Of late I’ve been listening to Puccini’s trilogy of one-act operas Il Trittico, featuring Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), and Gianni Schicchi. No doubt about it, the three operas are lots of fun. (Well, except for cringing through O mio babbino caro in Gianni Schicchi, an aria sung absolutely to death by every soprano at the SF Conservatory.)
Yet I hear them with regret bordering on dismay. A composer of Puccini’s extraordinary fertility, so colorful an imagination and so fine a grasp of theatrical pacing, lavishing all that care on such twaddle. In Puccini one finds concentrated the ultimate tragedy of opera: that a genre with such possibility for transcendence dives straight for the gutter with such lamentable regularity. I suppose here we have the ultimate Catch-22 situation: being a great fusion of art forms, opera is bound to be horrendously expensive to produce. But because it is expensive to produce, it is forbidden from lofty goals but must cavort instead in the base and trivial in order to stroke the well-heeled rubes who write the checks.
Because it’s no secret that opera is not supported for artistic reasons. Opera thrives where social climbing and ostentation thrive. The upper tiers and standing room areas of opera houses may be thronged with sincere music lovers, but the bills are paid by those who are there to be seen, by those whose social standing depends on supporting the opera and whose business dealings would be threatened without that connection. No opera company will survive long on those $20 standing-room and student-rush tickets. It’s the big donors, the corporations, the old money, the new money that hankers to join the old. You can’t keep those folks around with a raft of artistically daring, risky endeavors that are likely to fly right over 99% of the audience. You may do that sort of thing only once in a while, a Saint François d’Assisi or A Streetcar Named Desire. Mostly you need to do Tosca and Traviata. You can cut it both ways and put on The Marriage of Figaro, which in addition to being artistically worthy is also tremendously popular. But the Figaros are rare.
Puccini went the mass-audience route and thus we’ll never know what he might have been had he taken the risk of becoming a true artist. Instead he remained the expert showman, purveyor of almost illicitly attractive music, ravishing harmonies in opulent orchestrations, stolid tenors belting out high A-flats and sea-lion sopranos expiring in a cloud of muted strings.
Consider Il Tabarro, the first of the Trittico. Despite being only one act long, it requires heavy padding given it has almost no plot. The denizens of a Seine River barge; an affair between one of the bargemen and the wife of the head guy. Head guy murders the bargeman and displays his dead body by opening a cloak (once used to wrap himself, wife, and defunct child) while wife-y poo shrieks. Curtain. A character given several long numbers (La Frugola) could be excised without affecting the whole one bit. Discursions on people drinking too much, a silly dancing scene. All belongs in Delete Key limbo. But it’s there because without it we have nothing but a brief setup to a cheap shocker at the end.
Even Puccini’s big operas are padded, threadbare, and peopled by stock characters many of whom could be cashiered without noticeable impact. When you get right down to it, La Bohème is a one-act that has been stretched to four by the addition of unnecessary extra characters and plot lines that go nowhere. Possibly the least stuffed of the bunch is Tosca, but the Machiavellian intrigue that makes up its bodice-ripping story isn’t altogether coherent, nor is it particularly important to understand. It’s clear enough that we have the Woman (Tosca), the Young Lover (Mario), and Snidely Whiplash (Scarpia) and that the good guys will tussle with Scarpia’s nastiness and that they will all die during the course of the show. The higher the billing, the later the death, with Tosca herself therefore going last. (Nobody dies after Hamlet, Macbeth, or Cleopatra, either.)
Puccini’s operas are just plain cheap. But they’re filled with gushy music that offers the immediate sensual thrill that, as a child, I might have found in an ice-cold grape Nehi soda. Like the Nehi sugar-rush, Puccini is less attractive to me now but still offers its blandishments. The big problem for me as an adult is that I can hear how derivative it all is, how built out of stock materials and regurgitations of far more adventuresome composers. You get a bit of Wagner here, a taste of Verdi there, a sliver of Richard Strauss there, a soupçon of Debussy there.
Puccini, however, may well attract folks to opera when no other composer could, thanks to that up-front, tits-bared seductive charge. The first opera I ever really got into was Madama Butterfly, listening to it over and over one summer until I had it more or less memorized. Being the instrumentalist that I am, I paid little attention to the words and knew only the bare outlines of the story. But I had the music down cold. Later on I got punchdrunk on Tosca and Turandot and Bohème. There are a few Puccini operas I still don’t know very well — La Rondine, Manon Lescaut, and The Girl of the Golden West. Since I’ll be curator for a summer exhibition involving that latter opera, I plan to be drenching myself in the very near future. Later on I could approach Verdi, Wagner, and Rossini with a bit more confidence, having been conditioned by the easy-listening smoosh of Puccini. (Not that Verdi or Rossini require any great intellect to appreciate, nor Wagner for that matter, truth be told.)
So I remain torn by Puccini’s penny-dreadful operatic shockers. On the one hand, they’re wonderful fun. On the other, they’re trailer trash and I know they’re trailer trash and I’m attracted to them anyway. Well, one can’t be high-toned all the time, I suppose. There’s a place for everything in this world: Beethoven followed by Puccini, dinner at French Laundry followed by a bucket of KFC.