Chapter 1 - Puccini the Progressive?

Summary

Viva Wagner!

Giacomo Puccini = This great musician was born in Lucca in the year……and it can well be said he was the true successor to the renowned Boccherini. — Handsome with a vast intellect, he brought to the field of Italian art a breath almost as powerful as an echo of the transalpine Wagner.

- Puccini, in a school notebook, 1882

A common image of Puccini is at one with Bernard Shaw's when the playwright hailed him as the most likely successor to Giuseppe Verdi. Yet at the Milan Conservatory in 1882, when the student Puccini doodled this youthfully exuberant, imaginary encyclopedia entry in a notebook, probably during a less than scintillating class (the rest of the notes seem to bear out that hypothesis), he left us a peek at himself that mentions both his Italian roots, as the “true successor” to local Lucchese hero Luigi Boccherini, and the new “transalpine” Wagnerian influences. [Ex. 1.0, next page]

Puccini's fanciful statement could be unpacked in several ways: as evidence of the young man's desire to become either an important Italian composer with influence as great as Wagner's, the next favorite son of his home town, Lucca. Or it may suggest the young man's absorption of the artistic, Wagner-influenced reforms put forth by the Milanese futurists [Avveneristi], whose name itself is redolent of wagnerismo. Indeed, Nicholas Baragwanath has used this same quotation to support his view of the composer as an exponent of the Italian traditions. In any case, we can already find at this early stage a hint of the confluence of the native traditional and the imported progressive factors that will be a constant hallmark of Puccini's career, and which will have direct connections to his technical compositional choices.

At the end of Puccini's life too, he still seemed to acknowledge respect for both Italian and German masters, as the Italian writer Ugo Ojetti described after a visit to the composer during his last days at home in Viareggio:

Today, here is Puccini at home, in his ground floor studio, between his shiny black piano and me. […] No photograph of a singer, nor a photograph of some dear colleague. Only an autograph of Rossini, inside a small mahogany frame.