GIACOMO PUCCINI
(1858-1924)
Beginnings
Milan
Torre del Lago
The Man
The End
BEGINNINGS
In the early eighteenth century, the Puccini family settled in Lucca,
Italy, a medium-sized, city one of the richest in northern Italy. It was founded
by the Etruscans, became a Roman colony in 180 BC (there are still some Roman
remains), and played an important part in Hannibal's war after he crossed
the Alps. The capitol of Tuscany during the tenth and eleventh centuries,
it still has its old walls, wide and strong enough so that a road for cars
runs on top of them. Dante spent part of his exile there and it was
the site of a convocation called to resolve the schism in the papacy.
Along with Genoa and Venice, it was one of the essentially independent
cities of northern Italy until the time of Napoleon whose sister Elise then
ruled with her husband. Lucca was ceded to Tuscany in 1847 and became part
of a united Italy in 1861.
The family was originally from Celle, a small Tuscan village and the first Puccini to reached Lucca in the early eighteenth century was the progenitor of five generations of musicians who occupied honored places in the community as composers, organists and choir masters. The first Giacomo (1712 - 1781), son of the first settler, studied music in Bologna and, in 1739, was made organist and choir master at the cathedral of San Martino. He earned less than Lucca's hangman but was also granted a monthly loaf of bread to compensate for the difference. He wrote a great variety of works, mostly church music.
Giacomo was followed by Antonio (1747 - 1832) who also studied at Bologna and married a fellow music student. He wrote church music and some opera. Domenico (1771 - 1815) followed his father and grandfather in studying in Bologna and serving at San Martino. He studied at Naples with the composer Paisiello and wrote several operas. Appointed director of Princess Elise's court orchestra, he later became the director of the municipal orchestra. Suspected of liberal ideas, he died suddenly, and there were the inevitable rumors of poisoning. His son Michele (1813 - 1864) o studied at Bologna and Naples and also with Donizetti and Mercadante. Also organist and choirmaster at San Martino, he wrote two music textbooks. When he died, he left a wife Albina, eighteen years his junior, and seven children.
The fifth of these children was christened Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria after each of his musical ancesters. Giacomo was six years old when his father died, leaving his mother to care for him, his younger brother, and five older sisters. Albina was able to give her children only the bare necessities, but she saw that the daughters had a good education so they could help support the family. She was a strong-willed woman with a special dream for little Giacomo — that he would become a great musician. San Martino saved his father's position for Giacomo until he should be old enough.
The young Puccini initially studied music with his uncle but showed little interest in work. His chief pleasure was hunting birds, and with a new music teacher, Carlo Angeloni, who also liked bird hunting, his talents soon emerged (maybe because his lessons were between jaunts in the woods). At an early age, Giacomo helped support his family by teaching both piano and organ and by playing for dances. At ten he was a choir boy at San Martino and at fourteen began to play the organ at services there and at other churches in the area. He and his brother sometimes made money for tobacco by stealing organ pipes and selling them. He also played piano in taverns. At fourteen he began to compose in earnest.
Although he had become acquainted with opera by examining scores, Puccini heard his first full opera at the age of eighteen. The work was Verdi's Aïda, performed at the opera house in Pisa, some twenty miles from his home. Since Puccini did not have the money for train fare, he and two friends walked there and back and even managed to enter without paying! The experience inspired him to make opera his life; he later said it had opened a musical window for him. "Almighty God touched me with His little finger and said: 'Write for the theatre — mind you, only for the theatre'. And I have obeyed the supreme command."
MILAN
After the Queen of Italy arranged a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory
of Music, which had been founded by Napoleon, he began to pursue his goal.
He received further support from a doctor uncle. (The city of Lucca had paid
for his ancestors' studies but not for his.) The Conservatory, one of the
finest in Italy had started as a boarding school but, by Puccini's time, students
had to live on their own. Earlier Verdi had been denied admission because
he was too old, and Puccini, at twenty-one, was also well over the usual age
for admission. However, he was told that would not matter if his entrance
exam was good enough. He scored best of all but, once in, was bored by most
of his classes, often fell asleep, and was fined for too many absences.
