Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style

Three Expressive Uses of Convention in Il tabarro

66 An examination of formal and expressive strategies in Puccini’s late operas naturally begins with Il tabarro, not only because this is the opening, anchoring work for the Trittico but also because the piece is a definitive example of Puccini’s strategies in the late works—especially the systematic withholding of the lyric, Romantic style so as to make its presence rare, peculiar, and striking. In Tabarro as in both Angelica and Schicchi, the effect is achieved through Puccini’s use of two contrasting musical languages, one overtly Romantic and the other equally overtly non-Romantic, in an expressive opposition: the Romantic language becomes fully manifest, and thus the work’s level of discourse shifts, once in the piece. In Tabarro this occurs in the first duet for Giorgetta and Luigi, just before the work’s halfway mark, where the shift is cued by the emergence of stylistic traits explored in chapter 2—lyric singing, textural isolation of the melody, harmonic non-functionality, systematic undercutting of dominant function, metric elasticity, suspension of musical time, and others—and, in a far less obvious but equally important strategic maneuver, by Puccini’s invoking the organizational schemata of the nineteenth-century melodrama: the conventions of la solita forma. Puc c ini’s Tr ipt yc h Mosco Carner has observed the parallel in Puccini’s Trittico with the three volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso .1 Even if Gianni Schicchi is the only one of Puccini’s three panthree Expressive Uses of Convention in Il tabarro Trittico.indb 66 7/2/10 10:32 AM Expressive Uses of Convention in il tabarro · 67 els derived directly from Dante, the parallel is apt in that, at least in one reading of the work’s meaning, Puccini’s three move in a generally negative to positive direction, from darkness to light, despair to bliss, hopelessness and total despondency to the optimism of a brighter future .2Dante may have been one source of Puccini’s inspiration for the idea (he even apparently considered a three-part work based entirely on Dante after reading the Divine Comedy); another may have been his interest—widespread in contemporary Italy—in French literature and theater, in particular the Grand Guignol, in which short plays in contrasting styles and genres were commonly joined to make a single evening of theater. Grand Guignol often included a violent horror piece, something sentimental, and a comedy, exactly the grouping in Puccini’s triptych and a generic scheme that integrates a principle from ancient Greek theater, in which a satyr play—a Greek comic form similar to a modern burlesque, with themes of sexuality, drinking, and other forms of raucous entertainment, so named because it includes a chorus of satyrs —served to lighten the atmosphere following a series of tragedies.3 In any case, it is well known that by the time of his starting work on Il tabarro he had been considering the idea of joining together three works of varying tinte for quite some time4—at least since September 1904, in the period of crisis following the disastrous Milan premiere of Madama Butterfly, at which time he apparently considered setting three stories by Maxim Gorky and told Illica “I insist on three colors”;5he wrote to future Casa Ricordi director Carlo Clausetti some years later, on March 19, 1907, during his agonizing search for a new subject: “I am constantly depressed about the [next] libretto. I will no longer do The Woman and the Puppet. Another kind of idea has come to me: a while ago I had considered doing three different sketches (3acts) by Gorky, taken from The Vagabonds and In the Steppes; I had chosen [in September 1904] The Raft and the 26 and One: but I was missing a strong and dramatic third for the evening’s finale, and I couldn’t manage to find it in anything else by Gorky.”6And evidence of a tendency on Puccini’s part toward somewhat unconventional, experimental dramaturgy had surfaced at least as early as La bohème (in which, in Act II, Puccini’s highlighting each character in a series of rapid shifts of focus resembles procedures later adopted in film) and Madama Butterfly (in which the original second act was abnormally long relative to contemporary theatrical norms).7 Trittico.indb 67 7/2/10 10:32 AM 68 · il trittico, turandot, and Puccini’s...