled origins as an operetta commission, Baranello persuasively argues that the libretto’s Viennese origins were repeatedly repressed following the outbreak of the Great War, even as they shaped the dramaturgy in fundamental ways. The echoes of Die Fledermaus (1874) in La rondine’s second act have often been commented upon; but these are ultimately less important, Baranello suggests, than the parallels with Silver Age operetta. Rather than following the structure of Lehár’s popular works, for example – according to which the diegetic song, ‘Che il bel sogno di Doretta’, would appear in Act Two – La rondine’s hit number instead appears early on, giving the opera an air of ‘strange inevitability’ (p. 125). At the same time, the work’s bittersweet conclusion reflects a markedly more conservative set of sexual mores than contemporary operetta, and could indeed be thought of as ‘an Act 2 finale in search of its final resolution’ (p. 126). Viewed in the context of contemporary operettas, in fact, one might argue that La rondine reflects a similarly unoptimistic attitude towards human agency to Il trittico: a world in which individuals are forced to play out tragic narratives all-too-predictable from the start.

The most wide-ranging and most extended essay in Giacomo Puccini and his World is Leon Botstein’s concluding contribution, ‘Music, Language and Meaning in Opera: Puccini and his Contemporaries’. Botstein’s aim is to shed light on Puccini’s shifting attitude towards the operatic medium, while avoiding the ‘outmoded and condescending trivialisation’ (p. 185) that he identifies (and cogently contextualizes) in earlier writings on the composer. He does so via a set of three contemporary comparisons: Madama Butterfly with Janacek’s Jenůfa (1903); La fanciulla del West with Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911); and Suor Angelica with Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna (1922), which for Botstein ‘present themselves as quite uncanny parallels’ (p. 193). Perhaps surprisingly, however, Puccini does not fare especially well by this approach. Madama Butterfly, for instance, exhibits ‘vocal virtuosity of an unambiguous and almost generically expressive nature. Through the music characters are shorn of specificity, ambiguity and complexity’ (p. 196), while ‘[t]he transparently melodramatic plot, the unremitting lyricism, and the exotic are more comforting than unsettling to its audience’ (p. 197). In Jenůfa, by contrast, ‘music deepens complexities’ (p. 198). Der Rosenkavalier, in turn, provokes ‘a differentiated, sceptical, and reflective account of human conduct unlike Jenůfa or any Puccini opera’, whereas in Fanciulla ‘music overwhelms language; there is nothing autonomously poetic or philosophical in the language as is the case in Rosenkavalier’ (p. 204). These observations reach their climax with Botstein’s conclusion that ‘For all his greatness, Puccini may simply be too pat, too self-consciously beautiful, and too easy to listen to, with the result that his art ends up affirming passivity toward both injustice and vulgarity’ (pp. 216–7).

Botstein is surely correct that Puccini’s approach to operatic modernity was in important respects different from his central-European contemporaries, shaped significantly by earlier Italian expectations of the medium. There is, moreover, no reason why a collection devoted to Puccini should offer an uncritical account of his work. The assessment that Puccini’s works lack philosophical ambition or emotional depth nonetheless sits oddly alongside the rest of the collection, especially since Botstein’s contribution contains neither detailed musical analysis nor any exploration of the works’ reception history. Botstein in that sense appears paradoxically embedded in the very set of historical discourses that his essay sets out to debunk; a productive reminder of the challenges that Puccini’s popularity still poses to sustained critical interrogation.

It is nevertheless a testament to the overall perceptiveness and intellectual energy of Giacomo Puccini and his World that the reader is left above all with a sense of the opportunities that Puccini might still afford musicology in rethinking musical modernity. Further research on Puccini reception – both contemporaneous and posthumous – would certainly offer rich possibilities for nuancing our understanding of how cultural hierarchies shaped twentieth-century musical culture. Other analytical approaches might pursue some of the questions raised in Botstein’s essay, and explore (for example) Puccini’s relationship to literary culture or his representations of spirituality. Yet perhaps the key insight one gleans from this outstanding collection is the necessity for all such readings to emerge in dialogue both with Puccini’s own works and their myriad historical contexts, and to take seriously the extraordinary affective power they continue to hold over audiences – a feature that even Torrefranca grudgingly acknowledged. Only by engaging with Puccini on those terms can we begin to understand his world, and his continued allure in ours.