Opera is often dismissed as a moribund art form. The most recent frequently performed works
were composed around the middle of the twentieth century, and audiences even
for the established repertoire are in steady decline. In 2015 the public perception of opera is
far more restricted than it was two generations ago. But insofar as people have heard of opera at
all, they have heard of Puccini. The
heartstring-tugging, ‘the girl dies’ sentimentalism of La Bohème and Madama
Butterfly, and the disaster-prone, corpse-strewn melodrama of Tosca: along with Carmen’s bullfighter, and some vague idea that Wagner was a Nazi
who wrote portentous epics, this is roughly the opera-shaped shadow that
remains in popular consciousness.
How did it come to this?
In his time, Puccini was blamed for almost single-handedly bringing on
the decline of great opera; now he is about all that is left of it. In what follows I want to suggest that if
‘crowd-pleaser’ Puccini is still pleasing the crowds like no one else a hundred
years later, it might be because he’s actually some good, and that the frenzied
critical attacks on him in his time and since, rather than his operas, were
symptoms of the problems in ‘Western’ culture that began about then and are
still with us. The groundwork of
analysing Puccini’s critical reception has been done by Alexandra Wilson in her
book The Puccini Problem (Cambridge,
2007). A vigorous case for the
‘rehabilitation’ of Puccini has been made by William Berger in Puccini Without Excuses (New York,
2005). Wilson’s book is specialized and
Berger’s is essentially a popular guide, though with very perceptive critical
sections. I want to try to bridge the gap
between the two, and add some context, and also some polemic, within a briefer
compass.
Puccini worked at exactly the time that the Romantic era in
the arts sputtered to a close (dated 1910 by Virginia Woolf!), to be replaced
by Modernism. His crime was essentially
to continue to be a Romantic when the arbiters of taste were in the process of
decreeing that something different was needed.
He was not a composer in the Verdi/Wagner league, but he was a good and
effective one; and better composers than he, who worked in symphonic music
rather than opera, are regarded as problematic and rejected by some
high-and-dry critics for much the same reasons as he is: Mahler and
Rachmaninov, for instance. They, too,
are accused of an over-ripe Romanticism that shades into sentimentalism and
hysteria, but arguably all they did was to continue to insist on a lush style
of beauty and frank emotionalism when taste demanded that beauty be pared down
into austerity, or eliminated altogether, and emotion be understated. They continued moving further in a direction
from which dominant taste had veered away.
But why had taste changed direction like this? Did it ‘have’ to?
WHO KILLED ROMANTICISM?
There is no agreed definition of Romanticism, the artistic
style that flourished in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of its features, however, was the placing
of a high value on naturalness, spontaneity and unbridled emotion in art, as a
reaction to the ‘classicism’ – the control, symmetry and rationality – of the
Enlightenment period. And it in turn
suffered its own reaction, but cultural historians argue about the reasons, and
will continue to do so.
Romanticism, especially in music, may simply have reached
the end of its natural life span. ‘Every art form increases in complexity,
ornamentation, and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style
is fully exploited. Attention then turns
to the style itself, at which point the style gives way to a new one.’ (Pinker,
The Blank Slate, p. 412) ‘Highly wrought’ becomes ‘over-wrought’, and
the wise artist will realise that the seam has been worked out and will strike
out in a new direction.
But the life cycle of Romanticism was also affected by
socio-economic and political factors.
With increasing prosperity in the late nineteenth century, with mass
production, wider education and higher disposable incomes allowing an ever
greater proportion of the population access to art, all kinds of tensions
arose. During the climactic flowering of
any artistic style, the barriers between the ‘elite’ and the ‘masses’ can
temporarily be broken down. Thus it was
with the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe, the plays of Shakespeare, and,
in Risorgimento Italy, the operas of
Verdi, whose combination of powerful immediacy and technical subtlety made them
appealing to rich and poor alike. But
almost at once, when the climax was passed, Romantic art was seen to be losing
its spontaneity, its authenticity, and to be in danger of being ‘commodified’
for a mass audience. There were
anxieties that the ‘vulgar’ tastes of the ‘masses’ would corrupt art, or,
conversely, that bad art would ‘manipulate’ the masses into stupor or
fanaticism. It was thought necessary to
purify art, to purge it of anything that could have a ‘cheap’, automatic,
unthinking appeal, to recover a fresh way of seeing the world by getting rid of
unnecessary elaboration, sentiment and if necessary, the notion of beauty itself. Thus Modernism was born.
The directions taken by Modernism were heavily influenced by
two theorists in particular, Marx and Freud – an unholy duo both apparently
determined to cut Art down to size.
Romanticism had enthroned art, in place of religion, as the supreme
repository of value for humanity, the means to apprehend what was true and
important in life. Marx and Freud
between them tried their best to strip away these claims. For Marxists, all that matters is economic
justice, to be achieved through class struggle.
