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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2012
This essay charts the contours of a ‘second practice’ in Puccini's corpus. Whereas his operas from the 1890s are fuelled by a longing for unmediated access to empirical reality, his later works unleash a variety of distant sounds that unsettle the aesthetics of verismo opera. These sounds, which draw on the ontology of wireless transmission just as surely as his earlier works do on that of phonographic transcription, find their fullest expression in Suor Angelica. The notorious Marian apparition that concludes that opera has long been mocked and explained away, and no wonder: for, if we attempt to take the miracle seriously, we may (like Puccini himself, in the years following Madama Butterfly) begin to doubt whether modernism ever was an art of confidence and disenchantment.
1 Giacomo Puccini to Tito Ricordi (23 July 1918); in Gara, Eugenio, ed., Carteggi pucciniani (Milan, 1958), 463–4 (no. 724)Google Scholar.
2 For a nuanced recent history of the fortunes of Italian music during this period, see Mallach, Alan, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Lebanon, NH, 2007)Google Scholar.
3 Hanslick's 1897 review is excerpted, and here cited, in Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger, Giacomo Puccini: La bohème (Cambridge, 1986), 133–5, here 135Google Scholar.
4 I elaborate this argument in ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music, 31 (2007), 228–44Google Scholar.
5 Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003), 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Monsecret, , ‘La Tosca’, Life, 37 (1901), 173Google Scholar. For similar Italian formulations, see Schwartz, ‘Rough Music’, 234–5.
7 Also worth mentioning are the final bars of La rondine, where Magda moves off stage to intone a mysterious high A; and the on-stage humming chorus that accompanies the off-stage children's choir during the first appearance of the ‘Mo-li-hua’ theme in Turandot, Act I.
8 See Senici, Emanuele, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.
9 Greenwald, Helen M.'s ‘Verdi's Patriarch and Puccini's Matriarch: “Through the Looking Glass and What Puccini Found There”’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1994), 220–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests, however, that the Grand Inquisitor scene in Verdi's Don Carlos may have served as a model for the central duet between Angelica and the Zia Principessa.
10 Panichelli narrates his contributions in Il pretino di Giacomo Puccini ([1962] rpt. Pisa, 2008), 168–73.
11 Tomlinson, Gary, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 James Gibbons Hueneker, ‘A World Premier [sic] of Puccini Operas’, New York Times (15 December 1918).
13 Alastor, ‘Le tre nuove opere di Giacomo Puccini’, Musica (15 January 1919); quoted in Wilson, Alexandra, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, Modernity (Cambridge, 2007), 180CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Hepokoski, James, ‘Structure, Implication, and the End of Suor Angelica’, Studi pucciniani, 3 (2004), 241–64, here 259–60Google Scholar.
15 Studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marian apparitions include Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorie (Princeton, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blackbourn, David, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Christian, William, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley, 1996)Google Scholar; and Kaufman, Suzanne K., Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, 2004)Google Scholar. Also relevant is Apolito, Paolo, The Internet and the Madonna (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar. Thanks to Deirdre de la Cruz for pointing me in the direction of these texts.
16 See Girardi, Michele, Puccini: His International Art, trans. Basini, Laura (Chicago, 2000), 396Google Scholar.
17 ‘Reinhardt's New Spectacle’, New York Times (14 January 1912).
18 Major studies of occultism on which I draw include Thomas, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar; Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar; and Sconce, Jeffrey, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, 2000)Google Scholar. For a discussion of these issues in a specifically Italian context, see Chessa, Luciano, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (Berkeley, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 For a reading of this text in the context of Lombroso's earlier writings, and of post-Unification discourse more generally, see Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, ‘In a Dark Continent: Cesare Lombroso's Other Italy’, in The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago, 2007), 229–88Google Scholar.
20 For a discussion of Lombroso and Palladino in the context of interactions between male scientists and female mediums more generally, see Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 214–51.
21 Lombroso, Cesare, After Death – What? Spiritistic Phenomena and their Interpretation, trans. Kennedy, William Sloane (Boston, 1909), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Violi, Alessandra, ‘Storie di fantasmi per adulti: Lombroso e le tecnologie dello spettrale’, in Locus Solus: Lombroso e la fotografia, ed. Turzio, Silvana, Villa, Renzo and Violi, Alessandra (Milan, 2005), 43–69Google Scholar. Quoted and translated in Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 269.
23 In this paragraph I follow the illuminating discussion of Capuana and Lombroso in Jonathan Robert Hiller, ‘Bodies that Tell: Physiognomy, Criminology, Race, and Gender in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Literature and Opera’ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2009), 167–217.
24 The phrase derives from di Blasi, Corrado, Luigi Capuana: originale e segreto (Catania, 1968)Google Scholar.
25 Barnaby, Paul, ‘The Haunted Monastery: Capuana's Profumo and the Ghosts of the “Nuova Italia”’, Romance Studies, 19 (2001), 109–21, here 110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 This connection is noted, if interpreted somewhat differently, in Girardi, Puccini, 406.
