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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. Puccini and Verdi are unquestionably the two giants of 19th-century Italian grand opera. Like Verdi, Puccini knew what his audience wanted, and supplied it – in Puccini's case, a highly coloured world of sweeping emotion, melodrama shot through with a kind of sadism. His three greatest operas, La Bohème – the most popular opera ever written – Tosca and Madama Butterfly are invariably staged every year, while Turandot, La fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, and Gianni Schicchi appear only scarcely less often. Ever the hard-drinking, chain-smoking sportsman, Puccini had much of the raffish playboy about him. He bought himself fast cars, yachts named after the works whose proceeds financed them, and built a magnificent house at Torre del Largo where he continued his womanising under the jealous eye of his wife, Elvira. Michael Steen's narrative follows the progress of the small boy stealing the organ pipes of his village church on the rocky road to fame to become this larger-than-life figure. Supported for several years by his publisher Ricordi, Puccini's first real hit was Manon Lescaut, heavily influenced by Massenet. Subsequent success saw him joining the jet set, and travelling to England and America, his star only eclipsed by the First World War. But his appeal remains clear and direct, as the director Jonathan Miller says: 'I'm made to cry by Puccini and I never am by Verdi.'
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-806-9
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
Puccini and Verdi are unquestionably the two giants of 19th-century Italian grand opera. Like Verdi, Puccini knew what his audience wanted, and supplied it – in Puccini's case, a highly coloured world of sweeping emotion, melodrama shot through with a kind of sadism. His three greatest operas, La Bohème – the most popular opera ever written – Tosca and Madama Butterfly are invariably staged every year, while Turandot, La fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, and Gianni Schicchi appear only scarcely less often.
Ever the hard-drinking, chain-smoking sportsman, Puccini had much of the raffish playboy about him. He bought himself fast cars, yachts named after the works whose proceeds financed them, and built a magnificent house at Torre del Largo where he continued his womanising under the jealous eye of his wife, Elvira. Michael Steen's narrative follows the progress of the small boy stealing the organ pipes of his village church on the rocky road to fame to become this larger-than-life figure.
Supported for several years by his publisher Ricordi, Puccini's first real hit was Manon Lescaut, heavily influenced by Massenet. Subsequent success saw him joining the jet set, and travelling to England and America, his star only eclipsed by the First World War. But his appeal remains clear and direct, as the director Jonathan Miller says: ‘I'm made to cry by Puccini and I never am by Verdi.’
PUCCINI
ONE OF THE first musical ‘events’ of the 20th century was the première of Tosca in Rome on 14 January 1900. It was magnificent theatre, and a great 19th-century opera. Organisers of events to mark the turning of centuries and similar jubilees would be hard pressed to find anything better to stage: a simple, straightforward drama, with a big spectacle. It provided an opportunity for Puccini to write some of his best and most memorable songs, such as ‘Vissi d’Arte’ and ‘E Lucevan le Stelle’. Anyone hearing it would surely agree that ‘where erotic passion, sensuality, tenderness, pathos and despair meet and fuse, he was an unrivalled master’.1 Yet, Puccini’s name does not appear in the index of Alfred Einstein’s leading work on Music in the Romantic Era written just after the Second World War.
So where does he fit in? Although traces of Tristan, Debussy and the whole-tone scale are detected in some of his works, Puccini is hardly a 20th-century composer: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was premièred in May 1913, over a decade before Turandot.
Most composers have damned him. Stravinsky dismissed MadameButterfly as ‘treacly violin music’.2* Fauré labelled La Bohème a ‘dreadful Italian work’4 and Richard Strauss said that he could not distinguish between it and Butterfly.5 The leading Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini put his finger on the problem: ‘In many Puccini operas you could change the words, and any other set would do.’6 Of the Paris première of Tosca in 1903, Fauré wrote to his wife: ‘At the very beginning of September there will be an important première at the Opéra-Comique; important because of the personality of Sardou, the librettist, and the bizarre school of music to which the composer of the music belongs, Puccini. They consist of three or four fellows who have conjured up a neo-Italian art which is easily the most miserable thing in existence; a kind of soup, where every style from every country gets all mixed up. And everywhere, alas! they are welcomed with open arms.’7