The scholarship was only for the first year of the three-year course and Puccini was very poor. During his stay in Milan, he shared an apartment with other artists. He mostly lived on thin soup and later claimed it made him ill to see any kind of soup.The three had barely enough money to buy food, and the landlord strictly forbade his tenants to cook in their rooms. In order to cover the cooking noises, Puccini would play loudly on the piano while the others prepared the food. Once, while cooking lunch on top of the piano while playing the prelude to Die Meistersinger at full force, the stove, frying pan and contents fell into the piano greasing the strings. It was unplayable until the cleaned with a bottle of Chianti. Jobless, he wore borrowed clothes and borrowed money to meet his expenses. Once he pawned his overcoat so he would have enough money to dine and dance with a girl from the opera chorus. While he was living with Mascagni (the composer of Cavalleria rusticana), and creditors called, the debtor would hide in a closet while the other said he was out.
While at the conservatory, he went with three friends to visit Ghislanzoni (the librettist for Verdi's Aïda). One of them wrote: "Signor Ghislanzoni put us all in one big room with four beds. Mascagni was always up to some trick or other, so as soon as we were in bed and the light out, a shoe came flying throught the air! Puccini, not to be outdone, threw two shoes, and Buzzi-Peccia followed suit with the candlestick. I let fly pieces of bedroom china until nearly everything in the room was in the air and the cry was Si salvi chi può! (Save himself who can!). Experiences such as this, his struggling years as a student, his dislike of his martinet of a landlord, would figure prominently in his opera La bohème. (However, he said he had "never enjoyed the supreme consolation of cheating my landlord").
After conservatory he could have gone back to Lucca and taken up church and teaching positions, but he was determined to succeed in Milan. At one time he considered moving to South America with his brother, but he never did. (Buenos Aires was a big opera center because of the large Italian population.) His brother died of yellow fever there.
With his teacher's encouragement Puccini entered a competition for one-act operas. His opera Le villi (The Will-o'-the-Wisps)*, produced in 1884, did not win the prize, but it caught the attention of Giulio Ricordi, Italy's most important music publisher. Le villi was produced separately and was an immediate success.
Puccini joined the Milanese Scapigliatura (the disheveled ones) a group devoted to modernizing Italian music, more in the manner of Wagner than Verdi.
His first real triumph was Manon Lescaut, introduced in 1893. This was followed by La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904), his three most popular operas. Soon he had achieved worldwide recognition as one of the most prominent figures in Italian opera. He became very wealthy and bought an expensive villa at Torre del Lago, near his old home city of Lucca; many of his later operas were written there. He loved gadgets expensive cars, was fascinated by airplanes, and had a yacht he named Cio-Cio-San (the real name of Madama Butterfly)..
TORRE DEL LAGO
At Torre del Lago Puccini and his friends formed the Club la Bohème,
which met in a converted shed. They installed a piano and other furnishings,
and thus had a retreat where they could smoke, drink and play cards. Some
of the club rules were:
Poker faces, pedants, weak stomachs, puritans, and other wretches of the species are not
admitted and will be chased away.
The treasurer is empowered to abscond with the money.
It is forbidden to play cards honestly.
Silence is forbidden.
Wisdom is not permitted except in special cases.
All his life, Puccini found it easier to compose in noisy, distracting surroundings and the club provided that ambience. Rather than seek privacy, he worked at night, surrounded by talkative, card-playing friends, and he always wore a hat while composing. Unfortunately he starting smoking early and soon became a chain smoker. This probably contributed to his eventual death from throat cancer.
One
night in 1903 Puccini was being driven from Lucca to Torre del Lago in a fog
and on an unpaved road. His driver missed a curve and the car turned over.
Luckily the accident was witnessed, and there was a doctor nearby. The driver
had a broken leg, but Puccini was nowhere to be seen. Finally he was found
under the car. Although his own leg was badly damaged, he refused to go to
the hospital.
THE MAN
Puccini was attracted to women and they to him. Soon after the production
of Le villi, his mother died and the distraught composer turned
to a married woman, Elvira Bontini Gemignani, to whom he had given piano lessons.
Soon they were deep in an affair, and she left her husband and their two children
to live with Puccini. They had a son, Tonio, but could not marry because divorce
was impossible in Italy. The day after Puccini's automobile accident, Elvira's
husband died. She was now free to marry, and they did, but there is some indication
Puccini may have been coerced into the marriage. It was all very secret; no
banns were read, and they were married at 10 PM in a chapel with covered windows
so no light could be seen. Their relationship was stormy throughout their
life together.
Puccini was an avid reader of the music of his time and adapted techniques from other composers. He admired Beethoven, whom he called the essence of music, and Wagner for his orchestral coloring.
