Judge Dennis Davis
Puccini’s 100th Anniversary

Judge Dennis Davis | Puccini’s 100th Anniversary | 07.03.24

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- Good afternoon and evening to everybody. I’m sorry that I’m speaking to you from behind a rather strange Zoom thing, but I’m sitting in my office here in Cape Town and I’ve never managed to get rid of this thing, which was part of the lectures I gave at NYU. But I do apologise for that. Now we are talking about Puccini, and of course, 1924 was when he died. So this is the hundredth anniversary of his death. He was born in 1858, and during the period between the 1880s to the 1920s, he composed some 12 operas. It’s impossible for me today to deal with all 12 operas. I’ve selected three. It seems to me that Puccini deserves another lecture, and I shall negotiate accordingly with Trudy in this connection because there’s some marvellous other music. But I’ll come to the three in present. The interesting aspect about Puccini, although if you think about some of the great operas that he wrote, and the ones I’m concentrating on tonight, “La Boheme,” “Madame Butterfly” and “Turandot,” are amongst the most popular operas really in the world and really are always designed to get huge audiences.

Because he was essentially a 20th century composer, he was composing a time when modernism was becoming a sort of dominant within the aesthetic and cultural field. And in a way, therefore, he’s never really been embraced by musicologists in perhaps the way he might deserve, precisely because his music wasn’t considered to be modern enough. When you think about contemporaries, Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, and even Richard Strauss, to name only opera conductors who were working in the first decades of the 20th century. And so it’s often been very difficult to classify precisely where to put Puccini in the great lexicon of music. He himself was quite coy about where one was supposed to classify himself. He said, for example, on one occasion, “I’m not a Wagnerian. My musical education was in the Italian school.” And then on another occasion, he said, “Although I may be a Germanophile, I have never wanted to show it publicly.” And so the question really has always been, it’s like, how do you evaluate his music in circumstances where he might have been sort of a late entry into the 20th century and therefore unfavourably compared to some of the music which I’ve already spoken about, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, et cetera.

But notwithstanding that, it does seem to me that his contribution is very significant, not just to the box office, which obviously it is. So let us look to start with, and I’ve just, as I say, chosen some music from three operas precisely because I think that illustrates my point. So in 1896, sorry, 1895, Puccini finishes the score for “La Boheme.” In 1896, it premieres in Turin, and in 1900, it’s heard for the first time in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. Now, if you look at it as an early version of Puccini’s work, it is interesting just to, again, circle back to the points that I made earlier with respect to Puccini and an opera in general. And so the point I’m suppose I’m making is that when he wrote this particular opera in 1895, 1896, the real sharp point about it was that it concentrated on poverty, which was quite interesting, was a naturalistic opera actually. So let me explain. Rodolfo, in the opera “La Boheme,” talks about Mimi is a flower withered by poverty. And indeed, the fact that she dies of consumption at that time is particularly regarded as an illness of the poor. And the opera, of course, essentially is framed within terms of her fatal disease.

Now, for opera composers, the idea that you’d actually concentrate on poverty was particularly interesting, because it had neatly been split beforehand between serious opera, which focused on mythological figures, ancient nobility, and comic opera, which depicted clever members of the lower classes who seemed to outwit the idiotic rich counterparts. And you can classify all sorts of opera from Mozart to Wagner, et cetera, within that particular paradigm, composers of a naturalistic opera sought to objectively portray the conditions of ordinary people and particularly the lives of the urban poor. So when it comes to telling the story of poverty and deprivation on the operatic stage, the story by Murger of “La Vie de Boheme” proved to be irresistible to Puccini. And in effect, he therefore, as a sort of major breakthrough, decided to depart from this dichotomy of serious and comic and produce a naturalistic opera which focused very much on the urban poor and the conditions under which they happened to be located. And so there’s much in this opera that we can speak of. I am only going to play for you one very famous part in the first act. And the part I’m going to play is in fact the “Aria of Rudolfo.” And it’s remarkable if you just listen to it.

The way he’s singing gets higher and higher. There’s a kind of intensity in the volume and the nature thereof. It’s almost like, you get towards the end, it’s like a wave of music which engulfs somebody, surging to the end in the affirmation that Rodolfo exhibits towards Mimi and the recording, the clip that I’ve got, I think, is a marvellous recent one by Jonas Kaufmann, the very great contemporary tenor. So let’s listen to him as he sings to Mimi towards the end of the first act of “La Boheme,” which captures for me very much of the very essence of the opera.