Power is what counts: there is no transcendent, disinterested art. If art is not actively attacking a corrupt
social order, it is implicated in supporting it. Revolution in the arts was supposed to mirror
and encourage revolution in society, to speak directly to the oppressed poor,
bypassing the parasitic ‘bourgeoisie’, those self-satisfied consumers of
commodified art, and to lead to the establishment of a socialist utopia. Romanticism’s increasing association with
nationalism, racial theory, and then fascism, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, made it even more a natural target for Marxists. For Freudians, meanwhile, art is prima facie nothing but wishful
thinking, the attempt to compensate for the artist’s or society’s unhealed
psychic wounds and neuroses, without addressing their roots. In an ideal world, art would be unnecessary:
‘the perfectly adjusted organism is silent’.
Throughout the twentieth century, creators of literary fiction, poetry,
music, visual art of all kinds, have laboured under this dual denial of the
legitimacy of their work. Art must
criticize society, or art must clinically promote psychic ‘health’ and probe
‘sickness’; art must subordinate itself to these aims, or it has no right to
exist.
Populist historians like John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) somewhat cynically see the whole Modernist tendency as an attempt
by the intellectual elite to recover its privileged position – dependent on scarcity
value – by making art more ‘difficult’, even while its stated aim was to abolish
elites and empower the ‘masses’. The
failure of high modernist art to appeal to the ‘masses’ was noted, and as a
response, in the 1960s and after, modernism gave way to ‘post-modernism’. The very idea of absolute standards in art was
abandoned: instead there was supposed to be an infinity of different
perspectives, none leading to an objective ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. This
apparently total relativism, however, coexists to this day with a residual Marxist
belief in the value of overturning the established order. Perspectives other than those of the ‘white
European male’ and the political establishment are preferred. Rather than trying to wean the masses off
their dependence on mass-produced junk, post-modernists study and, to an
extent, celebrate the junk – the more
sensationalist, shallow and amoral the better – in the hope of so accentuating
the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ as to accelerate its collapse. So, since the 1960s, the attempt to educate
the public in ‘good’ art has largely been given up, if not actively sabotaged,
by the elites (educational establishment, broadcasters), with the dire
consequences for audiences of classical music and opera that we are all
familiar with.
In this context, we can understand why critics have been so set against Puccini ever since his time. His career coincided with the
exhaustion of the Romantic style.
Critics held him personally to blame for the decline, rather than
commending him for doing what he could to find new possibilities within the
style. There followed the Modernist
ascendancy, in which Puccini was judged and found wanting by Marxist/Freudian
standards, as (a) bourgeois and (b) unhealthy.
Post-modernism to some extent rediscovered Puccini, but on its own terms:
it approves of his perceived ‘decadence’ and trashiness, his supposed contribution to the rise of moral relativism
and the decline of absolute standards in art.
I think this attitude is pernicious: with friends like these, Puccini
hardly needs enemies.
HISTORICISM AND HINDSIGHT?
DECADENCE OR ASPIRATION?
Puccini is characterised as a composer of ‘decadence’. I shall get on to the idea that his actual
music was ‘decadent’ in a minute. But in
the wider, social and political sense, we need to look at the notion that
Europe in the 1890s was a ‘decadent’ place.
The idea was born at the time, and has been endorsed, with hindsight, by
most people since. The fact that Europe
was unable to resolve its political tensions and that the cataclysms of two
world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi and Fascist ascendancy were on
the horizon, seems to confirm the idea all too emphatically. Colonialism and trade wars set the European
powers head to head; national unification in Germany and Italy, rather than
being the hoped-for answer to their peoples’ problems, brought troubles of its
own. In the arts, as the noble struggles
for freedom seemed to be over, Romanticism had nowhere left to go but to extremes
– whether of aestheticism, nationalism, or ‘depravity’. However, if we read the claims that were made
at the time, it becomes clear that contemporary perceptions of ‘decadence’ were
perhaps one part serious diagnosis to three parts moral panic – the panic that
seems to overtake people when faced with comparative luxury, comfort, the removal of threats and the presence of
confusing new opportunities. And what
led inevitably to war was the moral panic, rather than the ‘decadence’ itself.
Prophets of doom back to the Old Testament have seen
excessive prosperity, and the conspicuous greed and inequity that go with it,
as the inevitable precursor to plagues and cataclysms. On this reading, Marx’s Kapital is perhaps the most intellectually respectable and
influential ‘The End Is Nigh’ tract ever written. With Marx as their starting point,
intellectuals throughout the twentieth century were impelled to fit past and
present events into a pattern which they expected to be completed in a certain
way – by the collapse of industrial capitalism, and/or its transformation into
the dictatorship of the proletariat, or perhaps a ‘planned’ Modernist world
society guided by technocrats (H.G. Wells).
That the pattern was not, in fact, so completed within the expected
time-frame, and that industrial (and post-industrial) capitalism has thus far
picked itself up from its successive crises and staggered, or swaggered, on –
this leaves the leftist intellectual establishment aggrieved, but still a long
way away from changing its collective mind.
But one thing is clear: that the global bourgeoisie, that class that was
just beginning to loom so large in late nineteenth-century Europe, has so far
gone from strength to strength. There
may be clouds on its horizon, but so far, everyone wants to be part of it. As a bourgeois composer writing for a
bourgeois audience, perhaps Puccini should be characterised as being on the
side of growth, rather than ‘decadence’.
The idea of ‘decadence’, indeed, is subjective. What seems like ‘decadence’ from the point of
view of an aristocracy, an institution, or an intellectual elite that is being
elbowed aside, or seeing its standards diluted, may seem like something quite
different to the upwardly mobile.
