A pioneer of the modern mood
Fiona Maddocks
PUCCINI: A BIOGRAPHY by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz Northeastern University Press, $30, pp. 384 ISBN 1555535305 PUCCINI: HIS LIFE AND WORKS by Julian Budden Master Musicians, OUP, £25, pp. 320, ISBN 0198164688 PUCCINI: HIS INTERNATIONAL ART by Michele Girardi, translated by Laura Basini University of Chicago Press, £28, pp. 530 ISBN 0226297578 Music has been poorly served by biography. Composers. unlike writers, painters, scientists, pop stars, footballers, have been left behind as the old-fashioned, respectful assessment of a life yields to a grander, more imaginative gesture in which writer and subject meet head-on. Humphrey Carpenter's Benjamin Britten, enlivened by new details about that composer's enthusiasm for young boys, provoked debate. Humphrey Burton's sharp study of Leonard Bernstein caused a ripple. H. C. Robbins Landon's 1791: Mozart's Last Year was a gift of a subject, deftly handled. All came out around a decade ago. No one has managed the same trick with Bach or Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms.
I could go on. Since these things are not much talked about, I will. While one excellent, Whitbread award-winning book on Pepys can make the best-seller chart, another — David Cairns's masterly twovolume study of Berlioz — sank without commercial trace, Yet until Claire Tomalin (supported by proper marketing) persuaded us otherwise Pepys arguably occupied a dustier corner of active human awareness than Berlioz.
The reasons are plain. You can enjoy music without opening a book, just as you can stroll through a landscape without ticking off triangulation points on your ordnance survey map. Readers fight shy of books laden with musical extracts. Even the musically adept, if they are honest, tend to skip them (why not put them at the back where at least they won't interrupt the narrative?). Publishers, necessarily answerable to marketing departments, are wary of any title which might be consigned to Mammon's mortuary, the section of a bookshop marked 'music'.
Bearing all this in mind, three new books on Puccini aroused my keen interest. Would they break free of the corsetry which has stifled so much writing on music? For a subject as fertile and popular as the composer of La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, there was every chance. The Puccini bibliography, as might be imagined, already runs into pages. Mosco Carncr's classic 1958 study begins to look dog-eared. Attitudes have changed. We have, grudgingly in some circles, progressed beyond the low-brow', 'secondrate' reputation. The American scholar Joseph Kerman's 'shabby little shocker' jibe was aimed at Tosca, but for half a century or more set the critical tone for appreciating Puccini's entire oeuvre.
Yet far from representing the dying fall of the 19th century, the final flowering of a tradition of Italian opera which began with Monteverdi. progressed through Rossini and Bellini and peaked with Verdi, Puccini is now regarded, at least by some of us, as a pioneer, a modernist, an adventurer, a revolutionary. In his own era he was compared unfavourably to Verdi because he chose modern life as his subject matter, rather than epic figures from history. He was never big on kings and queens. Date-rape with a bit of coke-snorting thrown in would be a likely subject were he alive today. Now he can be seen to presage the musical explosion of the 20th century. When Puccini died in 1924, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were in their prime. There was, it seems, no one left to write in his style. His mantle — big tunes, high emotion — was assumed by composers of film scores and musicals. Sondheim and Lloyd Webber owe debts to him. On Broadway it is Boherne, not Rigaletto or Traviata, that plays to packed houses, thanks to Baz Luhrmann.
Would any of these books share that forward-looking view, or address a general reader? All three authors are known authorities on Italian opera. Each book is published by a university press with the reliable trimmings that implies: footnotes, bibliographies, catalogues of works. The most ambitious in scope, placing Puccini in a wider European context (as its title indicates), is Michele Girardi's Puccini: His International Art. First published in Italy in 1995, this is a new English translation (by Laura Basini) in paperback. The pages of closely argued musical analysis sit awkwardly alongside his riveting examination of the cultural atmosphere of turn-of-thecentury Italy. If you fillet that which interests you, the rewards are satisfying.
Budden and Phillips-Matz have written on Verdi (whom, one suspects, they both secretly prefer). Both shape their narratives around the operas. The approach is good for dipping in, less inviting as a read. Phillips-Matz writes with knowledgeable enthusiasm rather than finesse (the subeditor could have worked harder), tireless in her detail about the man and his complex, indecisive nature. The public scandal and court case over his supposed affair with a servant girl are sensitively handled, his addiction to fast cars, speed boats, ocean liners and other 20th-century pleasures — notably the tobacco which killed him — generously itemised. Her strength lies in human interest and anecdote. Rather more skimpy is her discussion of the music. Perhaps to do both is impossible.
Julian Budden's Puccini: His Life and Works forms part of the venerable, if worthy, Master Musicians Series from which, until now, Puccini has been excluded. (Opera lovers, according to the series founder, Sir Hubert Parry, possess the lowest of all musical taste.) Half as long again as the Phillips-Matz, Budden's thick volume offers a closer examination of the operas — with musical examples — while also giving a wealth of scene-setting documentary detail about first performances, press reaction and so forth. There are more photographs here, but those in PhillipsMatz are livelier. Budden is President of the Centre for Puccini Studies in Lucca. He knows his stuff. This will prove an indispensable reference book though not quite a rollicking good read. The case for Puccini, modernist composer in the age of mass media, has yet to be put before the public who flock to hear his music and depart the wiser for it.
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