Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style

Introduction: Hearing Puccini

1 This book has grown out of a deep fascination with the experience of Puccini’s operas: the ways the music on the stage moves the listeners in the theater. Like many commentators on Puccini from his own lifetime and more recently, I have always found in his music a contrast between the new, or unfamiliar, and the traditional (in the sense of stylistically Romantic), or familiar. This feature of Puccini was clear to me from my earliest experiences with this music—the times when I first discovered opera, attended Puccini productions, or listened to recordings—what I anticipated and what I heard were often two very different things. As a scholar, I found this frustrating; it was a feature of Puccini’s work that was easy to hear but not at all easy to explain, and much of my work in opera analysis since has been devoted to trying to account for this discrepancy . My thinking on the subject has been heavily influenced by the work of Carolyn Abbate, Gary Tomlinson, Lawrence Kramer, and the captivating work of French psychoanalyst Michel Poizat, each of whom has addressed, in different theoretical contexts, the kinds of experiences I had while listening to Puccini.1 One of the most useful ideas in this literature for describing analytically what I heard, and thus one that underlies a considerable portion of this book, is that of opera as uncanny. This is the idea that part of opera’s fascination lies in its capacity to produce an objectified singing voice—a voice heard not simply as sound, but also as a tangible object of fascination—and, moreover, in how the art form exploits this capacity by overtly inviting listeners to aurally revel in the singers on the stage. And while this book is not overtly semiotic, Introduction Hearing Puccini Trittico.indb 1 7/2/10 10:32 AM 2 · il trittico, turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style I have been heavily influenced by the musical semiotics of Robert Hatten , in which marked oppositions of style types, genres, and topics—as well as expressive manipulations of conventional, background formal schemata—are the tools with which composers create meaning in music. Puccini seemed to me a master of the musical phenomena these writers were describing. As a listener, my attention gravitated naturally toward moments when I could hear, as a result of striking contrasts in the musical language, the composer turning attention in the music toward the singing voice. The voice became objectified in these moments, precisely the moments in which I also found the music to be the most traditional and the most familiar—in the sense that this was the music I expected when I came to the opera house or put on the recording. This was no coincidence, of course, and indeed all these impressions of Puccini —his music as a mix of new and old, as familiar and unfamiliar, and as music that shifts the focus of attention—are related. All stem from Puccini’s strategically mixing a traditionally Italian operatic language with a compositional approach that borrows from contemporary European musical trends. The method is strategic because Puccini does more than simply mix the two styles: he systematically withholds until pivotal dramatic junctures the most traditional of his musical tokens in order to heighten their effect on his listening audience. As a result, the most traditionally Italian lyric music in these works becomes rhetorically charged, or marked, so that its appearance forces a shift of listeners’ attention away from the music as music per se and onto the performer’s presence on the stage, and, more specifically, the performer’s voice. Anyone who loves this music is likely familiar with this remarkable effect. As Poizat has suggested, it can trigger irrational, somewhat hyperbolic emotional responses—often physically manifested in tears; it also accounts in part for Puccini’s reputation as a sentimentalist—a tugger of heart strings. This effect shapes much of what I have to say here. This book offers analyses of Puccini’s last four operas as a lens through which to view what I consider his late style: the works that most clearly exhibit this strategic approach to incorporating contrasting musical styles. This approach is evident throughout Puccini’s oeuvre, but, as the result of an evolution I will discuss more thoroughly in the epilogue, it becomes the governing aesthetic in the three one-acts of Il Trittico.indb 2 7/2/10 10:32 AM [18.190.153...