Greater disposable incomes; more widespread literacy and
education; improved public health; greater religious and sexual tolerance; more
independence for women, and the beginnings of women’s suffrage; an increased
audience for the arts, and the possibilities of expanding the range of cultural
‘products’ on offer, into the infinite middle ground between the ‘aristocratic’
and the ‘popular’ – all these changes provided opportunities for an artist like
Puccini, and many of them, which even those on the Left regard as obvious
improvements now, were precisely what pundits of the time decried as
‘decadence’. If we note the extent to
which Modernism had its roots in moral panic, we may be less inclined to
dismiss artists whose work does not conform to the Modernists’ preconceived arc
of historical development.
‘REALISM’ AND RETREAT?
It is an extraordinary experience, now, to read the earliest
reviews of Puccini’s operas in the musical press of the time and consider what
he was up against. The critics who wrote
those reviews had become habituated, not just to an endless flow of competent
new opera, but to hearing a new masterpiece from Verdi or Wagner every few
years. The Ricordi publishing house,
hoping Puccini would be their new money-spinner, marketed him as the ‘heir to
Verdi’, and he paid the price: it’s as simple as that. The critics seriously seemed to think that
Italian opera could and should be maintained at the late-Verdi level
indefinitely: especially as Italy had used Verdi as a mascot of unity, and
thought it needed a new composer to continue to be its national mentor. They compared Puccini to Verdi and found him
wanting – an invidious comparison that persists to the present day. I suppose it is not impossible that a genuine
heir or heirs to Verdi might have emerged, composers who could discover new unexplored
possibilities in the Italian High Romantic style, but it seems unlikely. Readers in the early twenty-first century,
who can only dream of a new opera on a Puccini level being composed anywhere in
the world ever again, feel inclined to murmur ‘what did they want, jam on it?’
Puccini, of course, was not interested (other than
financially) in being ‘heir to Verdi’: his artistic aims were not totally, but
largely, different. He was the prime
exponent of verismo, the furthest
point reached in the nineteenth-century dismantling of the ‘frame’, the barrier
of artifice between the opera and direct imitation of life. Classical and early Romantic operas had told
stories and expressed emotion in a stylized way through a succession of formal
musical structures: recitatives, arias, ensembles and choruses. The operas of Wagner abandoned the formal
musical ‘numbers’ for a flexible through-composed style, but substituted their
own ‘distancing’ effects: the extended timescale, in which the singers and the
orchestra meditate on the action rather than responding directly and
immediately to it and each other; and the mythological settings, which warn the
audience not to expect literal reality or ‘normal’ behaviour. Verdi, for his part, set stories that were
more naturalistic, belonging to history and even (in La Traviata) to the contemporary middle-class world, but he usually
depicted royalty or nobility in classically tragic situations, and he hung onto
formal musical structures, although using them more and more flexibly. By
contrast, the verismo school of
Italian opera at the end of the 19th century strove to take
naturalism further. Action would unroll
at a realistic speed, the singers would sing as far as possible in natural
speech rhythms with only brief lyrical expansions, and the subjects would be
drawn from contemporary reality and everyday life. But, as William Berger points out, that
cannot be all: if imitation of ordinary life was the whole point of verismo, no one would sing, for a start.
He suggests ‘that at the core of verismo
there is a search for the mythic in everyday life’ (Puccini Without Excuses, p. 292.)
The music is there to bestow significance, to lay bare the archetypal
patterns into which ordinary human actions fall. In fact, there is little that is ‘ordinary
and everyday’ about the characters of the majority of verismo operas, compared to their middle-class audiences. They are peasants clinging to primitive codes
of honour, bohemians starving in garrets, historical characters caught up in
violent events, or victims of culture-shock in exotic settings. Emotional extremes were the meat and drink of
opera as they always had been: it was the uninhibited immediacy of their
presentation that was new – and the sense that not-especially-admirable
characters with all-too-human frailties, rather than heroes and heroines of
tragedy, might have their travails dignified in music.
Arguably, the greatest verismo operas were composed before the
style was recognised as such: Verdi’s Traviata
and Bizet’s Carmen. Puccini,
however, was the supreme exponent, the only verismo
composer to produce more than a single work that survives in the core opera
repertory. Yet in spite of his unending
search for ‘dramatic truth’, the criticism that dogs his operas more tellingly
and persistently than any other is that they are ‘fake’: that their
emotionalism has the feel of being artificially worked up and used to
manipulate the audience into a response that has not been ‘fairly’ earned. And a personal slur of dishonesty,
evasiveness and sentimental self-indulgence sticks to the composer himself and
to anyone who unreservedly likes his music.
But to what extent are the works of Puccini – and others – ‘refusing to
look at the world squarely’, and to what extent are they simply refusing to
look at the world in the way the prevailing high culture demands it be looked
at – in a ‘hard-bitten’, ‘disillusioned’ and reductive way? It is obvious that an attempt to discover the
‘mythical’ in people’s sordid little lives was not going to appeal to any
Freudian or Marxist. If you flattered
people that way, how would they ever realise they needed their heads sorted
out, or get angry enough to bring on the Revolution?
