Customer Reviews

Puccini: His International Art

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Michele Girardi's much-honored Italian work is now available in a graceful English translation. This book is more dense, musically speaking, than most opera studies, but it is an extremely refreshing account nonetheless. Girardi's deep understanding of opera history, the Italian music and publishing industry, the various sources for Puccini's operas, and, most important, Puccini's musical fingerprints has produced an essential handbook for singers, instrumentalists, Puccini admirers, and opera fans generally. The emphasis here is on Puccini's musical cosmopolitanism, beginning with his early introduction to Wagner's music, especially "Parsifal." Throughout his life, Puccini had great respect for and curiosity about his contemporaries in the opera world, and Girardi has assembled a wealth of persuasive musical evidence confirming that curiosity.

Also, Girardi convincingly shows that, from the start, Puccini's promise was great and fully recognized by the most sophisticated publishers and composers. In particular, his account of the creation of Puccini's first opera, "Le villi," together with a fresh look at the Sonzogno competition in which Puccini entered its score, shows that Giulio Ricordi, Verdi's publisher, knew from the start that Puccini might represent a gold mine for his firm and therefore lavished attention and favors on the 25-year-old musical neophyte. Girardi's account helps to dispel the traditional image of the youthful Puccini as lazy, slipshod, and decidedly unpromising, and it shows Giulio Ricordi to be a man of exquisite taste and judgment.

Best of all, Girardi shows that much of the pleasure that professionals and amateurs take in Puccini's music is due to the consummate craftsmanship with which Puccini used tiny musical phrases and rhythmic patterns to intensify both his plot and his characters. The chapter on "Boheme," for example, shows how this habit of using melody and rhythm to foreshadow later events makes the opera's climax almost unbearably moving and dramatically inevitable. Girardi's enthusiasm for "Il trittico," particularly for the much maligned and misunderstood "Suor Angelica," should enable a new generation of stage directors and audiences to appreciate more fully Puccini's musical and dramatic intentions in this brilliant work.

It is rewarding to see that, through Girardi's book, Puccini's long-acknowledged genius as a man of the theatre can finally be linked to his unacknowledged genius as a composer without making apologies or allowances.

(This review is based on the paperback edition of Girardi's work.)