Giacomo Puccini’s death, on 29 November 1924, came as a profound shock to those around him, as well as to the wider world. Hard at work on Turandot, with future operatic projects in the planning, and not yet 66, he appeared to be a man in his prime. But in the February of that year a sore throat and persistent cough that had troubled him for many years, the legacy of a lifetime of heavy smoking, had become decidedly worse. Medical consultations across the course of the spring and summer proved inconclusive and a visit to a health retreat failed to offer any relief. Eventually, in October, a specialist in Florence diagnosed advanced throat cancer and disclosed this information to Puccini’s son, Tonio, although not to the composer himself.
Tonio, concealing the prognosis from his parents, arranged for his father to undergo experimental radium treatment in Brussels. The first part of the therapy, which is described in vivid detail by Puccini’s biographer Mosco Carner, was excruciating and prolonged, though the patient was allowed to leave the clinic to attend a local performance of Madama Butterfly. The second part involved a long and complex operation. It was declared to have been a success, the radium having shrunk away the tumours, but only a few days later Puccini, enfeebled by the experience, succumbed to a heart attack and died.
News travelled fast. The Chamber of Deputies at the Italian Parliament held a memorial for the composer that same day, whilst artistic figures from around Europe rushed to pay tribute to Puccini in print. On the day of the funeral, the composer’s coffin was piled high with flowers, among them an immense bouquet of chrysanthemums and lilies bearing the name Benito Mussolini, and a wreath of orchids from the King of Italy. The procession of the funeral carriage, drawn by four plumed black horses, was observed by an estimated 80,000 people who turned out to line the streets of central Brussels. Film footage, astonishingly, survives and is available to view online.
After the ceremony, Puccini’s coffin was transported to the Gare du Nord, and thence to Milan. Among those waiting to meet the train were Puccini’s librettists Renato Simoni and Giuseppe Adami, his collaborators on Turandot. Also in attendance were the conductor Arturo Toscanini – reportedly ‘almost petrified by sorrow’ – and the composers Italo Montemezzi and Ildebrando Pizzetti. An overnight vigil was held in the Church of San Fedele before the coffin was moved to the Duomo the following day, where candelabras were reportedly placed around Puccini’s coffin in an arrangement identical to that which had been used for another national icon, Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of the united Italy. Ultimately, Puccini was laid to rest in a specially constructed chapel at his beloved, tranquil home at Torre del Lago in Tuscany.
Although Puccini had received harsh criticism from the press during his lifetime, as I outlined in my book The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity, he was celebrated lavishly in his obituaries, which stressed his appeal to listeners of all social classes. Tributes tended towards the grandiose, often drawing connections between his music and the spirit of the nation via emotive but impressionistic references to the Italian landscape, or comparing his physiognomy to that of a Roman emperor.
Of course there was a lot at stake here, for no other Italian composer of the time could match Puccini’s global success or prestige. His old friend Pietro Mascagni, the composer of Cavalleria rusticana and Opera Holland Park favourite L’amico Fritz, outlived him by 21 years, but his later works are barely remembered now. Francesco Cilea, a slightly younger contemporary best known for Adriana Lecouvreur and L’arlesiana, would live until 1950, but was by now only tinkering around with revisions to much older works. Puccini had no protégé waiting in the wings: the younger generation of Italian composers was interested primarily in instrumental music and the modernist innovations coming from beyond the Alps. It looked highly likely that the unfinished Turandot might be the last great Italian opera, bringing to an end a glorious, centuries-old tradition, and so it would turn out to be.
Thus, when that work finally reached the stage two years later, having been completed by Puccini’s colleague, Franco Alfano, the première served, in effect, as a further memorial service. Almost all first-night reviews recounted the anecdote of Toscanini setting down his baton and ending the performance after Liù’s death, at the precise point where Puccini was reported to have laid down his pen. The audience rose to its feet in reverence, and a voice from a box was heard to exclaim “Peace and glory to the Italian soul of Giacomo Puccini!” Outside of Italy, obituarists were somewhat more circumspect, hurrying to assess Puccini’s standing in the canon of great composers, and in some cases finding him wanting, their judgments coloured by a snobbery about his commercial success that has been an enduring critical trope.
The centenary of Puccini’s birth in 1958 was greeted with a certain amount of celebration, notably in the publication of Carner’s landmark critical biography. Later centenaries (the 50th anniversary of his death in 1974 and the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2008) were barely marked, but in a sense this was a composer whose operas were already so dominant in the international performing canon that they had no need of the boost that an anniversary can provide. Nevertheless, a century after Puccini’s death, it is worth reflecting upon his artistic innovations (often overlooked or dismissed by academics), his enduring popularity, and the sheer modernity of his aesthetic, which means that his characters still have relevance and resonance today. His operas were drawn from diverse literary sources and are highly varied in plot and mood.
A friend once remarked to me after watching a performance of La bohème that ‘you can tell exactly what’s going on, even without reading the surtitles – it’s all there in the music’. This was aptly put, for Puccini might well be described as a ‘sensory’ composer. He was adept at using music to evoke how things feel, whether it be the sorrow of missing home (La fanciulla del West), the crushing disappointment of a broken marriage (Il tabarro), the terror of listening to your lover being tortured (Tosca), or the shock of receiving appalling news (Suor Angelica).
A man with a colourful and complicated private life, Puccini excelled at depicting love in both its most romantic (Gianni Schicchi) and its most sensual (Madama Butterfly) manifestations. He was also skilled at portraying the horror and pain of death, whether quiet deaths (La bohème), desperate deaths (Manon Lescaut), or violent deaths (Tosca), and he would, himself, go on to suffer terribly during the harrowing medical treatment that preceded his own demise. Poor Puccini. He was a composer who knew what it was to really be alive, but he was also able to anticipate and to articulate what it might be like to die.
