PART I
Essays
Realism and Skepticism in Pucciniâs Early Operas
ARMAN SCHWARTZ
The final act of Amilcare Ponchielli and Arrigo Boitoâs 1876 opera La Gioconda takes place in âthe entry hall of a dilapidated palaceâ on Veniceâs Giudecca island. It is a lonely, indeterminate space, designed to contrast maximally with the glamorous, public, andâto any tourist or collector of lithographsâfamiliar Venetian tableaux that had dominated the previous three acts. As the curtain opens, Gioconda, a beautiful singer, is struggling to reconcile herself to an awful bargain she has made: she will offer her body to the malicious spy Barnaba if he frees Enzo, the object of her own unrequited love. After securing safe passage out of the city for Enzo and his lover, Laura, Gioconda attempts to flee, only to be cornered by her nemesis. There is no way out, and the singer consents to Barnabaâs proposal, asking only for a moment to pretty herself first. Then, unexpectedly, Gioconda pulls out a small dagger and stabs herself in the heart. She âfalls to the ground as if struck by lightning,â and the opera concludes with what must count as one of the strangest stage directions in the history of Italian opera: âBending over the corpse of Gioconda and screaming into her ear with furious voice,â Barnaba informs her that he has killed her mother.
The unforgettable image of a man screaming into a dead womanâs ear has no precedent in the literary source for La Gioconda, Victor Hugoâs 1835 play Angelo, tyran de Padoue, nor does it feature in Saverio Mercadante and Gaetano Rossiâs Il giuramento (1837), an earlier opera inspired by Hugoâs text. Yet however murky its origins, Ponchielli and Boitoâs conceit would soon take on a life of its own. Scenes in which men confront deaf or silent women appear prominently in both Giacomo Pucciniâs Manon Lescaut (1893) and his La bohĂšme (1896), and there are clear parallels between the conclusion of La Gioconda and the second act of Tosca (1900). (Indeed, if Pucciniâs diva had stabbed herself instead of Scarpia, the two scenes would be hard to tell apart.) This chapter proposes that the final act of La Gioconda constitutes something like the primal scene of Pucciniâs oeuvre; it is a scene he would revisit throughout his career, recasting its climactic confrontation in increasingly sublimated forms. By tracking these recurrences, we may gain a new understanding of Pucciniâs early operas. More specifically, we may be prompted to reconsider the composerâs relationship with the verismo movement, and with the aesthetic and philosophical anxieties it provoked. Taking my cue from recent scholarship on the dramaturgy of âskepticismâ in realist spoken theater, I suggest that Puccini uses isolated, desperate charactersâfigures who, like Barnaba, struggle to establish meaningful connections with those around themâin order to engage with larger questions about the situation of opera in a silent, newly disenchanted world.
From La Gioconda to Manon Lescaut
Although it remained enormously popular in Italy for generations after its premiere, La Gioconda might not seem to have had, from the perspective of current historiography, much of an afterlife at all. Ponchielli is often depicted as a conservative stalwart, purveying Meyerbeerian âeffects without causesâ well after the genre of grand opera had faded from fashion.1 Nonetheless, La Gioconda exhibits a decidedly nontraditional anxiety about its own medial conditions. Diegetic performances, those hallowed vehicles for operatic self-reflection, abound in La Gioconda, and a relentless thematization of the human mouthâfrom the heroineâs Leonardine name to the menacing statue of a bocca di leone that looms over the first act set and the speaking trumpets that the sailors place on their lips at the start of Act 2âhelps call attention to the physicality of vocal production.2 Hearing, too, takes on extraordinary importance: one of the main characters is blind, and many others spend whole scenes in masks. Barnaba may be the only spy in La Gioconda, but his profession is an apt metaphor for all the inhabitants of Ponchielliâs world.