Although
Puccini probably travelled more extensively in Europe and America than any
other major composer of his time, he was basically shy and had simple tastes;
he much preferred to stay at home. From England he wrote that he could only
understand the first ten numerals and knew some addresses to which he could
go in a cab. In 1906 Puccini accepted an invitation from the Metropolitan
Opera in New York to attend a six week session of his operas. The singers
for Madama Butterfly included the famous tenor Enrico Caruso, but Puccini
was disappointed in him. He liked the voice but thought him lazy. On his trips
to New York, he loved to window shop and look at the mechanical gadgets. He
was one of the first composers to grasp the potential of one of these, the
phonograph. However, the only thing he ever bought to take back to Italy was
a motor boat which he paid for with money given him by an autograph hunter
for writing out the opening bars of Musetta's waltz.
Puccini was a man of the theatre and one of his greatest gifts was his dramatic sensitivity. He always wanted to see the original plays on which he based his operas such as Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La fanciulla del West and Il tabarro. He often said of himself that he had more heart than mind. Although he changed the location and story of each of his operas, the heroine was usually the same soft, smiling girl, driven by emotion rather than by thought, yet displaying an inner strength when necessary. (This strength may reflect the influence of Puccini's mother who made it possible for him to succeed.) Only once did Puccini create a heroine with a heart of stone, the Chinese princess who is the title character of Turandot — and she too softens in the end. [Note: Turandot premiered in 1926, after Puccini's death.]
After Madama Butterfly he thought audiences were getting tired of his "sugary music" and wanted to change his image. Fanciulla was his first attempt but was not very successful at the time. Duing a trip to Vienna to in 1913 in connection with a production there, he was approached by the management of the Carl Theater about writing an operetta for them. The result was La rondine (The Swallow). (See Puccini and The Swallow.) His other late operas are Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, and Turandot.
THE END
The composer started work on his Turandot in 1920, during the last
days of the Kingdom of Italy. The work went slowly, and by the time it was
finished, Mussolini had assumed power. (The Fascist party was founded in 1919
and took over the government in 1922.) Although he was at heart a royalist
and paid litted attention to politics, Puccini welcomed Mussolini at first
and approached him about building a National Opera House in Rome. However,
the dictator said there was not enough money to make it as grand as it needed
to be for his vision of Italy. He did make Puccini an honorary member of the
Fascist party.
One reason the work on Turandot went so slowly was Puccini's health. For many years he had suffered from chronic fatigue which was discovered to be due to diabetes. It was difficult to control, and he began to use insulin. While at dinner one evening he swallowed a goose bone which stuck in his throat. This was the beginning of persistent throat problems for which no treatment was effective. His eyesight began to fail. (When he went hunting, he could not see the birds very well so he would aim and fire, and someone else would shoot at the same time so that Puccini could get credit for the kill.) Finally he was diagnosed with throat cancer. His Italian doctors corresponded with cancer specialists in Brussels, Belgium who advised he not come there for help because of his physical condition and the advanced state of the disease. (Puccini did not know this; the true nature of his illness was kept from him.) The Italian doctors still urged him to make the trip to Brussels. Expecting to be able to work on Turandot, he took the score with him. First he had to wear a collar containing radioactive material around his throat. This was not too bad, but then radioactive needles were stuck directly into his throat, and he needed a tracheotomy so he could breathe throught a tube. He was fed through the nose. At first this treatment seemed to help, but he began to fail and soon died of a heart attack.
There was a brief funeral service in the hospital, and he was honored at the Brussels opera house that evening. There was an official funeral in Brussels before he was taken to Italy. In Milan there was a large funeral in the Milan cathedral at which Toscanini and the La Scala orchestra played. La Scala was closed for mourning. He was buried temporarily in a vault belonging to the Toscanini family and later moved to a specially-built mausoleum constructed into the dining room at Torre del Lago. Later his wife and their son were buried there with him. His estate was worth the equivalent of $25 million in today's money, but unlike Verdi, he did not bequeath anything to charity. His branch of the Puccini family ended with him.
On Puccini's death, Mussolini issued a statement: "In the history of Italian music and in the history of the Italian spirit, Giacomo Puccini occupies an eminent positiion. … A few months ago this renowned musician requested admission to the National Fascist party. He wished to express with this gesture his adherence to a movement …which is the only living thing today in Italy". It is doubtful that the Puccini requested admission, but the dictator was not above using the composer's death for his own purposes.
* They are the Italian version of the Slavic Vilia sung about in The Merry Widow.
Revised October
2007
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