Context and overview of Puccini's major works

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Puccini is one of the most successful of all composers of opera. Almost all of his works are regularly performed around the world, and several – La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Tosca and Turandot – are among the top operatic favourites. The reasons for the extraordinary popularity of his operas were clear from his earliest big success, Manon Lescaut. This opera confidently combines a sense of continuous melody with the descriptive use of music to create a vivid sense of place and character that is to be found in all his subsequent stage works.

One of Puccini’s best-known qualities is the ability to write beautiful melodies, charged with emotion. Those for his heroines are especially haunting – Tosca’s ‘Vissi d’arte’, Cio-Cio-San’s ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ (Madama Butterfly) or Liu’s ‘Signore, ascolta’ (Turandot) – although for world-wide fame Calaf’s ‘Nessun dorma’ (Turandot) can’t be beaten! Yet Puccini’s operas also have a wonderful driving motion, the music interpreting the shifting play of the conversations of the characters and building towards intense conclusions to each act.

It was with Tosca that Puccini refined this creation of sustained dramatic tension, each of its three acts building slowly and inexorably towards a thrilling climax: a big religious ceremony, torture followed by murder, and finally a firing squad and a suicide. More broadly, the three one-act operas of Il trittico demonstrate Puccini’s ability to evoke contrasting musical moods using techniques to match each story’s tone: suspenseful (Il tabarro), ecstatic (Suor Angelica) and comic (Gianni Schicchi).

Puccini was drawn to stories with strong emotions – love, jealousy, rage, compassion – but avoided the kings, queens and history lessons of 19th-century grand opera. Instead, he preferred characters with more personal conflicts that the audience could relate to, even when the situation was exotic, as with the Japan of Madama Butterfly or the Oregon gold rush of La fanciulla del West.

The detailed demands Puccini placed on his librettists for rewrite after rewrite were an indication of how focused his vision could be, and how sure-footed his theatrical sense was. His operas are packed with action and suspense, and the music is often descriptive of specific stage events, as in many film scores. He also uses short, distinctive themes to evoke vividly a character or a dramatic mood: for example, the four big chords for the malevolent Scarpia in Tosca, with which the opera opens. 

In his own country, Puccini was considered the successor to Verdi only reluctantly for most of his life, as contemporary Italian critics thought his style too ‘international’ and not sufficiently ‘pure’ to represent the best of Italian music to the world. For example, there are flashes of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in the seductive tones of Madama Butterfly, the whirling of the Viennese waltz in La rondine and signs of the more raw and rhythmic sounds of Stravinsky in Turandot. But these are essentially exotic elements grafted onto Puccini’s musical identity to reinforce the specific location and atmosphere of each of his opera’s stories. Today, there is no hesitation in considering him the greatest Italian opera composer of his time, and indeed since.

John Snelson

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