- - -
[...] "All I know," I said, "is that they like your music. It is the same with the soldiers. Sometimes they like their music gay, and then at other times they like music with deep religious feelings."
It was not much of an answer. But Giacomo seized on it.
"You see, it's all there, gentlemen," he exclaimed. "The important thing is that human emotions are not changed by the wars. Life is fundamentally simple, and so is my music. The wars pay attention to frontiers, but people don't." (Del Fiorentino, pp. 167-68)
Never physically threatened by the conflict, Puccini fell into a profound depression during the war, as Del Fiorentino saw. To Adami he wrote,
Loneliness is as wide as the sea; it is as smooth as a lake; it is as black as night; and it is also as green as bile! My present indecision exhausts me, wears me out, irritates, and depresses me... I am turning into an imbecile, like a rock, that stands silent and turns gray as it is weathered by time... The Austrians have my crown, and I no longer have it: I'm like the king in the Tarot cards. What about music? I don't answer. [It's] gone with the wind, like the ashes of suicides that drift away. [Tito] Ricordi's proposals humiliate me. All said, this state of affairs can't continue. I am alone. You can imagine what fun! Nicche has been called back into service and has left. Tonio is in Milan. Let me hear from you. I won't tell you to come because I know you can't. But if you were free, what joy you would give me! (GP to GA, March 11, 1915, in Adami, p. 196)
On October 10, 1915, with Italy already in the war, Puccini made a private statement about Italian art, one he never tried to publish.
"Although I recognize great merit in these French musicians, the direct followers of the Russians, yet I say that our art is, must be, and has been the ruler of the world, and insist that we Italians are [not so cruel] as foreigners. Italian geniality, even if it is less rich in technique, imposes itself on the world. And [should] we seek to depreciate it by accepting, desiring, and encouraging conglomerations and intrigues of notes? No! Clear Italian light must restore our [strength]." (GP to Carlo Vanbianchi, October 10, 1915, in Charles Hamilton catalogue for Auction No. 146, May 20, 1981)
Puccini's neutrality and his failure to help with benefits and fund-raisers would eventually have cost him Toscanini's friendship in any case.
- - -
The opera [La Rondine] was completely finished in October 1915. In trying to arrange the world premiere, he faced several problems, because he was contractually obligated to present it in Austria, where he now could not travel. Because his operas were boycotted in Germany, he might even be denied permission to give it in Vienna at all. For a while, it seemed La Rondine might never reach the stage. Worse, he needed the income at a time when opera companies had shortened their seasons or canceled them altogether.
- - -
[...] the problem started with Puccini's complicated arrangements about the rights. He had been able to meet the Austrian impresarios in Switzerland before all travel had been stopped, and he renegotiated his contract during that meeting. No longer required to give the world premiere in Vienna, where the war prevented its production, he had to cede his rights for Austria, Germany, and the United States, three major markets. [...] In the end, however, this long dispute was resolved.
- - -
News of the premiere and the planned cast of La Rondine appeared in a dispatch from Paris, dated January 1917. It also appeared in the February 10 number of Musical America, which announced that the Polish soprano Rosa Raisa would sing Magda. According to Raisa's biographer, Charles Mintzer, the threat of submarines was so great that she could not cross the Atlantic, and another singer had to be engaged.
- - -
He wrote to Schnabl:
"I am may troubled about going to Milan. I am not used to the new Italy; and Milan is the university of new ways." (GP to RSR, December 25, 1920, in Gara, pp. 499-500)
La Scala could not reopen until December 26, 1921, when Toscanini conducted Falstaff. Bicchi remembered Puccini reading about the opening night in the Corriere della Sera and seizing the occasion to make sarcastic comments about Toscanini. However concerned the composer may have been about Italy, he was even more worried about the European theaters, especially those where his works had been banned during the war. Naturally, some of his most popular operas recovered quickly, but others fought to stay alive.
* * *
Trechos de The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, And Modernity (2007), de Alexandra Wilson.
