Puccini: Love, ladies and a lost finale

A century ago, the composer Giacomo Puccini died leaving a legacy of 12 operas – although he had not been able to complete his last one, Turandot, when he succumbed to complications during treatment for throat cancer in November 1924. For some time before he died, he had been struggling with the ending of the story, based to an extent on Carlo Gozzi’s play of the same name. Unlike the vividly realistic stories of the central female characters in seven of his previous operas, this time Puccini had chosen an almost far-fetched subject based on a fairy-tale. He had been attracted to the strange and somewhat fanciful narrative of how in ancient China the young princess Turandot sends countless suitors to their deaths.

Princes from near and far are so mesmerized by Turandot’s mysterious beauty and ice-cold aloofness that they are prepared to risk their lives, but Turandot will only give her hand to someone who can give correct answers to three almost impossible-to-answer riddles. When, finally, an unknown prince (secretly called Calaf) solves them, Turandot is devastated as she had thought this impossible. Calaf, so passionately confident in the triumph of his love, risks his life again saying that if anyone can find out his name before dawn, Turandot can order his execution. He is convinced that, even though nobody will sleep that night, no one will discover his identity. Thus, what has become (thanks to the 1990 Football World Cup) perhaps the most famous opera aria of all time: Nessun dorma. Calaf sings that at dawn: ‘On your mouth, I will tell it (my name) when the light shines. And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!’ The one person who could have given the game away, a slave girl named Liu who encountered Calaf long ago, is devotedly in love with him and kills herself rather than succumb to torture and reveal his name. Turandot is shocked to see Liu die for her love, prompting an unforeseen epiphany. Before long Calaf will kiss the Princess – and his true love and the memory of Liu will melt her icy demeanor.

(Image courtesy of Royal Opera House)

It was the burning power of love – Liu’s love as much as Calaf’s – to conquer the seemingly impossible that ignited Puccini’s imagination and, in portraying the huge contrast between the vulnerable slave and the haughty princess against the backdrop of a brutal and blood-thirsty imagining of ancient China, he created an opera that actually has two major roles for women. Liu, although she sings relatively infrequently, is crucial to the story. But – despite writing sketches (some of which were used by Franco Alfano to make a performing version with a finale) the composer could never figure out how to lead successfully from Liu’s suicide to Calaf’s kiss nor, most troubling of all for him, how to resolve the finale after it.

Many people have felt that Puccini’s block was rooted in the, at face value, very nature of Turandot’s subject, which was so untypical of all his other operas about women, notwithstanding that each one of those women were individualistically dissimilar in themselves. One of the miracles of the composer’s creativity was the strikingly varied musical languages with which he had brought his diverse women to life – not only in their characters but also vitally in the environments in which he portrayed them: Paris, Rome, Nagasaki, the Californian Mountains, an Italian convent, etc. In all his operas he had conjured up his very different women in compellingly life-like situations that still feel realistically modern today despite the massive social changes that have occurred in the last century. But Turandot was a very different situation and posed a new challenge for the composer, which he nevertheless met with some of the most adventurously innovative orchestral and harmonic writing in all his oeuvre. Had he lived he probably would have found a way through his dilemma, and it would appear from correspondence that shortly before his death he was beginning to see the solution – but sadly we can never know. All we can conclude is that despite the apparent unreality of the story, it was yet again love in a woman (and, against all odds, love in another woman) that aroused the composer’s unique genius.

Puccini loved his opera heroines with a passion that he felt for ladies in his own life. He profoundly admired women, and he felt compassionately for their emotional plights at the hands of society, even though (or maybe partly because) in his own life he was driven by intense desires that conflicted with his deeply spiritual soul. For me, his greatest genius was conjuring up the vivid characterizations and psychological truths of all his vastly different women in extraordinarily atmospheric depictions of their environs: geographical and social. Before returning to Turandot, let us take two poles-apart examples of Puccini’s portraits of love in women’s lives – in wholly different environments and situations, but this time in profoundly realistic stories, both based to an extent on true events: Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly.

In Manon Lescaut Puccini gives us a tragically self-destructive woman, still in her teens, who only fully understands true love – both from a man and from herself – too late. Her restrictive home background as much as her unstable personality might be held accountable for much of the way her destiny plays out. Escaping, in a sudden impulsive elopement, from being sent by her parents to a convent, her new freedom is taken advantage of. She easily exchanges the passionate love of her penniless but deeply romantic partner Chevalier Renato des Grieux for the opulence of Parisian high society as the protected woman of a rich elderly rake, Geronte de Ravoir, who happens to be the city’s Treasurer General. But she later pines for the zealous and doting love that Des Grieux had given her and, despite the wounds she inflicted, he can’t resist her when she comes back to seduce him and ultimately lead him to accompany her as she spirals to her destruction and death. Puccini did not create the story – it was Abbé Prévost’s – but he brought it to life with music that invokes both the truth of the characters and the atmospheres of the locations with magnetic realism. The burning ardour and, ultimately, weakness, in Des Grieux – the deceptive frivolity and extravagant glamour of wealthy Paris – the fragile confusion and impassioned love in Manon – and, underpinning everything, the pungent tang of fatalistic tragedy, especially in the orchestral colours, that was a hallmark of so many of Puccini’s masterpieces.