The uncertain success of verismo
may, however, be partly the result of trying to remove veils or destroy
frames that, in the end, have to remain in some shape or form. Art is not life, people singing on stage is
not ‘natural’, and there comes a point when to try to be as realistic as
possible ends up calling attention to, rather than hiding, the inevitable
artifice. (Nothing falls as flat as
realism that fails to be realistic, as the many references to Tosca in the book Great Operatic Disasters make all too clear.) But someone had to try it. Puccini was the fall guy. After Puccini, a rattling noise could be
heard all over Europe as operatic composers retreated pell-mell into new forms
of stylisation, slamming the shutters as they went – the detached mythical
game-playing of late Richard Strauss, the neo-classicism of Stravinsky and
Prokofiev, the astringent dissonance of Berg, Schoenberg and (to some extent)
Janacek, the formalism of Britten. No
one was ever again going to risk appearing on stage naked, only to have the
critics claim they were wearing tasteless, diaphanous, rose-tinted veils.
‘DECADENT’ MUSIC?
As Puccini refused to be either reactionary or revolutionary in the self-proclaimed ‘age of decadence’, it was inevitable that he would be accused of writing ‘decadent’ music, and now we must look at the
various senses in which this label has been applied. First of all, the basic sense that his music is
technically shonky: ‘decadent’ in the sense of falling short of the high
standards of workmanship achieved by his illustrious predecessors. Puccini, the accusation goes, was a lazy
bastard who was more interested in spending his royalties on sport, women and
fast cars than on mastering symphonic technique. True – and not true. Puccini wasn’t Wagner, and he wasn’t
Verdi. But then, he wasn’t trying to
be. Wagner’s leitmotifs grow in and out
of one another organically like the roots, trunks and branches of a primeval
forest. Verdi’s musical structures have
the combined grace and weight of a palatial building. But their grandeur can be daunting to the
inexperienced listener. Puccini’s are
more like a prefabricated house with rearrangeable screens for walls. Smaller-scale, more lightweight, and yet
elegant, adaptable and functional, they draw you straight in. Just right for the upwardly mobile middle
class. There is a deftness about the way
he slots his motifs together that is miraculous in its own right. It’s like watching a collage artist –
Matisse, for instance – creating a balanced, suggestive whole from a few scraps
of torn paper. Why should this not be a
legitimate proceeding in music? Donald
J. Grout (1947; Wilson p. 223) concluded that ‘Puccini’s music often sounds
better than it is, due to the perfect adjustment of means to ends’. Unfortunately I don’t think he meant to be
funny. How should music be judged
otherwise than on how it sounds? Does
anyone ever say ‘Matisse’s pictures look better than they are’, because he
didn’t use the technique of Rubens?
The more damning sense in which Puccini’s music is called
‘decadent’ is that it allegedly shares in the suffocating, dissolute atmosphere
of the fin de siècle – an unhealthy
interest in extremes and infirmities, a sensuous and sentimental gloating over
frailty and suffering, rather than true sympathy. His contemporaries, and the Modernists,
considered he went too far in this direction; for the post-modernists, he
didn’t go far enough. But did he really
go there at all? It is essential to put
such criticism in its context. As
Alexandra Wilson’s book shows, the earliest complaints of immorality and
sensationalism in Puccini’s work came from conservatives who objected to the
depiction of extra-marital sex and violence on stage as such; the accusations
of ‘weakness’, ‘effeminacy’ and ‘sickly sensuality’ came from Nationalists who
wished to promote a cult of ‘strength’, ‘virility’ and racial purity. The complaints were taken up by Modernists
with a preference for dispassionate dissection, and Freudians with their own
narrow ideas of mental hygiene. Although
objecting to Puccini on almost opposite grounds, their objections can sound uncannily
similar. Their attitudes, unlike the
nationalist ones, are still with us and have respectability, but it must be
recognised that they are just as partial.
The Freudian reading of Puccini, in particular, deserves a
more sustained critique than it has yet received. The Freudian gospel so dominated the
twentieth century that I imagine very few artists, and none of those who
belonged to the intellectual ‘establishment’, were unaffected by anxiety as to
how their work would be read in its light. To
be fair to Freud, he developed his ideas for therapeutic use: when applied to
art criticism they are reductive a priori. Rather than having a ‘gift’, the artist has,
or is, a ‘problem’, and his work is not so much an achievement as a set of
symptoms, merely presented in a more accessible and interesting way than those
of an ordinary patient. While ages of faith might try to silence artists they disapprove of by
calling them wicked infidels and condemning them to hellfire, Freudians do the
job by impugning their mental health. It
may be doubted whether even threats of damnation can be as crushing to an
artist as to be told that his work is a manifestation of his sickness, his deep
and inescapable personal inadequacy: at least an infidel supposedly has the
power to repent. I suggest that the
ascendancy of Freud had an incalculably paralysing effect on creativity
throughout the twentieth century. A
respectable artist had two choices: either to bend over backwards to present
him- or her-self as ‘healthy’, according to the highly restrictive template
that Freudian theory allowed; or to avowedly ‘pathologise’ his or her
peculiarities, pre-empting judgement by self-analysis, again according to the
Freudian template. Spontaneity and the free emergence of what lay in the
artist’s unconscious was interfered with, as therapeutic aims were twisted into
very public value judgements.