[Clip plays]

• A wonderful rendition of that aria by Kaufmann, and gives you a sense, just gives you a feel of Puccini’s style of music, which is, I think, exhibited even more luminously in the next of the operas to which I wish to refer, which is “Madame Butterfly.” Now, in the summer of 1900, Puccini was in London, and he was there because there was going to be production of Tosca at Covent Garden, an opera which I thought very deeply about dealing with in some detail, but given the confines of one second lecture on lockdown, it seemed to me appropriate just to concentrate on a couple. Now, during his visit, he went to see a new play which was on at the Duke of York Theatre, which was David Belasco’s “Madame Butterfly.” And of course, the play concentrated on the Pinkerton, the American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, who sort of marries, in inverted commas, a 15-year-old Japanese girl, Cho-Cho-San, who, of course, is Madame Butterfly. She, of course, believes that the union is a legally binding one, that they legally married. And what is interesting about the play, and Puccini drills down into this, is as a result of her marriage to an American naval officer, she isolates herself from her friends and entire family, extended family.

Now, Pinkerton, on the other hand, in terms of the play, saw this nothing but a game. And of course, in a completely outrageous act of negligence, he abandons her and returns to his Western style of life, only to return at the end of the play because she’s given birth to a son which he wishes to claim. And as a result, in terms of the play, Cho-Cho-San finds herself in the position where the only honourable course of action was to end her life. I’m not sure how much English Puccini knew when he saw the play. Hard to kind of know, but what I do know is that in terms of the biographies that I’ve read, he found this a particularly moving play and one which stimulated him to think through preparing an opera on the basis of the play with the same writers who he had used in “La Boheme” and “Tosca,” Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. And they based their libretto on the Belasco play. And, of course, the interesting aspect about this particular play, opera, of course, is it didn’t start off particularly well. Its premier at La Scala on the 17th of February of 1904, the stellar cast, right, certainly attracted the entire cream of Milan’s high society, but it was a complete flop.

One of the newspapers said, “Last night’s performance at La Scala was not just a failure, it was what one might frankly call a disaster, a catastrophe! The audience, or at least a portion thereof, now thought to have been a hired clerk, was afterwards booed, cackled, made animal noises, and shouted personal insults at Madame Butterfly, played in this, sung in this particular play by Rosina Storchio.” And there was a real kind of criticism about it. But the funny thing was that he revised the opera. He said, “I’ll have a revenge when it’s performed somewhere less vast, less full of hate and passion.” And the second version of this opera, performed but three months later in Brescia, with a huge success, and has been ever since. But it’s interesting to reflect on “Madame Butterfly” now in the 21st century, in a woke world, in a world of multiculturalism, with all of the complexity, and we’ve spoken about this so often on Lockdown University, which is, well, is it not an opera which is a representation of the East through a Western prism on account of its misogyny and the politics which essentially underpins it? And indeed, one musicologist, Susan McClary, wrote in 2006, quote, “I look forward to the day when we can pin this opera up in the museum of strange cultural practises of the past, when we can mount Puccini’s butterfly once and for all as nothing more than historical exhibit.”

Now, it’s not surprising that people reacted to “Madame Butterfly” in that particular regard. But if you think it through more deeply, if you think through the plot more deeply, it does illustrate a level of complexity. Of course, it ends with the death of Madame Butterfly. And of course you can interpret the particular opera as complicit with a standard orientalist discourse, presenting Cho-Cho-San as a victim of Pinkerton’s egregious deception and of the very patriarchal and religious code which dominated Japan at the time that the play was written, and Puccini wrote his opera. But on the other hand, as some commentators have suggested, that it also shows a level of tragic freedom, a hero trapped between the East and the West, who’s been allowed, between the East and the West, conflicted in this regard and exercising in an awful way her freedom to choose death, the freedom to assert a maternal love for her son while sacrificing herself for a future denier to her, her son’s assimilation into a Western race and culture. In other words, it’s a more complicated, multi-textured opera than I think meets the eye from those on the crude woke kind. And it is a remarkable second act in particular, which I want to concentrate on, where it’s almost hard not to cry.

In fact, I don’t see how you can. Every time I listen to this opera, tears well in me, because it is so tragic and the music is so brilliant in being able to capture the tragedy thereof. For example, what we’re going to play now. And I really wonder if anybody who listens to this, and I do appreciate that when I lecture on these through Zoom, the sound isn’t what it should be. But even then, with all those imperfections, when you listen to the humming chorus, towards the end of the opera, in which you know what the result is going to be, that she’s been let down by this deceptive American, that she’s been estranged from her entire family, that she is all alone, and that literally there, with a small son and her loyal assistant Suzuki, you know what’s going to happen. And before it happens, in this well of music, which just captures the pathos thereof, you have the humming chorus. The Metropolitan Opera version here, which we’re going to play is fantastic for a series of reasons. Firstly, you’ve got the chorus off the stage. They’ve got a puppet playing the little child, and sitting next to the little child, the puppet, is, of course, Madame Butterfly and Suzuki. It is, I think, almost unspeakably sad music, and it’s genius to have written it in this particular way, but let’s listen to it.

