Berger William - Puccini without excuses: a refreshing reassessment of the worlds most popular composer

WITHOUT PUCCINI, there is no opera; without opera, the world is an even drearier place than the evening news would have us think. This book is aimed, firstly, at people who would have trouble agreeing with either part of that sentence.

To begin with, there is the issue of opera in general. I do not hold with those who believe that opera is a dying art form. The same things have been said about opera almost since its invention. Opera was said to be doomed when the castrati disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars shut down the conservatories in the early nineteenth century, when tonality was redefined in the twentieth century, and so on. Movies, television, radio, and the Internet were each supposed to nail the coffin lid shut, and all of those media have become part of the opera story. If opera were mortal, it would have died by now.

Yet opera has been neatly contained in an obscure corner, thought to be only for, ahem, certain people, and this riles me. I believe opera is the most important art form. It is not the most important because, as is always said, it subsumes every other art form (which happens to be true), but because at its best it has the ability to probe deeper into the human experience than any other art form. There are never any easy answers in opera, and it promotes critical thinking.

This is why fans are always said to be so passionate. While I can celebrate the high profile of opera in America today, I wish it were even highermuch higher.

There are, however, impediments to raising this profile. Opera will always be considered a foreign art form, and we see all our national neuroses about things foreign in our approach to opera. It will always be marginalized to some degree. Opera continues to attract the elitist label. That there are rich people who support and attend the opera is beyond question, but I must wonder why it is that opera remains the single great signifier of the effete elite. You have all seen the images on television: overdressed, ancient, white audiences wielding lorgnettes while overfed woman onstage hits earsplitting high note. It doesnt matter that this image has little basis in realityit exists and is with us forever. Had there never been this opera house of the imagination, it would have been necessary to invent it. And the image continues to keep opera, and all its considerable power, away from many, many people.

Conversely, the arts marketing people have been working overtime for a generation or so to combat this idea, and in doing so have perhaps overstepped their bounds. Opera is not elite, they have maintained. Its fun, and (worst of all), its good for you, like cultural cod liver oil. This is America. We have to believe, or pretend, that something has an uplifting moral effect in order to support it (cf. baseball). I doubt that opera has ever made anyone a better person. I dont think baseball has either, but I love it all the same. Quality should be an end in itself. Furthermore, opera is elitist, but not in the way it is assumed by detractors to be. It is phenomenally expensive to produce and always has been, and therefore must be funded by someone (the king, corporate foundations, whomever). It is elitist in its performers: only about one in a million people (by one estimate) is born with the instrument necessary to make the sounds required, and only very few of them can follow through on their gift. And it is elitist in its requirements of its audience. We are expected to pay attention if we are to cull what can be culled from the experience. We seem to be able to assimilate these ideas in sports. We ought to be able to do something analogous for opera.

Leaving aside, for now, the issue of operas continuing, illogical, and urgent validity in the world today, we must focus on Puccini within that world. On the one hand, a Puccini fan should have no cause for complaint. Puccinis works are in the repertory of every company, major and minor, and are hugely available on recordings and video. The numbers are unreliable, but I have read that one-fourth of all opera performances in the United States are of three of Puccinis most popular operas (La bohme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly). The number seems plausible. Yet this alone can be a cause for complaint among fans. There is a tendency toward either fossilization of performance or hysterical attempts to revitalize these works, both of which have the effect of reducing their inherent vitality. In general, critics, performers, directors, and audiences have reached a stalemate on this mans art. People like Puccini, and many love him, but one gets the feeling that he is approached in this country as a sort of guilty pleasure, like dessert. I never understood this stance, and let me say right off that I am absolutely allergic to anything that reeks of the sentimental. So how could I stomach Puccini? I have always found a huge degree of insight in his works, and was shocked to discover that there were others who didnt.

A hundred years ago, there may have been something old-fashioned about Puccini. He relied heavily on melody, with which he was ostentatiously gifted, and much of the popularity of his operas was due to the hit tunes, the big arias, in his work. The general movement of opera composers at the time was away from a reliance on the aria and toward an absolute horror of melody. This was a huge issue of debate at the time. It need be less so now. Audiences seem to comprehend that there are different styles of opera, and no one in their right mind posits one form only as the right way. Furthermore, Puccinis arias, magnificent though they may be, are not the whole of the story. There was recently an interesting movie called?(Pi). In it, a young mathematician is on the verge of discovering a sequence of numbers that forms the numerical identity of God. Naturally, everyone wants to wring the secret out of him, from Wall Street to religious factions. At one point, our hero is captured and tortured to reveal the equation. He attempts to explain to his captors, Its not the numbers theyre just numbers! Its the spaces in between them and their relationship to each otherTHATS where God is! It occurred to me that this was the most elegant explanation of opera I had ever heard. The numbersthat is, the arias, or the hits, or the big momentsare not the point. Of course, as in?, they have to be the right numbers, but those are not the essence. The point is the work as a whole. Example: Musettas famous waltz from Act II of