Mosco Carner, in his 1958 biography of Puccini, reduced the artist’s
creativity to a simple psycho-sexual ‘complex’ in the standard Freudian way. Pointing out that the composer grew up
fatherless with an energetic mother and several older sisters, Carner asserted
that he never escaped his all-powerful Mother and was unable to mature as a
man. His unsuccessful marriage and
frequent extra-marital affairs are explained in this light. The step away from the Mother that full
commitment to a sexual partner would have entailed was, supposedly, fraught
with unbearable guilt for him, a guilt that he projected onto the heroines of
his operas: this is why they are nearly always presented as in some sense
‘fallen women’, ‘punished’ for their devoted love by sickness, abandonment,
suffering and death. And why the male characters in his operas tend to be cads
and bounders, or at best romantic, impulsive types who are unable to follow
through and achieve their own ends, not stalwart grown-up men with their feet
on the ground. In his repeated
variations on these themes, Carner implies, Puccini was ‘pushing his own
buttons’ obsessively, re-enacting a dilemma which it was not within his power
to consciously diagnose, let alone solve.
His operas are a kind of self-soothing mechanism that can only appeal to
those who are content with non-solutions: they do not helpfully illuminate the
human condition. Thus having, you might
think, completely damned Puccini, his praise for his musical and theatrical
skill seems faint indeed.
And the only thing we can be sure
of in all this is that a man with an averagely messy love life wrote some arguably
saccharine melodies for suffering sopranos.
It is surely time to turn things round and dissect the mental attitudes
that led to this frantic medicalising and moralising. We get a taste of them in Carner’s anxieties
about the levels of ‘virility’ or ‘effeminacy’ in Puccini’s male characters,
and in his telling confusion between ‘weakness’ and ‘gentleness’ (p. 261). Puccini lived through the fin-de-siècle crisis of masculinity that
saw many of his contemporaries reacting with misogyny and militarism. His characters, lest we forget, belonged to a
generation for which the whole of Europe seemed to find little use: the ‘doomed
youth’ of the First World War. The fact
that his romantic young men cannot find their place in the world, and need to
be saved (physically, not just spiritually) by strong women, is to a degree more
honest and interesting than Carner’s criticism.
It is the latter that appears nervous and dated, redolent of a time when
old-fashioned moral rigidity about sex and gender roles had collided with the
new, high-fibre-and-three-times-a-week, Freudian censoriousness about ‘normality’
to create perhaps the worst of both worlds.
We are more relaxed and aware now.
And yet Carner’s judgements continue to be repeated as gospel, and
embroidered, by modern writers on opera like David Kimbell (Italian Opera, Cambridge 1994) – though
Berger takes a nicely irreverent attitude to them.
I should suggest that Puccini’s dilemma as an artist was not
so much a product of his psycho-sexual peculiarities, as of his consciousness
of standing at the end of the Romantic tradition during a crisis of belief in
Art, in religion, in Enlightenment ideals and in the value of human life in
general. His response to the crisis,
however, was more robust and less ‘decadent’ than has usually been
thought. Rather than scrambling into a
sanitised, collective, materialist hope for humanity with the Modernists, he
asserted a continued belief in the Romantic ideal despite every pressure to the
contrary: this is why his work can appear so pessimistic, and yet contain a
core of hope.
The majority of Puccini’s operas, including his three most-performed
works (La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly), take disillusion as their overt subject. In all these three, the central characters
begin with high hopes which are systematically thwarted and stripped away, a
process that ends in every case with the heroine’s death. Yet the disillusioning process is not a
cynical one, and the heroines, far from being depicted as weak and inadequate,
are strong despite their frailty, their perspective powerfully endorsed by the
composer. La Bohème is a special case, in that the central character, the
consumptive Mimi, is to an extent ‘illusion-free’ from the beginning. Mimi’s music is ‘fragile’, that of the
Bohemian set she falls in with is boisterous; but the effect is ironic,
considering that Mimi earns an honest living making the fripperies that society
demands (silk flowers), while the Bohemians, less successful purveyors of more
pretentious fripperies, inhabit a fantasy world. Puccini’s achievement is to present their
youthful illusion as the bubble it is, without puncturing its gorgeous rainbow
surface. He does not validate their
belief that Art can transform the world, but he sympathises with it; and he
does validate Mimi’s simple belief in love.
In his other two ‘Big Three’ operas, Puccini presents the Romantic
predicament yet more starkly. Tosca and
Butterfly believe in love against all the odds, to the point where the only way
for them to maintain their faith is through suicide. The simple question that all Puccini’s operas
ask is: was it – or is it – worth it? Is there any ultimate value in life, love,
beauty, all those things that humans have and then must lose? On the face of it, most of his plots say
‘no’: but the music says ‘yes’. The
music accentuates the apparent vulnerability and helplessness of those who keep
faith without compromise in the teeth of the evidence. Yet it bestows value, and does what Romantic
music does: insists, inarticulately, on transcendence.