With Madama Butterfly, Puccini gives us another very young woman, this time only 15 years old, but in the hugest possible contrast she already has a steadfast rock-like spirit of unfaltering devoted love that, three years later, leads to her tragic suicide as a victim of belatedly discovered betrayal. Inspired by David Belasco’s play, the composer set his opera in Japan, a country he had never visited, but he conjured up the location’s feeling and traditions with astonishing authenticity. On a business trip to Nagasaki, Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton from the United States Navy buys geisha Cio-Cio San – Madama Butterfly – from a marriage broker as his wife for 100 Yen: and he can opt out of the 999-year lease contract by giving a month’s notice as he pleases. This kind of so-called arranged Japanese marriage began to be brokered in the second half of the 19^th Century for the new influx of wealthy travelling people like him, so that they could have a local wife for whenever they happened to be visiting. Pinkerton has no intention of being faithful. He already intends to get married to an American lady back home in due course, and he has not remotely understood that Cio-Cio San has fallen devotedly in love with him: to the extent of giving up her religion so as to join his Christian faith. For that she is going to be abandoned by her people when they find out, which happens before she and her husband share their wedding night together in rapture. Then, a day or so later, Pinkerton sails back to the United States and does not return. Nearly three years go by, during which time a child has been born, but Madam Butterfly is convinced her husband will return – which he finally does: but not to her. He is on another business trip but this time he is accompanied by his new American wife, Kate. On arrival they have been told about the child, and now Kate has come to request Cio-Cio San give up her son so that he can grow up in America. Butterfly agrees – and then calmly resolves to commit suicide as a dishonoured woman in the Hara-kiri ritual (also known as Seppuku): as her father before her had done. There is no future for the child of an abandoned woman in Japan, and there is no future for Cio-Cio San at all.

(Image courtesy of Royal Opera House)

In such astounding contrast to the music in Manon Lescaut, in Madama Butterfly Puccini creates music that transfixingly evokes in a delicately feminine persona a woman, now 18 years old, of unconquerable and indeed stubborn faith and, as her tragic fate unravels, great dignity. The composer’s extraordinary triumph here is the evocation of Cio-Cio San’s values as a woman within the context of her heritage – so the remarkably life-like conjuring up of Japanese life through folk-inspired pentatonic melodies is much, much more than just colouring: it is the musical expression of traditions and symbols endemic in Japanese society that, in Cio-Cio San’s devotion to her husband, she has sacrificed.

In opera, Puccini was perhaps unique in creating a musical unification of peoples’ deepest feelings with their environs. One of the greatest of all performers of the role of Cio-Cio San, the late Renata Scotto, commented on this when she spoke to me about Madama Butterfly’s conclusion: ‘When she gives up her religion for the new one in the First Act, she is alone – very much alone. For me, when she tells Pinkerton about this, she is talking to herself that she has done this for the future, and she believes deeply in it. She believes it until the moment that she takes her life: because when she commits Hara-kiri she becomes Japanese again. She has to commit suicide in this ritualistic Japanese way. She would not cut her wrist! She has to do what her father did’.

Puccini’s musical expression of the ritual here is extraordinarily authentic sounding, as all his Japanese evocation is in the opera. Renata Scotto continued: ‘Con onor muore chi non può serbar vita con onore (‘To die with honour if life cannot be preserved with honour’). Puccini wrote these words to be sung on the note ‘D’, but she is not on the Earth anymore, she is not a human being attached to the ground, she is sort of already in another dimension – and so I sang this with no vibrato: like a prayer.’

Puccini also vividly evoked ritual in Turandot, in fact more centrally than in Madama Butterfly – this time a completely different kind of musical ritual in a totally different environment. Once again, he wrote ingeniously authentic-sounding music of a location he had never visited, and now, in ancient China, the background is harsh and brutal. Against that backdrop he wanted to show how true and passionate love can change the most unyielding of persons – not just princess Turandot, but also the people of Peking who take their cue from their transformed princess. One tantalizingly wonders how it might have sounded had the composer got round to completing the opera.

Puccini had, despite the relative incredulity of the fable, most powerfully painted very real issues of love in a woman – not just in Liu, but actually deep down in Turandot herself before she is finally transformed by Calaf, as the great soprano – and one of the most famous Turandots – Montserrat Caballé put to me: ‘When I sang Turandot I saw two faces in the spirit of that woman. One of those is trying to be like ice – and the other is the woman inside the fridge. This is what is so demanding to perform – to carry this other side inside you that is hidden. One side is mysterious, and that is not only in Turandot’s voice but also in the orchestra. And then, inside, the other part of this woman – who is young – does not want to be mysterious. When she does finally submit to Calaf this is a very special moment – and in that moment you don’t have to change your vocal technique: you find a way to change the personality, in the spirit of the music.’

(Image courtesy of Royal Opera House)

And so when Turandot in Act 2 sings for the first time in the opera, explaining in her aria In questa reggia how the soul of her ancestress of thousands of years ago who was raped and murdered by a foreign invader lives within her now and defies the harsh domination of men, this is a protection against something inside that the Princess is unconsciously frightened of. Highly acclaimed great Puccini soprano Angela Gheorghiu explained to me: ‘Turandot is a young person – and she is really like a young girl. When you are a teenager and you are a virgin, you can be scared of everything and you want to give your life and love to Prince Charming, the person you really dream of falling in love with. The story of this opera can seem like a fairy-tale for children, but there is great truth and depth in it: there are two ladies, one is a slave, the other is a princess, and in fact they both are wanting the same thing even though Turandot does not realise it until the end.’

Montserrat Caballé, who in her career also sang Liu, concludes: ‘Puccini has created this sweetness of a girl in Liu and at the same time he has developed in her in the third act the will of a woman with strength before death. And in another way, a little of this spirit is also in Turandot – in the womanly part of her: that is in Puccini’s music, in his writing for her voice and also the orchestra.’ Right to the end of his life, the inspired genius Giacomo Puccini was exploring love in a woman: and always in new characters and new situations. He never completed his oeuvre’s finale – but his deep understanding of a woman’s love remained with him to the very end.