The operaâs pervasive concern with performance, hearing, and spectatorship coalesces in its final scene. Crucially, Gioconda begins by describing herself as an operatic diva:
Tâarresta. Raffrena il selvaggio delirio! | Halt. Restrain your savage joy! |
Voâ farmi piĂč gaia, piĂč fulgida ancor. | I want to make myself even more gay and bright. |
Per te voglio ornare la bionda mia testa | For you I want to adorn my blonde head |
di porpora e dâor! | with purple and gold! |
Con tutti gli orpelli sacrati alla scena | Iâm already covered with all the tinsel of the |
dei pazzi teatri coperta giĂ son. | stages of frivolous theaters. |
Ascolta di questa sapiente sirena | Listen to the sweet song |
la dolce canzon. | of this skillful siren. |
Ponchielliâs music here amplifies Boitoâs imagery. Gioconda sings a series of flashy, but stock coloratura gesturesâlaughing ornaments, staccato broken triadsâthat sound nothing like the weightier music given to her elsewhere in the opera. Julian Budden has despaired that Giocondaâs âdescent [âŠ] to the coquettish language of Violetta in Act 1 of La traviata verges on the bathetic.â3 Yet her lapse into an earlier and more self-consciously performative mode of operatic expression, at precisely the moment in which she presents herself as an opera singer, must be Ponchielliâs point. Barnaba, too, is transported to the operatic past. Listening to Giocondaâs âdolce canzonâ he repeats the old formulas of Romantic desireââEbbrezza! Delirio!ââas mechanically as did any primo ottocento hero.4
Both the musical style and the distinctive poetic meter change the instant Barnaba realizes that he has been deceived:
Ah! ferma! irrision!⊠ebben ⊠or tu ⊠| Ah! stop! derision! ⊠well then ⊠now you ⊠|
mâodi ⊠e muori dannata: | hear me ⊠and die damned: |
(curvandosi sul cadavere di Gioconda e gridandogli allâ orecchio con voce furibonda) | (bending over Giocondaâs corpse and screaming with a furious voice in her ear) |
Ier tua madre mâha offeso! Io lâho affogata! | Yesterday your mother offended me! I drowned her! |
Non ode piĂč!! | She hears no more!! |
Ponchielli sets these faltering lines to a series of chromatically ascending octave drops that sound like a desperate attempt to reassert authority, but also suggest a voice on the verge of breaking. Similarly, Barnabaâs words are both emphatic and inscrutable. Is it Gioconda, or her mother, that no longer hears him? Should âmâodiâ be translated as âyou hear meâ or (as some English language translators render the phrase) âyou hate meâ?5 It is as if Giocondaâs deafness has infected the audience; we, as much as the protagonist, are unable to fathom the message that Barnaba so violently intones.
Indeed, the final moments of La Gioconda are full of strange transfers and reversals. Just as previously Barnaba had been a passive spectator, now he struggles to make himself heard. By a similar logic, Gioconda ceases to perform for Barnaba and is instead recast, however unwillingly, as his silent audience. Barnabaâs final speech to Giocondaâs corpse might thus be described as replaying the earlier deception scene, but with its conventionalized gender roles reversed. Yet this reversal also unchains a string of paradoxes: a performer who speaks sincerely, an audience that cannot hear. If the final scene of La Gioconda asks to be read as an allegory of theatrical performance, it is a cautionary tale: truth and meaningful connection are precluded from its rigid roles. Perhaps this is why Barnarba, after emitting a final unpitched and incoherent âAh!!!,â rushes off into the darkened alleyways of Venice. They resemble the mess of hallways that wind behind the stage of any theater: a maze to get lost in, but also a place to hide from the footlightsâ deadly glare.
With this cluster of concerns in mind, let us turn from the fourth act of La Gioconda to the fourth act of Manon Lescaut. Puccini studied composition with Ponchielli during his final two years at the Milan Conservatory (1882â83) and La Gioconda was a formative influence on the young composer. From it, Puccini learned the technique of recycling short melodic fragments to create grand orchestral perorations at the end of acts, and he drew on La Gioconda for more local models as well. âSuicidio!,â Giocondaâs famous final aria, seems clearly to have inspired âSola, perduta, abbandonata,â Manonâs last, and equally despairing, solo utterance.
Puccini also seems to have adapted from La Gioconda an altogether more eccentric set of dramaturgical ideas. Like his teacherâs opera, Manon Lescaut follows three busy, crowded acts with a shorter final act that focuses exclusively on the main characters and seems designed to frustrate expectations for spectacle. (Here the scene is a flat and barren desert âon the borders of New Orleans.â) What is more, and perhaps not unrelated to these final scenic voids, both La Gioconda and Manon Lescaut feature heroines who seem to lack coherent selves. In Buddenâs assessment of the former work, âGioconda herself is less a personality than a succession of moods and attitudesâwilting and forlorn in Act One, the avenging tigress in Act Two, an almost âveristicâ victim in her great aria in Act Four.â6 Similarly, Alessandra Campana describes how Manon âadapts to the changing background, mirroring and fulfilling the expectations prepared by each setting.â7 Campana perceives a connection between the large-scale dramaturgy of Manon Lescaut and the peculiar character of the heroine who inhabits it. If the first three acts of Pucciniâs opera position Manon as the willing object of the audienceâs gaze (sutured through the obsessive onstage looking of Manonâs lover, Des Grieux), the last act implies that, outside of this spectacular structure, there is nothing. Tellingly, and thinking back again to La Gioconda, Campana invokes the figure of a spy to make her argument. In Acts 1 through 3, we look at Manon as if through a keyhole; in Act 4, we hear footsteps, and realize that we, too, are being seen. âNo longer hidden behind the look of onstage spectators, those in the theatre are abruptly deprived of that illusion of mastery over the scene that they had been surreptitiously and repeatedly granted thus far,â Campana writes, and her words could easily be applied to the final moments of Ponchielliâs opera.8 So could her final judgment: âAct Four reveals how the operatic machinery is necessarily founded on voyeurism.â9
Like many critics since the workâs premiere, Campana treats the last act of Manon Lescaut as a single, undifferentiated span of time. It may be possible, though, to pinpoint the moment when the âoperatic machineryâ fi...