What was Puccini like?
By: Noah Bradley
Tags: History, Italy, Classical Music, Music, Opera

Puccini in 1924: the year of the composer’s death

Short Biography

Lucca, embedded in the Tuscan hills; renaissance architecture and Puccini. Born there on the 22nd of December 1858, the roots of a quintessentially Italian style are unobscured. Puccini, being of a long line of Luccan church musicians was put to work as an organist at the age of 14, but did not engage with the traditionally insipid catholic style. Instead, discovering the wonders of Verdi upon walking 20 kilometres to his local opera house in Pisa, his dispassion thawed.

Puccini studied composition in Milan from 1880 to 1883. As his first project, he wrote an opera: Le Villi, for a local competition, did not win, did not get mentioned, but was nonetheless approached with staging it by the publisher Giulio Ricordi.

In 1884, he eloped with the already married Elvira Gemignani (née Bonturi), a fellow Luccan.

Elvira was said to be a set, jealous woman- in parallel to Tosca (though without the concordant set of murderous instincts towards Roman police chiefs). In 1891, she heard neighbourhood rumours that Puccini was declaiming himself bored of her. A series of arguments opened up in response. Though Puccini publicly cheated on her later, he paradoxically tried to keep it under wraps from her, but not the entire rest of the public.

After writing Edgar in 1888: a second opera and a second stinker, he finally hit it with the public in 1892 with Manon Lescaut.

Then the behemoths of Bohème, Tosca and Butterfly.

During his lifetime, he amassed a fortune of around 100 million in today’s money, spending it on fast cars; De Dion-Boutons and Fiats, amassing speeding tickets, and a wide portfolio of houses, many around Lucca.

After Il Trittico, his final work was Turandot, which he died before completing after a failed operation for throat cancer.

His Character

Puccini, as his music, was of intense complexity and contradictions. Though the choice of opera was no doubt an inevitably of his nation, training and exposure, the genre seems to suit him uniquely: the incessant returning and re-returning of the same motif; within it uncertainty liberated into highest exaltation, breaking away into shrieks of despair.

Opera is historically the occupation of the middle and upper classes. Given his life dedication to it, you would assume that they were his favourite people. In fact, he was blasé with high society mainly through his distaste for pretension, large social situations, and the urban in general. “He always felt constrained and ill at ease among the bourgeoisie, even in artistic circles”, would “pant for the fragrant woodlands”, “loved hunting and walking alone” and “simply could not bear to live anywhere but the country” as was said.

Puccini, though working for the northern cities, predominantly did not work in them. His primary residence was in Torre del Lago: a sleepy seaside town near Lucca, on the other side backing onto a typically northern lake. Part of his comfort in the country lay in the absence of the pressure of the cities. Puccini “bit his nails during moments of nervous impatience or tormenting doubt”. Speaking publicly “he found the greatest difficulty through stammering”.

Unlike his contemporaries, or indeed most, he prefered to ride on consecutive waves of inspiration, only to sit in idleness until another came along. Tosca took 11 years to write, though half of it constituted artistic clashes. He had an “insuperable tendency to speak his mind.”

Giuseppe Giacosa, his librettist/poet, nicknamed Buddha by him in a quip relating to an abandoned opera project of theirs was introduced to him, along with the partner by Ricordo. Giacosa was some years his senior: always loved by Puccini like an uncle. He would write the words, whilst Luigi Illica worked mainly on the structuring of scenes and dramatic touches: like the Gavotta in Bohème being interrupted by Musetta and the sick Mimí, rather starting with her bedridden, as the composer insisted. Puccini’s relationship with Illica was not comfortable. They liked each other, yet would inexorably digress into arguing, often questioning the other’s artistic validity. Giacosa, one might call mediator over librettist. Given, it is unsurprising that their working relationship did not survive Giacosa’s death.

Much of the time, supposedly quintessentially Puccini dramatic irony is quintessentially Illca. What people often forget about his operas is that they are not only the labour of one man.

Much of the time, supposedly quintessentially Puccini dramatic irony is quintessentially Illca. What people often forget about his operas is that they are not only the labour of one man.

In the evenings, Puccini would compose in the parlour, usually in the society of his “friends, simple men in an atmosphere of unpretentious jollity.” “In such company, he would feel quite at ease”. “He almost always kept his hat on, even in the house, and while working at the piano or his writing-table.” Suddenly having thought of something, Puccini would stop his other task, and then rush to the piano. His teachers in the conservatory emphasised his laziness though it can also be construed as thinking time.

In 1920, Puccini visited Vienna for the German Language premiere of Il Trittico, or rather “Das Triptychon”.

Here is Richard Specht’s account of him:

“He was now resting in an arm-chair, a little weary with a happy sparkle in his fine, dark eyes, veiled from time to time by their heavy lids, and with a pleasant smile on his fastidious mouth, often drawn into an expression of melancholy” “It was a face that need not necessarily have belonged to an artist, though it was unquestionably that of a man of breeding, with an active brain, easily kindled sensibilities, and an eager receptivity, at once shy and conscious

of his own worth, full of strong vitality, sensuous curiosity, and

an instinctive repugnance for all that is vulgar; a man, too, in

whom primitive, popular elements were combined with a subtle

culture, an unconstrained naivety with the acquired exterior- of

a man of the world and a dash of eternal youthfulness that made

an enchanting mixture.”

Puccini spoke French well, but his German was about as good as his English. As a result, he had the same meal the whole time in Vienna because the only words he knew in German were “Koteletts mit Kartoffeln”

There “he was most anxious to acquaint himself more thoroughly with Arnold Schoenberg’s work.” Puccini held a healthy appetite for “present-day musicians” speaking of “Stravinsky and Debussy, who, as he always freely acknowledged, had exerted a decisive influence on his own harmonic and melodic style”. The truth was however that it was Wagner that had the most decisive impact on him. Despite his “unbounded admiration of Beethoven”, his favourite work, was forever Tristan und Isolde.

In Vienna, Specht said of him to have remarked:

“Ah! How hard is my life! And yet to many I seem happy. But my successes? They pass away, and there remains little. They are ephemeral things. Life slips away and descends swiftly towards the abyss.”

By this, Puccini probably did not declare personal unhappiness, but rather a creeping occasional unhappiness at the nihilistic nature of things. His music is full of genuine feeling, eminent among them is melancholy.

It is quite contradictory for maybe the most sincere composer about love to have cheated on his own wife so enduringly. Puccini maintained throughout his life that he loved Elvira dearly, so it is hard to see how he was able to turn a blind eye to the effect that it was having on her. In 1909, spurred on by intense paranoia, Elvira hounded their poor servant girl for having an affair with him, despite evidence to the contrary. The girl eventually committed suicide as a result, leading, as you can imagine, to an unsettled dynamic, eventually a separation. Her reconciliation was an uneasy exchange for legal assistance against the girl’s family.

In his defence, Puccini’s lovers were never chosen shallowly; they were intelligent cultural people. “I need a friend but do not have one,” he said. It is evident that Elvira did not satisfy him fully in some intellectual way. Though they were close, there was a lack of understanding between the two of them, somewhat driven by her comparatively low immagination. Puccini would “exactly calculate and weigh every accent, the value of every note and every nuance of timbre”, all in the pursuit of a point in creation where his sensibilities would no longer bug him over deficiency. His last words were concerning her: “Elvira- poor woman”. Leave no doubt as to where his heart lay.