[Clip plays]

What is so interesting for me about this is the touch of having the puppet, little boy, the mother’s lap, the love for the mother has with a little boy, and you know what’s going to happen. And she’s isolated completely from the world. No words can describe that. And he uses the humming chorus to encapsulate all the tragedy of this particular opera without a word. I think it is truly one of the iconic pieces in all of opera. And it’s kind of hard not to have a dry eye when you finish listening to it. Now, of course, that’s not the only part of the opera which makes one incredibly sad, because towards the end of the opera just thereafter, we have the famous aria by Madame Butterfly. It is an incredibly difficult piece of music to actually sing, and sing well, because what has to happen with this is this is her essentially dreaming, to start with, dreaming, that Pinkerton will return, that she can see the future with Pinkerton, that all of the vicissitudes that she’s encountered over the period of the opera to which we have listened, it will end well.

And so she has to start in this kind of dreamy way. And then she has to engage, through the music, through her voice, with the intense love that she still feel this man. And then a sense of longing and ultimately a sense of hope. And the way in which that is to be sung, in a sense, has to capture all the nuances of these particular emotions which go into the opera. Now, there are many, many versions of this which one could choose. Many people think that the best version of all was Victoria de los Angeles with Jussi Bjorling, my favourite tenor, but that’s another matter, in a remarkable recording many, many years ago. But perhaps it would be unwise not to choose for us to listen to the version of Maria Callas at her very best in the 1950s. I think this was the production where Nicolai Gedda, marvellous Pinkerton in this was also there with Fancurrion conducting. We are going to listen to Maria Callas, I think, capture all of the emotions that I’ve indicated in this marvellous rendition of the aria of Madeleine Butterfly right towards the end.

[Clip plays]

Extraordinary capturing of the pathos of the whole opera. And it’s difficult to know which is the better version. Many people prefer the Victoria de los Angeles version, which is absolutely magnificent, I should say. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the early Callas. I must plead guilty to that. So the last opera that I want to talk about, of course, is “Turandot,” which, of course, is his last opera. Started in 1921, we know that he never finished it entirely, because he died before it could be concluded. In many ways, because the opera, which will come to us known because of “Nessun Dorma,” which has become just sort of, you know, operatic hit, probably thanks to Luciano Pavarotti, but more in moment. But the plot is so, I mean, quite ridiculous, really. It has a captivating, man-hating princess, Turandot, who requires her suitors to solve three riddles. The cost of failure is death, which many have already suffered. But because of so-called irresistible allure, despite warnings from his elders, this fugitive prince now decides to throw his lot in the ring, as it were.

Manages to answer all of the enigmas in this wonderfully staged ceremony, which of course is of great joy to any opera designer. Horrified at the prospect of now yielding to him, she prepares to take her own life. He then propounds a riddle of his own. He will die if she can discover his name by daybreak. And whilst you know the various versions, at the end of the day, his name is ultimately revealed. But she’s now startled by the depth of his love, embraces him, renounces a vicious past, and all ends well. It isn’t exactly what you’d call, you know, the most subtle or nuanced of plots. And yet in so many ways, it has a number of remarkable features, because, particularly the music is an extraordinary combination of 20th century music, which I think is where he definitely comes into play in relation to our earlier comment, and oriental influences, ranging from parallel fourth, the pentatonic scales, to bi-tonality, tone clusters, all of which he uses in this particular opera. And we also know that eight of the principal themes in this opera are authentic temple music, national hymns, and folk songs derived from China.

So it’s an opera which, to a considerable extent, does engage with the East in quite substantial a manner. And notwithstanding, therefore, the particular plot itself, it’s an opera which, of course, has captured the imagination for a number of reasons. I’ll come back to “Nessun Dorma” in a moment. Puccini himself is on record about talking about this opera at some length in various letters. He said in 1921 that the duet particularly must be grand, bold, unforeseen, cling to the fantastic, to the limit, weaving something great, audacious, unexpected, and not leave things simply as they are, must be a great duet. These two beings who stand, so to speak, outside the world are transformed into human beings through love. And this love must take possession of everybody on the stage in an orchestral peroration. And, in fact, many people suggest that one of the reasons that Puccini himself was so attracted to this opera was because of his own long relationship with Elvira Gemignani. I’m probably mispronouncing it.

A married name, a married woman, with whom he had this long relationship in which this whole conception of love, of course, got into his head, because he was somewhat of a hedonist. But the point about the story, of course, is that he never finished it, because in 1924 he consulted a series of specialists who issued a diagnosis of cancer after he’d had various pains in throat, and he then wrote that he was trying to finish off the last part of the final act, but he never succeeded. The treatment consisted of a course of X-rays, radium needles inserted into the tumour for a week. First stage went well. On the fourth day of enduring the needles, he suffered a heart attack and died the next morning. So the opera was never finished by then. He did leave some 36 pages of notes in relation to how it should end, but it was basically concluded by Franco Alfano.