Puccini’s operas are often criticized for having little
character development, for never examining or challenging his characters’
supposed beliefs or ethical positions. There
is justice in this. Verdi’s operas belong
to the tradition of liberal humanism, and encourage us to ask questions, to
take part in a dialectic. Why does Rigoletto have to pander to the Duke? Why does Otello believe Iago? Why doesn’t Violetta send Germont packing? In Verdi’s universe, things can – indeed,
urgently must – get better. In Puccini’s,
things, and people, are as they are. You are more likely to be left thinking
simply (as in the blogger Opera Obsession’s Tosca
experience) ‘My God my God my God’. http://operaobsession.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/ecco-un-artista.html .
But to argue on this basis that Puccini has no moral
seriousness and is just a sensationalist is very wide of the mark. Puccini, at some level, knew that he was at
the end of a line. He felt that,
rationally speaking, Romantics like himself were losing the argument in the
hard-edged, clinical new world of the twentieth century. But, like Galileo forced to recant, he went
on muttering Eppur si muove – ‘and
yet it does move’: ‘it’, in this case, being the human heart. This is what continues to make Puccini’s
operas so compelling. It was not what
intellectuals wanted to hear in the twentieth century. As a Modernist, one was not supposed to place
one’s hope in the power of Art to touch ordinary hearts. One was supposed to hope in the Dialectic of
History, or not at all. If there is one
good thing about post-modernism it is that at least other messages can be heard
from time to time, over this shrill utilitarian ideology.
THE TOSCA QUESTION
Tosca tends to
focus the attitudes of critics to Puccini.
It is the opera most often brought up as the lead exhibit when accusing him of Decadence, perversion and fakery: the one with torture, attempted rape,
stabbing, suicide, and everybody dead at the end. What do opinion-formers say of it? A ‘guilty pleasure’, a ‘shabby little
shocker’, a ‘coarse bodice-ripper’ from which even the opera critic of the Daily Telegraph feels he must take pains
to disassociate himself: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/8645993/Tosca-Royal-Opera-HouseLa-Rondine-Opera-Holland-Park-review.html. (‘I neither like nor admire Tosca’… I am sure we are all relieved, Rupert Christiansen!). Even an admirer, Susan Vandiver Nicassio (Tosca’s Rome), thinks that its subject
is ‘the illusory nature of human happiness’.
The best that she can say about it is that it provides an emotional
catharsis of sorts as we watch the composer manipulate his unknowing, helpless
puppet characters to their doom. For the
opera’s detractors, it’s even worse. Tosca is an exercise in sado-masochism
that hasn’t the courage of its convictions, but pretties the subject up. The audience is in the moral position of
passers-by rubber-necking at an automobile wreck on pretence of sympathy, or of
kinky porn users who won’t admit to their habit. If all this is true, I wondered for years,
why do audiences leave performances of Tosca
feeling not depressed and vaguely dirty, but exhilarated, as if they have
witnessed a triumph as well as a disaster?
I believe that the critics have it back to front. The trouble is that Freudian attitudes to
sexual politics, and pre-conceived ideas about ‘decadence’, have blinded them to
what is actually going on in the opera. Mosco
Carner gives the consensus view when he cites the villain of the piece,
Scarpia, as an example of the fin-de-siècle ‘discovery of … disease …,
abnormality, as a fertile theme for artistic treatment … Tosca has in Scarpia an erotic sadist [with a] pathological trait’. The truth is that Tosca is more old-fashioned and innocent, and at the same time more
modern, than that. It is not ‘about’
Scarpia as a psychological case (in the way that Salome is about Salome or Wozzeck
is about Wozzeck). It does not
present him as sick or abnormal. On the
contrary, he functions successfully and is very pleased with himself. He is bad, not mad. While an artist like Puccini could depict a
sexual predator like Scarpia operating with impunity from a position of public
power, under layers of hypocrisy and denial, the world was busy pretending that
this didn’t happen: that such a person was a rarity, if not a figment, to be
sought out by the Decadent imagination.
In fact, he is a realistic portrait of a common type. Only in the last few years (as I write in
2015), with taboos on speaking publicly about sexual abuse finally being
lifted, are we waking up to the everyday reality of the Scarpias who have been
operating, probably for centuries, in closed hierarchies – families, schools,
churches, ethnic communities. Freud
played his part in the cover-up, preferring to treat women who came to him with
stories of rape by relatives as delusional, and their complaints as ‘fantasy’ –
evidence of what they secretly wanted.
His theories were a new way of doing what power systems have always
tended to do: blaming the victim, creating a moral equivalence between the
powerful and the powerless. While those
few sexual bullies who were unmasked were labelled interesting cases, excused
by being pathologised, their victims were dismissed as having invited their maltreatment,
as being ‘masochists’ on a level of perversion with the ‘sadists’. The mischief this attitude has done is
breathtakingly documented in Lundy Bancroft’s book Why Does He Do That? You can
see this whole mess of twentieth-century attitudes informing critical responses
to Tosca: the notion that Scarpia is
the most important or interesting character, or that Tosca is secretly
attracted to him and really wants to be raped (in a Freudian twist of the
self-serving libertine code that Scarpia himself propounds)! Puccini is found wanting for not having been
more truly Decadent and made all this explicit.
