Last Acts: The Operas of Puccini and His Italian Contemporaries from Alfano to Zandonai (review)

Last Acts: The Operas of Puccini and His Italian Contemporaries from Alfano to Zandonai. James Keolker. Napa, Calif.: Opera Companion Publications, 2000 586 pages, $29.95.

Verismo composers, long pushed to the fringes of the repertory and neglected by scholars, are finally attracting serious attention. Following up Hans-Joachim Wagner's 1999 Fremde Welten: Die Oper des italienischen Verismo (Stuttgart: Metzger), James Keolker has written an ambitious study of the operas of the so-called young Italian school. Last Acts, as Keolker's subtitle indicates, surveys "the operas of Puccini and his Italian contemporaries from Alfano to Zandonai." Unlike Wagner, who focused on Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Giordano, and Cilea, Keolker aims for a more comprehensive study of the operas from the post-Verdi period. In nearly 600 pages, he studies fifty-six works by sixteen composers. Keolker brings admirable dedication to this challenging project, but his survey turns out to be frustratingly uneven. The author provides straightforward plot synopses and simple musical descriptions of such rarities as Catalani's Edmea, Mascagni's Lodoletta, and Zandonai's Conchita, but he proves to be a rather dull tour guide through this fascinating musical landscape. Keolker writes without stylistic flair and fails to delve deeply in his prosaic musical analyses. Misspellings and factual errors also mar his work.

Keolker reveals his strengths and faults in the opening chapter, aptly called "Setting the Scene." In ten densely written pages, he provides some interesting background material. The title, explains the author, refers to Italian operas that were composed before World War II convulsed the musical world. He rightly calls this era "a time of imaginative innovation and experimentation" (p. 1). He also notes the larger social and artistic trends that influenced Italian opera at the end of the nineteenth century, from industrialization and advances in communication, to the emergence of photography, films, and recordings. Italian composers, he adds, set librettos derived from such diverse sources as German Romanticism, Italian decadence, and French literary works to British novels and oriental themes. So far, so good. But once Keolker begins to discuss musical issues, his judgments raise questions that demand fuller explanation. "Musical styles both within and without Italy were also changing," he points out (p. 5). But Keolker never shows how they changed. Instead he resorts to bald generalities: "Debussy, Fauré, and Satie were developing distinct musical vocabularies, as were Janácek and Bartók, Mahler and Richard Strauss, whose influences were soon matched by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg" (p. 5). Throughout this long book, Keolker continues to rely on such generalities to describe how opera developed during the verismo era. He points out that composers shifted from rigid aria structures to freer forms of arioso, which he credits to "musical fragmentation" caused by the subordination of music to the words (p. 5). He fails to point out that, influenced by Wagner and late Verdi, verismo composers merged recitative and aria to write in larger, more continuous forms.

This chapter also reveals the mistakes that repeatedly confound Keolker's efforts. He claims Mascagni's Guglielmo Ratcliffe (sic) was "inspired" by a Walter Scott novel (p. 4). In fact, Heinrich Heine's drama inspired Guglielmo Ratcliff. He also credits Russian novels as a source of Giordano's Fedora rather than the play by Sardou. He lists both Zandonai's Giuliette [sic] e Romeo and Mascagni's La cena delle beffe as the results of renewed interest in "Italian medievalism" (p. 4), though both operas are set in the Renaissance. He also misspells the French term japonaiserie ("japanaiserie," p. 6). Mistakes like these, some more glaring than others, undercut this earnest and sincere but dully written book.

Keolker treats fifty-six operas in fifty-five chapters (Ferruccio Busoni's Arlecchino and Turandot are bundled together). Relying on a basic structural formula, he provides background about each opera and then combines a plot...