La Rondine (1917) was seen as a lightweight quasi-operetta, condemned as a hybrid work and even an "enemy opera" in a
time of conflict. Finally, just as Puccini's status as national composer seemed to be in profound danger, Gianni
Schicchi (1918) was hailed as the ray of light Italy needed as it emerged from the First World War.- - -
The Futurists also had other agendas. Their first intention was to stage a protest against the Austrians, in order to further their campaign for Italian entry into the First World War: the performance of Fanciulla on 15 September 1914 coincided with the Battle of the Marne. Their second aim was to express their hostility towards a composer and an audience that represented everything that they held in contempt. Marinetti's disdain for the past - manifested most vehemently in his instruction to his followers to "set fire to the bookshelves of the libraries! ... Deviate the route of canals to flood the museums!" - also informed his attitude towards Puccini, the most prominent composer keeping alive an art form that, in the eyes of the Futurists, was nauseating and obsolete. The Futurists were enraged by the fact that Puccini and his audience were able to enjoy a glittering social event without apparent thought for the conflict taking place a few hundred miles away to the north. Once again, Puccini had become embroiled in a political debate despite his intentions.
At the end of the first act of Fanciulla the audience at the Dal Verme that night were rising to their feet to applaud the singers and the maestro when, suddenly, an uproar was heard from the balcony. Amid loud cries of "Down with Austria!", "Down with Puccini!", "Long live Marinetti!", one man unfurled an Italian flag, whilst another set fire to an Austrian standard. Confusion ensued as the protestors were apprehended and ushered from the theatre; the orchestra struck up the Marcia Reale, and the rest of the evening's performance passed uneventfully. The incident was reported in the Milanese press, but Puccini's later biographers do not mention it; evidently they felt it to be insignificant or were eager to cover it up. The event may have been glossed over as an embarrassment, but reading Marinetti's own account of the night reveals the strength of the avant garde's contempt for Puccini, for his audience and for opera as an institution. Marinetti painted a heroic picture of the demonstration, using a machine-gun-like style of prose to convey the excitement and dynamism of the occasion.
- - -
By the spring of 1915 Italy had herself "accepted the sorry necessity of war" and joined the Allied campaign. Meanwhile, the image of Puccini as a cowardly neutralist promoted by Marinetti had not disappeared. Out of a commercially minded desire to avoid alienating German and Austrian audiences, Puccini had refused to sign artists' petitions protesting against German aggression towards Belgium in late 1914 and the bombardment of Reims at the beginning of 1915. The Parisian press, and principally the extreme right-wing Leon Daudet of the Action Française, accused Puccini of disloyalty to the allied cause. Daudet was to attack Puccini again two years later when he produced an "enemy opera", La Rondine, originally commissioned as an operetta by the Karltheater in Vienna but moved to neutral Monaco on account of the hostilities. Puccini's new opera once again called into question his status as a national or international composer, not only because, like Fanciulla, it was first performed abroad, but also because of the generic questions that it raised.
- - -
After a war that had left Italy battered and bruised, Gianni Schicchi seemed a reaffirmation of a healthy, positive Italianness, a work "destined joyously to gladden the restless spirits of the twentieth century". Not only had Puccini produced his sunniest opera to date, composed in a "single burst of inspiration" in the manner advocated by Verdi (unlike the "episodic" Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica), but it was the first he had set in Italy since Tosca. Furthermore, it was based on a work by Dante, that most iconic of Italian cultural heroes. Gianni Schicchi was thus widely hailed as a national masterpiece, even drawing praise from the ultra-nationalistic Idea Nazionale, which applauded the composer for his return to an Italian subject "after so many useless Japanese, American, Parisian digressions". The critic for this newspaper welcomed Schicchi as a truly Italian opera, which had emerged from the grey operatic scene of the past few years, and which represented "our people, our refinement, our accents, clear Italian vivacity": finally, the critic wrote, the Italian people could breathe once more.
- - -
[...] members of the generation born around 1880, had advocated Italy's entry into the First World War, which they hoped would provide the "struggle" and "purpose" that they had so long craved, and act as a stimulus for national reinvigoration. In the event, however, the "great collective war" had not been the glorious Italian victory for which they had hoped: Italy had suffered great losses on the Alpine Front.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrWPsj6fVbeVXgJF6RF9-JmjfkUJDjuSA