Because he wrote music that was exciting and accessible rather than
disturbing and alienating, he and the audience are assumed to be sneakily ‘enjoying
it the wrong way’, to be sadists, or worse, masochists themselves.
Puccini, actually, is entirely innocent of all this inverted
morality. His story is about resistance
to tyranny, not sexual perversion. Tosca
successfully defends her integrity; Cavaradossi defends his friend,
unsuccessfully but still admirably. Their
bad choices, manipulated by Scarpia, drive them apart, but their love brings
them back together. Puccini is sometimes
accused of reifying or worshipping Sex as a ‘primal instinct’, in place of
‘higher’ religious or ethical ideals. He
does no such thing. He presents a showdown
between two kinds of sex so different as to be different things: sex as a tool
and reward of power, and sex as part of a free, loving relationship. It is love, not ‘sex’, that he presents as
valuable, as conveying meaning in life despite the fact that it must inevitably
end with death. This might seem a
message so obvious as to be anodyne, but it is worth emphasising, given that it
seems to have been completely opaque to critics who bought into the strange
sexual ideologies of the twentieth century.
A reassessment of Tosca by William Berger goes deeper, offering a mythical interpretation which gave me a Eureka moment. Scarpia, the corrupt police chief, stands for the Apollonian principle, Tosca the opera singer for the Dionysian. He, in other words, represents order, hierarchy, rationality, taken to the point of ossification; she, creative chaos, anarchy and instinct. Tosca is a Maenad, who is led by a glass of wine to the knife with which she slays an ‘order’ that has become a life-denying tyranny. Berger puts Tosca’s leap from the castle walls in the context of a number of self-actualizing, heroic ‘death leaps’ in Latin history and mythology. On his reading it is no mere suicide but an act of faith – faith in the principle she represents getting an equal hearing ‘before God’. And the orchestra’s final theme is an orgasm, a triumphant vindication of the value of life in the face of death. The ‘vulgarity’ of Tosca is an essential part of the opera’s artistic effect. It is the nature of the Dionysian to be vulgar, to fly in the face of canons of ‘good taste’.
Berger’s analysis has much wider applicability. What has the twentieth century in music been but one huge and destructive split between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles? In one corner, cerebral, disinfected ‘high art’ music, too embarrassed to try to evoke any uninhibited emotional response; in the other, abandoned by the priesthood, ‘popular’ music that is emotionalism reduced to mindlessness, so impoverished in technique and ideas that it is barely even emotionally effective any more. The same split between the precious ‘high’ and the shlocky ‘low’ has been writ large in all the arts. No wonder that no one wanted to listen to Tosca’s message, once the arts were set on such a path. And an artist who tried his best, but in vain, to keep the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’ from flying apart, and got thoroughly bashed for his pains, might well feel that he was in the position of Tosca’s Cavaradossi: a tortured prisoner of the self-righteous Apollonian, with his Dionysian Muse powerless to save him, although his last hope might be that she could save herself. That audiences for a hundred years now have continued to respond so powerfully to Tosca, even without being able to say why, may suggest that it was not a vain hope.
PUCCINI IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
When I suggested on an internet discussion group that Tosca should be seen as a humane drama, I received the following reply from the user ‘Fontinau’ that neatly encapsulates the received wisdom:
‘Puccini couldn’t be less humane if he tried … Tosca, and Puccini in general, have to
be understood in the context of late 19th, early 20th
century Decadent art. He impels the
audience to take sensual pleasure in weakness: Mimi’s physical frailty, Tosca
feeling sorry for herself because God has neglected to reward her good
behaviour, Cavaradossi crying because he doesn’t want to die, etc. The problem is that Puccini couldn’t or
wouldn’t go further. In stylistic terms,
music that rather interestingly hints at the possibilities of Decadence rather
than great Decadent music.’
I hope I have said enough to show that this view is, at the very least, open to question. I believe that it’s diametrically wrong. The reason why Puccini doesn’t ‘go further’ into the possibilities of Decadence – in the sense of amorality, the rejection of values – is because, as an essentially humane composer, he was resisting it with all his might; and the frailty of his characters shows the difficulty of the task. One interesting thing about this comment is that it reveals some of the geological layers of Puccini-detraction: a post-modernist readiness to celebrate transgressive ‘decadence’, wrapped around the rather nasty, essentially fascist, contempt for ‘weakness’ that earlier critics evinced.
Among the many reasons why this viewpoint needs revising is that it should be clear, in the twenty-first century, that decadence is a slippery concept. What is perceived as decadence can be a reshaping of morality, as much as a mere rejection of it. We, now, have far more of all the things that the fin-de-siècle considered decadent: irreligion, disrespect for authority, sexual permissiveness, divorce, comfort, short attention spans, ever-changing fashions, globalisation and ethnic mixing, as well as an entertainment diet that makes Puccini’s operas look strait-laced: there is more sex and violence in an average episode of TV drama any night of the week than there is in Tosca, making present-day opera critics’ complaints of its ‘sensationalism’ sound rather quaint. And yet the sky has not fallen, the ‘race’ has not noticeably ‘degenerated’, public order broken down or morality vanished. It is thanks to ‘decadence’ that our level of goodness to each other has improved in some ways: that our ethics are more modest, more grounded in human nature. Unlike the early critics of Tosca, we don’t think it contemptible for a man who is going to be shot to spend his last moments thinking about the amazing sex he had with his girlfriend, rather than contemplating his political ideals or what a loss he is to Art (à la Nero). Nor do we feel we have to explain it in terms of a pathological identification of Love and Death, à la Freud. It just seems honest. We don’t think that a woman who would stick a knife in her attacker rather than be raped must be un-womanly and semi-crazed; we don’t coyly excuse the man as a ‘seducer’, and we know better than to think that she must fancy him really. By twenty-first century standards, Tosca is positively moral for precisely the reasons its critics a hundred years ago thought it was immoral. People need to get with the programme.