He was an Italian composer, and he was being subjected to extraordinary levels of criticism for the fact that, you know, it wasn’t particularly good. Significant in this particular connection, when the gala premiere took place at La Scala on April the 25th, 1926, conducted by the most famous conductor in the world at the time, Arturo Toscanini, I might add that it was such a major event that the dictator Mussolini was to attend, but he cancelled when Toscanini refused to open the whole event before the opera with a fascist anthem. And what happens is that the music which Puccini had written basically ends when Liu, the slave, who is so loyal to Calaf, and who herself, of course, has some beautiful music to sing during the opera. When she dies, that was the end of Puccini’s composition. And Toscanini very significantly ended the performance after Liu’s cortege leaves the stage. And he addressed the audience saying something to the effect that here the opera ends.

• Oh, yeah.

• Here the composer died. And effectively, therefore, for Toscanini, the last part of the opera didn’t really fit with the whole of the balance, and therefore the characters aren’t, do not kind of, are not concluded in a more nuanced fashion. Probably right. But it is interesting that the greatest conductor of the time decided to end the opera at the very point that Puccini had died and therefore had not quite ended the opera. Of course, the opera is most famous because,

• Thanks for all your effort.

• Sorry, I’m getting a noise coming through. I don’t know from whom. The opera ends, it doesn’t end, but the opera is most famous, of course, for “Nessun Dorma,” which has been the aria which has made the opera in many instances. It’s curious for a number of reasons, this. Firstly, we all know that when “Nessun Dorma” ends, after the final phrase is, as we should just see, when I play this, it kind of translates right into the next part of the opera with a sort of harmonic transition. And so very often conductors are not quite sure what to do here. For example, there’s a famous version by Stokowski who waits for the ovation, ovation of “Nessun Dorma,” and then he continued.

So it’s always been problematic. The second thing about this opera, this aria, which is so interesting, is that the penultimate note is a high B, but it’s risen in a manner which we call a grace note, supposed to be really quite short. But there are very few tenors who can resist not extending that high B. And in the version that we are going to hear, the tenor holds it for a full six seconds. And that tenor is Luciano Pavarotti. And the 1972-73 recording that Pavarotti did with Joan Sutherland as Turandot and Montserrat Caballe as Liu and conducted by Zubin Mehta, many people regard as the best of all. But you’re going to have to go some distance before you hear a better “Nessun Dorma” with Pavarotti at his absolute prime. And here it is.

• No, no, this is not the one I want. Sorry, sorry.

• [Assistant] Sorry, Dennis, this is the only other clip that I have.

• This is the one I was not going to use. I want to use the last clip.

• [Assistant] I don’t have a fifth clip. This is the only clip.

• Oh, no, there was a clip I sent.

• [Assistant] I’m sorry. It didn’t make it into the presentation.

• Well, it was confirmed that it was supposed to be there. Tip five. Not there.

• [Assistant] No. This is, as you can see, there’s nothing else.

• Let me just play. I’m just going to play then one or two. Well, just play this in. It’s, this is, I had sent the Pavarotti clip, and it had been confirmed. It doesn’t matter. I’m just going to play. You can play the Domingo version and then one or two the others just towards the end, just so that we can end there. I’m so sorry to the audience. This is Domingo.

[Clip plays]

Okay, you can. Oh, sorry. Let’s just listen to Domingo. Oh, don’t worry. So just to give you who they were, the first was Placido Domingo. The second was Yonghoon Lee. Third was Mario Del Monaco. Fourth was Rudy Park, and the fifth was Franco Corelli. There were 14 of these, but I’m not going to play them all. So that, I’m sorry. I had sent, and I’m terribly sorry about the ‘72 version of Pavarotti. What’s extraordinary about that, that B he holds for 6 seconds. Quite extraordinary. Longer than almost anybody else, I think. And if you listen to it, and I would recommend that you listen to it if you want to, it’s the, by far and away, in my view, the best of the lot, but there we are.

So that really is what I wanted to talk about this evening, those three operas. I think you’d agree, I hope you’d agree, that these are extraordinary pieces of music, despite the fact that he’s perhaps not regarded as a front rank for all the reasons I’ve mentioned. And I am going to hope to do a return to him with some of the other operas, in particular “Tosca,” which I think is well worth an analysis all of its own, and one or two of the others.

But I hope you enjoyed the music in this gloomy period. It’s very nice to listen to something so beautiful. Thank you very much to all of you.