27 Given the pervasive gendering of mediums during the fin-de-siècle, it is perhaps no surprise that these themes emerge most fully in Puccini's one all-female opera. For more on occultism and gender see, in addition to the texts by Luckhurst and Sconce already cited, Owens, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.
28 Sconce, Haunted Media, 14. The influence of Marconi's invention on Italian literature of the period is discussed in Campbell, Timothy, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis, 2006)Google Scholar.
29 Sconce, Haunted Media, 15.
30 Sconce, Haunted Media, 15.
31 ‘Veniva tante volte qui a Vicopelago. Sono 47 anni che sono qui e lo ricordo bene. Un giorno arrivò, si mise seduto proprio lì all'armonium. È sempre quello, il solito. E cominciò a suonare. Noi sorelle si stava a sentirlo dietro le grate della clausura.’ The video is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOpq1_xdEEw (accessed 29 April 2012).
32 See, for example, del Fiorentino, Dante, Immortal Bohemian: An Intimate Memoir of Giacomo Puccini (New York, 1952), 168–9Google Scholar. Panichelli notes that ‘quando il maestro mi parlavo di quelle “Cuffie” era esilarante e nello stesso tempo commosso’; see Panichelli, Il pretino, 169.
33 Sconce, Haunted Media, 63.
34 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 255. Emphasis mine.
35 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 258.
36 See Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Outside the Tomb’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), 185–248Google Scholar; and Rehding, Alexander, ‘On the Record’, this journal, 18 (2006), 59–82Google Scholar. A few of the more influential studies of the cultural impact of Edison's invention include Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Wutz, Michael (Palo Alto, 1999)Google Scholar; Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katz, Mark, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, rev. edn (Berkeley, 2010)Google Scholar.
37 MacDonald, Malcom, Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (London, 2003), 304Google Scholar.
38 Stokowski, Leopold, ‘New Vistas in Radio’, The Atlantic Monthly, 155 (1935), 1–16, here 15Google Scholar.
39 ‘Wireless Melody Jarred’, New York Times (14 January 1910). A similar modulation between the utopian promise and prosaic reality of the wireless is described in Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, 1997), 242–3Google Scholar.
40 Stokowski, ‘New Vistas in Radio’, 7.
41 On the use of similar triadic juxtapositions as a signifier of the uncanny, see Cohn, Rick, ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2004), 285–324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 See Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Elektra's Voice: Music and Language in Strauss's Opera’, in Richard Strauss: Elektra, ed. Puffett, Derrick (Cambridge, 1989), 107–27Google Scholar; and Lee, Sherry D., ‘A Minstrel in a World without Minstrels: Adorno and the Case of Schreker’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58 (2005), 639–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Adorno's own attempt to connect Wagnerian phantasmagoria to Schreker's style, see his radio lecture ‘Schreker [1959]’, in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 1992), 130–44Google Scholar.
43 Adorno, Theodor, In Search of Wagner [1952], trans. Livingstone, Rodney (London, 2005), 75Google Scholar.
44 Adorno, , ‘The Radio Voice [1939]’, in Current of Music, ed. Hullot-Kentor, Robert (Cambridge, 2009), 345–91, here 348–9Google Scholar.
45 Adorno, ‘The Radio Voice’, 349.
46 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’. The interaction of ‘rotational form’ with other, more conventional formal structures is explored in Davis, Andrew, ‘Formal Multivalence in Suor Angelica’, in Il trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style (Bloomington, 2010), 108–37Google Scholar.
47 For Hepokoski's own description, see ‘Structure, Implication’, 245. For a different analysis of the same motivic material, see Girardi, Puccini, 399–400.
48 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 244.
49 Tomlinson, Gary, ‘Learning to Curse at Sixty-Seven’, this journal, 14 (2002), 229–41, here 240Google Scholar.
50 It seems to be this lack of difference (‘the note of transfiguration that the event requires’) that leads Julian Budden to conclude that ‘The exalted regions open to Verdi and Wagner were closed to Puccini’; see Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford, 2002), 405Google Scholar.
51 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 252.
52 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 252–6.
53 Busoni, Ferruccio, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, in The Essence of Music and Other Papers, trans. Ley, Rosamond (London, 1957), 190–3, here 190Google Scholar. The story originally appeared in the magazine Signale für die musikalische Welt.
54 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 191.
55 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 192.
56 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 193. Original emphasis.
57 We would, however, be remiss not to note the surprising re-emergence of wordless singing in the Zeitopern of the Weimar republic. Whether the omnipresent Männerchor in Kurt Weill's Der Zar lässt sich photographieren and the humming tango dancers in Max Brand's Maschinist Hopkins are best described as parodying or mourning an earlier practice – whether, that is to say, Zeitoper was willing to exorcise fully the post-Wagnerian ghosts it disavowed so showily – is beyond the scope of the present essay.