However, the critics did their worst, and after Puccini, composers paid attention. There was to be no more unguarded emotionalism. And no more pandering to the bourgeoisie, nor yet to the masses. Opera would become an ascetic, resolutely high-art form, and lose the popular audience as a result. Apparently it was a price worth paying. The gulf between high- and low-brow widened. As almost the last man to try to bridge it, Puccini represents opera’s dying fall. As part of his recent tentative rehabilitation, it has been pointed out that his style of composition – concise, free-form, following dramatic situations in ‘real time’, pushing emotional buttons and telegraphing thematic connections – found its future in film music, rather than concert music. It’s amusing to think that if he had lived in America, and instead of staging his operas, had made them into pioneering films, he would probably be remembered as the rude but vigorous father of a great new art form – albeit a little condescendingly, as cinema was obviously art for the masses. (It is, of course, no accident that Puccini’s most optimistic opera, the one that achieves the greatest integration between Romantic sensibility and modern technique, the one that his detractors don’t dare call ‘decadent’, but get round by dismissing it as ridiculous instead, is the one with an American and filmic setting: La Fanciulla del West.) But because he chose to present his theatrical work as opera, an art form that was doomed to decline through its very preciosity, he gets written off as decadent. How fair is that?
As an example of how opera retreated to the high ground after Puccini, we may consider the work of Benjamin Britten. Britten excoriated the ‘cheapness and emptiness’ of Puccini’s melodies: he was probably issuing a warning to himself. He was homosexual (homosexual acts were illegal in Britain for most of his lifetime), and harboured, much more obviously than Puccini, a preoccupation with the abuse of innocence. He could not afford to let himself be caught unawares, let his feelings ‘hang out’ uninhibitedly, grab his audience by the throat and demand sympathy. Britten, unlike Puccini, was an intellectual, self-conscious, shape-shifting artist. He had a Puccinian gift for melody, but he knew better than to let it define him, in a Modernist musical milieu in which melody meant sell-out, schmaltz. He was dashed if he was going to be written off as an effeminate pervert, the corruptor of his nation’s manhood, as Puccini had been. He would confine his aching sweetness within the safe inverted commas of children’s music and ‘church stuff’, and otherwise serve it up with a generous squirt of irony, of astringent formal and dissonant lemon juice. He would treat himself, through his characters, as a ‘case’, in the approved Freudian manner, before anybody else did. What Britten’s operas – and those of numerous other twentieth-century composers – might have been like without this determined self-censorship, we can only guess.
Britten’s operas did, however, attempt to integrate melody and accessible narrative and characterisation into the Modernist style, and they resist being classified in any narrow stylistic niche. They belong to a time when ‘high art’ at least still believed in its mission to be universal. They may stand for the last bid of new opera to gain more than a tiny avant-garde audience in Britain. Half a century later, the mountain range of the operatic repertoire has receded far enough into the past for the peaks and foothills to stand out in a ‘vertical’ perspective, all seeming equally far away in time. This allows us to see Puccini’s operas as representing, not a ‘slide’ in a downward direction towards decadence, but an ‘approach’ to more demanding works. It would seem absurd to suggest that listening to Puccini spoils an audience’s taste for ‘the finer things’, now that ‘opera’ is seen as monolithic, occupying an undifferentiated ‘high culture’ niche. Its proselytizers recommend ‘first operas’ for people wanting to ‘get into it’, and what do they recommend? Carmen, La Bohème, and Tosca. You will hear abundant anecdotes of people starting with one of these and very quickly learning to enjoy Verdi, Wagner, Mozart and the other ‘high peaks’. But the numbers are pitifully small; the critics’ consecration, or demonization, of opera as an elite art form, has been all too successful. The critics of c. 1900 who thought that art was in danger of being debased by popular taste, and who deliberately set out to ‘purify’ high art to avoid this happening, actually brought about the very thing they feared. By denigrating the stepping stones, they created a near-unbridgeable gulf, ensuring that ‘the masses’ would be doomed to a diet of unrelieved pap.
At the time when opera stood at the inescapable fork in the
road between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ art, Puccini went with popular. History judged him wrong. But we ought to regret what was lost thereby,
and at the very least salute his operas as a gallant attempt to achieve the
impossible. Not to mention being
wonderfully enjoyable in their own right.
And it may not be too extravagant to hope that with the advent of a new
global audience for Western music, particularly in the Far East, an audience
unburdened by twentieth-century Western cultural baggage, opera may find
sufficient popularity to undergo a renaissance.
