The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity Arman Schwartz The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity. By Alexandra Wilson. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. [xii, 321 p. ISBN-10 0521856884; ISBN-13 9780521856881. $90.] Illustrations, references, index, appendices. The cover of Alexandra Wilson's book reproduces a wonderful image of Giacomo Puccini: bowler hat, French cuffs, carefully trimmed moustache. The composer stares back, somewhat suspiciously, at the viewer, his face illuminated by the blaze of a freshly lit cigarette. You want to know who this man's tailor is, and what café he frequents. You would probably think twice, however, before entrusting him with one of the crown jewels in your nation's patrimony. Puccini's role as the inheritor of a three-hundred year-old tradition of Italian opera, and his seeming unsuitability for that position, is the subject of Wilson's study. Care fully studying the construction of the composer's image in the Italian press, Wilson explores how Puccini was made to embody both the hopes and the anxieties of the Italian liberal state. During a period when the newly formed nation was increasingly opened up to foreign influence and industrial development, Puccini's operas helped critics articulate, often with surprising vehemence, broader concerns about the trajectory of Italian culture. As Wilson writes, "The Puccini problem became a problem of progress and reaction, of modernity and tradition" (p. 5). This is an innovative approach to the composer. Today Puccini occupies a comfortable, [End Page 736] if hardly exalted, place in the performing canon, and it is revelatory to learn how controversial his overly-familiar works once were. More important still are the ways in which Wilson parts company from the longstanding conventions of Puccini studies. It is a sign of the composer's ambivalent status within musicology that he has not inspired the sort of in-depth critical studies common in other areas of the field. Even the two most important recent studies of Puccini's music—Julian Budden's Puccini: His Life and Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michele Girardi's Puccini: His International Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)—are organized conservatively, alternating between biographical narration and blow-by-blow accounts of the operas themselves. In contrast, Wilson has little to say about Puccini's life, and grounds his career within the broader history of Italian culture. As an added bonus, she provides two invaluable appendices: one a survey of the bafflingly large number of newspapers and journals published during Puccini's era; the other a guide to the often obscure figures who wrote for these publications. Wilson sweeps away the conventional rhetoric that has hovered, for too long, around Puccini. Yet the story that she puts in its place is a very simple one. In her first chapter, Wilson sketches a portrait of post-unification Italy that will be familiar to any student of the period: a nation fragmented into warring regions and classes, uncertain about its place in the future of Europe. The musical situation was scarcely more secure. We see critics worried about the influence of Wagner and anxiously searching for someone to assume the mantle of an aging Verdi. Working against this backdrop, Puccini's early supporters presented him as the savior of Italian opera, depicting him as both quintessentially Italian and definitively modern. Unfortunately for Puccini, this balance of tradition and innovation was not easy to maintain. In the book's subsequent chapters, Wilson proceeds, chronologically, through all of Puccini's operas from La bohème (1896) to Turandot (1926). At each premiere, she finds critics who hear in Puccini's music all the worst qualities of the modern age: his operas are superficial, cynical, empty, mechanical, and cosmopolitan. Critics' voices become increasingly hostile over the years, but their judgments remain essentially the same. Such consistency lends the book a certain torpor. Strikingly, Wilson avoids some obvious strategies for complicating her narrative, refusing to discuss Puccini's music, the texts of his operas, or the staging and performance of his works. The Puccini Problem is, admittedly, a reception history—yet, instead of "receiving" Puccini's operas, Wilson's critics seem...