Recondite Harmony: Essays on Puccini's Operas (original) (raw)

Ariadne's threads: Puccini and Cinema

Studi Musicali , 2012

Unlike many of his contemporaries, such as Giordano, Mascagni and Romberg, and despite being a cinephile who had received offers to write for films, Puccini never wrote or arranged his music for the cinema. Yet perhaps in a way he did. Or rather, Puccini’s operatic scores have “cinematic” qualities that not only make them useful for soundtracks, but can also usurp narrative functions now usually carried out by filmic techniques, such as dissolves, fade-ins, fade-outs and superimpositions, to indicate the nature of spatial and temporal relationships with which to carry forward the narrative thread. Noël Burch labels these filmic codes “Institutional Modes of Representation” (IMR), as opposed to the primitive modes (PMR) of earlier film. The term “Ariadne’s thread” can be used to denote a problem-solving system, in which logical steps are exhaustively applied to systematically explore all possible alternatives or routes, backtracking when necessary. Many scholars who have explored the nature of film music often seem to practice an Ariadne-like, step-by-step search. This article, building upon the work of Leukel and Leydon, follows the thread of the intimate and intricate relationship between late 19th- and early 20th-century Italian operatic compositional trends and the birth of cinema during the same period, hypothesizing musical “cognates” of cinematic techniques in Puccini’s music. Finally, it explores, through the writings of Adorno, Eisler and others, the narrative functions of film music and the operatic score.

The silent maestro. Giacomo Puccini and the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik.

Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, 11, 2014

The article studies the use of Giacomo Puccini’s creations in one of the most complete and complex catalogues of music for silent films: the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik (1927), by Giuseppe Becce, Hans Erdmann and Ludwig Brav. The presence of Puccini in this compilation consists of 86 fragments from 6 operas: Gianni Schicchi, La Fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, Suor Angelica, Il Tabarro and Le Villi. The fragments are extracted from instrumental “fantasies” by Emile Tavan, Gaetano Luporini and Adolphe Gauwin. The excerpts are classified by an elaborated system based on a series of verbal “labels” referring to emotions or situations, which are ordered in a hierarchical scale. However, the hierarchy seems to present some intrinsic contradictions, as the “labels” with the higher rank appear to be slightly different between the main index and the actual catalogue. It’s nonetheless possible to infer a tripartite hierarchy, based on the concepts of “Dramatic”, “Lyric” and generic “Situation” (Dramatische, Lyrische and Incidenz). A throughout analysis of the puccinian selection reveals that most of the fragments appear in the “Lyric” section. Moreover, the greatest part of them are joined with labels referring to positive emotions (“Love”, “Luck”, “Joy and Peace”, “Hymn” etc.). Puccini’s music tends to be completely separated from its original context and meaning. Becce seems to have been guided by the mere “acoustic” feeling of the fragments to assign them their respective places. In this selection, Puccini’s operas like Il Tabarro or Suor Angelica are depicted as overall bright works, incline to fantasy, melancholy and occasional gaiety. It’s possible to explain this apparently unacceptable interpretation of Becce with a quotation from the first volume of the Allgemeines Handbuch: «The best film music is the one that cannot be listened to alone.» Becce, Erdmann and Brav were already aware of one of the main principles that modern film composers use in their work: the music has to depend on the moving images, and these images have to be completed by music. If Puccini’s music would have been catalogued in strict respect to its original finalities, it would have resulted in being inappropriate for cinema performances: it would have recalled memories and sensations that would likely have given a wrong sense to a film sequence. That kind of logic is perhaps the same that made Becce avoid to use excerpts from operas such as La Bohème, Tosca and Madame Butterfly: their melodies may have been too well-known to be effectively “disguised” through a clever work of classification. Puccini’s music, in the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik, contributed to the consolidation and to the explication of an important aesthetic tendency in early film music. However, it managed to do such a thing by losing its dramatic sense and its verses. In the cinema hall Puccini became a silent maestro, who gave a life and a future to flickering shadows on a luminous screen.

Story, Style, and Structure in the Operas of César Cui

Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 2002

The fifteen operas of Russian composer César Antonovich Cui (1835-1918) heretofore have never been addressed in a comprehensive fashion. For the first time this study analyzes together Cui's six full-length operas (Prisoner of the Caucasus, William Ratcliff, Angelo, Le Flibustier, The Saracen, and The Captain's Daughter) and his shorter stage works (a comedy, one-act tragedies, and children's operas). Using evidence in printed sources, it examines their musico-dramatic features within the context of the conditions under which they were composed and performed. These conditions include the reception accorded them and their relation to the works of Cui's contemporaries and to his own operatic ideals. Several indications of likely influences from other models or genres have been posited or identified in such figures ranging from Meyerbeer to Balakirev, as have likely exchanges of musical ideas between Cui and other composers, especially Rimsky-Korsakov. This study shows that Cui and his operas maintained a persistent, if not pervasive, position in the musical life of the era, and that to a certain extent his works bore relation to contemporaneous historical events and political circumstances. His position is both enriched and complicated by his intense and polemical activity in music journalism, wherein among other things he promoted the esthetic ideals of his circle and advocated for the works of Russian composers. The study uncovers, and at times reinterprets, the problematic and interesting aspects of Cui's musico-dramatic style — which incorporated certain stylistic features characteristic of Russian art music — in recognition of his avoidance of Russian subjects (except primarily Pushkin). These factors are intertwined with the shifting tastes of his Russian audience, for whom most of the operas were composed. As this study demonstrates, Cui's primary operatic achievements lie in being the first member of the "mighty handful" to have an opera performed (William Ratcliff); being the first of them to have an opera performed in the West (Prisoner of the Caucasus) and the first Russian to premiere an opera in Paris (Le Flibustier); completion of Dargomyzhsky's Stone Guest (with Rimsky-Korsakov) and Musorgsky's Fair at Sorochintsy; and his considerable contribution to the repertory of children's opera in Russia.