The world of opera was shaken on the morning of November 29, 1924.
Giacomo Puccini, the most famous composer of his time, had died in Brussels as a result of surgery for throat cancer. Or rather, as a result of post-operative treatment.
The 66-year-old chain smoker’s heart turned out to be too weak for radiation therapy — a technology that was still in its infancy 100 years ago.
Ten operas in forty years
Puccini composed ten operas during his four decades of creative work.
At least seven of them are among the most popular of all time, including “Manon Lescaut,” “La Boheme,” “Tosca,” “Madame Butterfly,” “La fanciulla del West,” “Il Trittico” — and of course his last and, for many, greatest masterpiece, “Turandot.”
These days, Puccini operas are staged more than two thousand times a year worldwide, regardless of any wars or crises. This puts the great Italian far ahead of his colleagues Rossini and Wagner.
Only works by Verdi and Mozart are staged more often, but they left behind 28 and 21 operas respectively, making Puccini, with his astonishingly short oeuvre, the absolute leader in the industry in purely mathematical terms.
Perfectionist and tragedian
“I’ve always wondered why Puccini is so successful,” says German musicologist Arnold Jacobshagen, whose biography of Puccini has just been published.
“I always suspected that the reasons for his success lay in the quality of the music, and the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it was indeed down to the quality of the music and not the bad taste of the audience, as many malicious tongues have long claimed,” he tells DW.
Puccini had his breakthrough in 1893 with his third opera, “Manon Lescaut,” and he soon became one of the most successful and richest artists of his time.
Three main characteristics of Puccini’s working style can be identified as the reasons for his immense success. For one thing, the composer was an extreme perfectionist, a master of “tightening and moderation,” according to Jacobshagen.
Or, as the composer himself once aptly put it: “A good musician must be able to do everything, but not give everything.” Conductors, singers and, above all, grateful orchestral musicians still admire the technological precision of his scores to this day.
In addition, the Italian had an incredible flair for the theatrical. “Alongside William Shakespeare, Giuseppe Verdi and Henrik Ibsen, Puccini is the most frequently performed tragedian in the world,” says Jacobshagen.
In close collaboration with his meticulously selected librettists and publisher Giulio Ricordi, the driving force behind the Puccini brand, the composer created ever-new intertwinings of love, suffering and death with each of his operas.
Thirdly, Puccini’s music has a unique ability to speak to the listener in a dramatic and immediate way. As music historian Julian Budden notes: “No composer communicated as directly with his audience as Puccini.”
The scion of a musical dynasty
Comparisons are often drawn between Puccini and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Like the great German composer, the Italian opera genius also came from a respected dynasty of church musicians. From the early 18th century onwards, the Puccinis shaped the cultural life of Lucca in Tuscany.
The impressive line of Puccini’s composing ancestors begins with Jacopo Puccini, born in 1712, who was the organist of the cathedral and maestro di cappella in the Republic of Lucca.
Jacopo married a singer, the beautiful Angela Piccinini. Their son Antonio and then grandson Michele were the city’s maestri di cappella for the next hundred years.
Great-grandson Giacomo, the future opera genius born in Lucca in 1858, also grew up among musicians and was employed as an organist at the age of fourteen.
Thanks to his roots in the musical world, he enjoyed the best possible education and found his way into the arts very early on, although this led him past church music and into opera.
Puccini and Mussolini: avoiding disrepute
Musicologist Jacobshagen considers the obvious comparison with Bach to be ideologically charged.
“The authors who first drew this parallel did so during the period of Italian fascism and German Nazism,” he says.
The aim was to promote a cultural connection between Italy and Germany, and “Puccini was an ideal candidate to be associated with one of the great heroes of Germany’s musical past.”
Puccini, like many representatives of the Italian elite of his time, had a certain sympathy for the emerging fascist movement and saw Mussolini as a politician who would “finally bring order.”
There was also a personal meeting between the composer and Il Duce, on Puccini’s initiative.
“So perhaps it was a stroke of luck that the composer died of this terrible cancer in 1924,” Jacobshagen tells DW. “Because otherwise, given his prominence, there would certainly have been a lot of photos in the world showing him with Mussolini.”
That would have been enough to discredit the generally apolitical composer in the long term.
Puccini and women: a drama in itself
Fragile, but strong and determined — these are the Puccini heroines that the world admires: Cio-Cio-San, Tosca, Mimi. Anyone who created such poignant female characters certainly understood women. But he was also a great tormentor of women.
“Puccini was certainly an attractive man,” says Jacobshagen.
You only have to look at some of the portraits of the composer to agree: the well-dressed Tuscan comes across as noble and graceful.
Austrian composer Alma Mahler-Werfel even thought that Puccini was “one of the most beautiful people” she had ever seen, a Don Juan, like an “English gentleman with romantic blood.” Alma, a coveted beauty herself, knew what she was talking about.
Completing his dashing image, the composer was a passionate hunter and a technophile. He indulged his passion with ever new purchases of cars, motorboats and other wonders of progress, such as an irrigation system for the garden of his villa in Torre del Lago.
The handsome musical genius with strong sex appeal led an intense and varied love life, without much consideration for those around him.
Only after twenty years of living together and at the insistence of his family did he marry his “main love,” Elvira Gemignani, mother of his only son, Antonio. Numerous affairs and infidelities overshadowed this relationship before the marriage — and even more so afterwards.
“For too long, you made me your victim, you trampled on my good and loving feelings for you by always insulting my feelings as a mother and passionate lover,” Elvira wrote to her husband.
Their failed love had a tragic climax: raging with jealousy, Elvira pursued a maid, Doria Manfredi, and drove the 23-year-old to suicide. Elvira Puccini was found guilty of denunciation and defamation of character in a trial and was bailed out by her husband.
Puccini’s “relationship to the themes of family and partnership proves to be somewhat complex,” is his biographer’s understated assessment.
Puccini as prophet
“Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me — But my secret is locked inside me,” sings Calaf in the famous aria “Nessun dorma.” In the end, Puccini’s secret also remains locked inside him.
Proof of the greatness of his art, however, is its relevance beyond the opera stage. Arnold Jacobshagen considers “Madama Butterfly” to be an “outcry against sexual exploitation and colonialism.”
“Tosca” and even more so “Turandot” should also be understood as pleas against tyranny and arbitrary rule and are more relevant than ever today, in the age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Puccini’s mastery of getting to the heart of the matter therefore also has a political dimension, and a timeless one.
This article was originally written in German.
