Puccini: His Life and Works (review)

'It has taken more than a hundred years for Puccini to be admitted to the ranks of the Master Musicians Series': thus begins Julian Budden's new study of Puccini's life and works (p. vii). Such an oversight comes, at first glance, as a surprise, for as every shrewd opera house knows, staging a Puccini opera is guaranteed to boost box office receipts. However, it is the very popularity of Puccini's operas that has until recently discouraged serious musicological criticism, leaving him very much on the fringes of the academic canon. The rot set in during Puccini's own time, when influential critics of the day such as Fausto Torrefranca and Ildebrando Pizzetti, keen to posit themselves as heralds of a bold new era, derided his works not only as musically insignificant but as the morally corrupt and corrupting products of a decadent, bourgeois society.

Later scholars have been no less dismissive, led most famously by Joseph Kerman, who in 1956 attacked Puccini's 'coarseness of sensitivity' and 'café-music banality', and labelled Tosca a 'shabby little shocker' (Opera as Drama, 1956). Kerman was operating within a long-standing tradition of Anglo-American hostility towards Italian opera, a genre then regarded by some scholars as vastly inferior to Austro-German instrumental music. Even when Verdi's music began to gain critical respectability during the 1980s, Puccini's works remained objects of contempt in musicological circles. And when Puccini wasn't derided, he was often conspicuous by his absence, failing to merit more than a cursory mention in many supposedly 'comprehensive' studies of twentieth-century music, an omission that Richard Taruskin has recently lamented in his monumental The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford, 2005). But of course in recent decades the musicological discipline has undergone a radical transformation, and now that journals are happy to juxtapose articles on the Spice Girls with those on Beethoven, we have reached a position where Puccini has ended up looking decidedly highbrow. The publication of Linda B. Fairtile's Giacomo Puccini: A Guide to Research (New York and London, 1999), two journals dedicated to Puccini's operas, and a spate of recent articles which approach the works from a variety of different critical perspectives testifies to the fact that Puccini's suitability for scholarly treatment is no longer in doubt.

Evidently eager to make amends for musicology's long neglect of Puccini, however, Budden has produced a doorstop of a book, which at 527 pages surpasses his own earlier study of Verdi by over a hundred (Verdi (London, 1985), rev. edn. 1993). Perhaps even more significantly, Budden's book is more than 200 pages longer than the recent Master Musicians volume on Bach (Malcolm Boyd, Bach (3rd edn., Oxford, 2000)): quite a statement about a not-so-long-ago belittled composer. But this is very much Puccini's moment, with publishers perhaps mindful of the profits to be gained from marking the centenaries of his most celebrated works. Budden's book has followed hot on the heels of two other surveys of Puccini's career: Michele Girardi's Puccini: His International Art (Chicago and London, 2000) and Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's Puccini: A Biography (Boston, 2002). Serious English-language studies of Puccini's life and works are, it would seem, rather like buses: nothing since Mosco Carner's Puccini: A Critical Biography (London, 1958, 2nd edn. 1974, 3rd edn. 1992), and then three come along at once.

Each of the recent Puccini studies takes a slightly different approach, with the result that there is ample room in the market for all three. Phillips-Matz's book is very much a study of Puccini the man, replete with human interest and very little discussion of the works. Girardi's Puccini: His International Art, on the other hand, approaches the operas from an analytical perspective, and is more for the opera specialist than the casual browser. Budden's book falls somewhere midway between the two, taking an integrated approach...