7. ‘Renewal or Death’.

When Giacosa died in 1906, Puccini tried to find other collaborators, but with no particular success. Several attempts were made for a collaboration between Puccini and Gabriele D’Annunzio between 1900 and 1913. The project was undoubtedly attractive: to bring together the highest profile Italian composer of his time and a great, established poet, the fading interpreter of decadent aesthetics. From the point of view of publicity, the combination could not have failed to benefit Ricordi, who nevertheless put no direct pressure on the composer. But nobody who knows D’Annunzio’s work could imagine anything less reconcilable with the dramatic and aesthetic world of Puccini. D’Annunzio’s grand rhetoric and impressionistic verse could only have restricted the composer’s artistic development. Puccini was obliged to take on personal responsibility for working out the dramaturgy of his next opera, based on Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West. His visit to the Metropolitan Opera House, New York (his first foreign début), was held up by long indecision about the choice of libretto and by a family crisis: Elvira suspected her husband of having an affair with a servant, who eventually committed suicide.

Puccini experimented with forms of expression which departed from the restrictions of verisimilitude, continually moving further towards the poetic than had so far been seen in European theatre. The increasing distance between the social class of his characters and the musical expression of their states of mind forced new creative solutions. In fact, late Romantic examples of sentiment and passion had sunk to plots that were realistic only in name. The development of the description of the setting, so important in La fanciulla, corresponds closely to the key points of the plot – especially the game of poker and the man-hunt – and creates unbearable levels of tension concentrated in crucial moments. These passages anticipate later experiments, mediated through different cultures and traditions, with the emerging Expressionism. They share common roots which go back to the theatre of the fin-de-siècle, which gave renewed importance to the human spirit as a source of passion and obsession – a tendency which later led composers to choose subjects in which the text was simply a vehicle for inner feeling.

The first act of La fanciulla del West presents us with a veritable crowd of characters, through which Puccini emphasized the responsibility of the orchestra more than he had ever done before. The connotative power of the leitmotifs associated with individual characters is reduced, and the wider framework is conceived as a broad symphonic exposition in which every element is subject to vigorous development. The result was not always successful, but in the scene of the poker game the evocative power of the full orchestra makes us think that Minnie is overcome by momentary madness, when she metaphorically possesses her lover having won his life in the game. It is as if Puccini crossed the strict limits of unified dramatic motivation in order to lay bare a human dimension disturbed by the deepest impulses, an idea frequently explored on the European stage at the time. The beginning of Act 3 is even more taut and rigorous, with the great scene of the pursuit of Johnson, in which the chorus and soloists follow the cadences of the orchestra. The passage, which ends with the bandit’s capture, is based on a slow introduction and four movements handled with a sophisticated symphonic technique. The vocal power of La fanciulla reaches its height in ‘Ch’ella mi creda libero e lontano’, when Johnson, in contrast to Cavaradossi, makes his farewell to life, prepared to die in the presence of everyone, like a character in a fairy-tale.

This brief heroic parenthesis supplies a dynamic prelude to the finale, on which Puccini gambled the credibility of his entire opera. In contrast to Turandot, in which the clear statement of the tragic element makes the final scene seem contrived, the arrival of Minnie turns everything upside down (almost reviving the finales of rescue opera), interrupting a musical fabric carefully arranged to accommodate the happy ending. Behind the concept of redemption, emphasized from the prelude to the first act onwards, is a faith in the power of love which overcomes every obstacle.

Never before La fanciulla had Puccini been able to envisage on such a large scale the unusual proportions of spectacular episodes and the exciting acceleration of action at key points. His natural impulse to find a new and more advanced balance between the music and the mise en scène was to become fundamental to his art. From this point of view he found himself in step with cinema, which had been making progress for several years. La fanciulla does not use the ambience of the gold rush merely as an exotic background, but shares with the Western’s classical devices of spectacle, conflict between good and evil and simple morality. On an intertextual level, moreover, La fanciulla contains a number of allusions to Wagnerian drama, including, in the scene in which Johnson is wounded (Act 3), a literal quotation of the chromatic motif which opens Tristan. This shows that Puccini was moving decisively towards a plurality of styles: the veneer of the Western and its realistic corollaries on the one hand and on the other the great European theme, not to mention an aura of fable which crowns the whole work.

Puccini showed that the way of renewal did not lie in the choice of subject but in the development of musical language. Opera as a spectacle was being replaced in the public’s affections by cinema. In 1910 it needed only the sound track to reach its full potential. Before his death Alban Berg would attempt an ideal compromise between the two arts, conceiving an interlude in Lulu as film music. Puccini did not go as far as imagining a collaboration between these media, but the idea of mingling them – and his optimism about the power of opera was equal to Berg’s – led him to provide in La fanciulla del West one of the most important and vital contributions to such a synthesis.

Puccini: (5) Puccini, Giacomo