by Dianne Hales
Describing himself as an instinctive composer with “more heart than mind,” Puccini wanted to express “grandi dolori in piccole anime” (“great sorrows in little souls”), as he put it. He was forever searching for a libretto “that will move the world”—all the while pursuing lovely ladies, fast cars, and the wild geese he hunted at his beloved Torre del Lago near the Tuscan coast. Local farmers and fishermen jokingly referred to him in dialect as “il maestro cuccumeggiante,” the composer of harlot music.
On three of his most cherished operas—La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904)—Puccini (who had worn out previous librettists) collaborated with Giuseppe Giacosa, an intellectual and poet, and Luigi Illica, a temperamental young playwright who considered a libretto nothing more than a sketch produced, as he put it, for the convenience of the deaf.
Puccini tortured this writing team during the composition of La bohème, which he insisted on being word-perfect. Sometimes he would write doggerel verse or sing nonsense words to give his librettists a sense of the meters and rhythms he was seeking. When they did as asked—or so they complained—he would change his mind. Puccini liked to compose late at night, often in the company of friends, playing a hand at cards and then going to the next room to bang out a few bars on the piano and jot some notes before returning to the game. He converted a ramshackle hut next to the local tavern into “Club La bohème” for the convenience of his drinking buddies.
In La bohème, written in a lively idiom that sounds colloquial compared to conventional libretti, Puccini created poetry of ordinary things. A worn overcoat becomes a treasure; a dropped key, a ruse for romance; a simple seamstress and starving writer, the spinners of soulful dreams. Although it sounds effortless, none of it was. Giacosa complained of “messing up more paper” and “racking his brain more” on the exuberant Café Momus scene for La bohème than on anything else he wrote.
Although I was fascinated to find Puccini’s notes, letters, and libretti (as well as his hat collection) on display at his unpretentious home at Torre del Lago, now a public museum, I was even more intrigued by his operatic love life. After a scandalous affair, he ran off with the pregnant Elvira Gemignani, his piano student, the wife of a friend, and the mother of two young children. They married in 1904 (after her husband’s death), but Puccini’s eye never stopped roving. On a visit to America, he wrote his sister that New York women “could make the Tower of Pisa stand erect.” Even though Elvira spied on him, he added, he “got away with everything.”
Elvira’s suspicions intensified over the years. In an incident that became an international scandal, she hounded and publicly harangued their young maid Doria, whom she accused of sleeping with her husband. Doria, protesting her innocence, swallowed a toxic disinfectant and writhed in agony for five days before dying. In her suicide note, she proclaimed her innocence and begged her family to take revenge (vendetta!) on Elvira but not Puccini. The town gossiped that Doria had died of an abortion, but an autopsy revealed that she was a virgin. With such drama in his personal life, is it any wonder that Puccini so masterfully told tales of “tenderness mixed with pain”?
Puccini wanted his audience to experience his music as if they were living it and not watching it onstage. He achieved this sublime feat in part because of his meticulous attention to detail. For the prelude to the third act of Tosca, set on the ramparts of Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo at dawn, Puccini went to the historic fortress on the Tiber in the early hours of the morning so he could replicate the multitude of matin bells ringing over the hushed city.
Puccini’s pursuit of the ultimate libretto led him to London and a play by David Belasco, an American playwright, theatrical director, and producer, about a geisha of the time abandoned by a cavalier naval officer. After the performance, Puccini rushed backstage, kissed Belasco, and declared on the spot, in a flood of tears, that he would write an opera about little Butterfly.
Puccini, who never came close to mastering English, made this commitment with little or no regard to Belasco’s words. But as always, he did his research, studying books on Japanese customs, religion, and architecture and consulting collections of Japanese music. Puccini persuaded the wife of Japan’s ambassador to Italy to sing for him and Japan’s leading actress to recite lines in order to capture the “peculiar high twitter” of the Japanese female voice.
On February 17, 1904, Madama Butterfly opened at La Scala. The applause for the lilting love duet at the end of act 1 was subdued, and the rambunctious loggionisti in the cheap seats booed at the curtain. In act 2 all hell broke loose. When Butterfly’s kimono billowed, people in the audience shouted that she was pregnant (by the opera’s conductor, Toscanini, the in-the-know loggionisti yelled). In the almost mystical vigil scene when Butterfly waits for her “husband” until sunrise, Puccini had arranged for actual birdsong. The audience answered with its own birdcalls, rooster crows, and mooing. At the final curtain they hissed and shouted at what critics called “a diabetic opera.”
Puccini, who felt that Madama Butterfly was his best work, the only opera he could bear to hear over and over, was stunned. His publisher and producer had La Scala cancel all performances, refunded a sack of money, and sent agents to music stores to buy up all copies of the libretto. The creators got to work snipping and tucking. A more streamlined, less saccharine Butterfly reopened in Brescia and moved on to triumph in Paris and around the world.
At my first production of Madama Butterfly in San Francisco, I remained dry-eyed until the very end, when Butterfly blindfolds her little boy before taking her own life. As I came to understand the words—and anticipate the plot—my heart started to break ever earlier in the opera: at Pinkerton’s “Addio, fiorito asil,” his farewell to their flowered asylum of love, then even sooner when Butterfly, brimming with love and hope, sings of the “one fine day” (un bel dì) when her beloved husband will return to her. Last season, in a particularly captivating production, I got as far as the couple’s love duet at the end of act 1, when Pinkerton concedes, “Un po’ di vero c’è,” that there’s some truth in Butterfly’s fear that an American who catches a butterfly pierces its heart with a pin. I wanted to cry out to the naïve farfalla to fly away while she could.
The word that Americans most associate with Puccini, thanks to Luciano Pavarotti and the Three Tenors’ concerts, is “Vincerò!” (“I will win!”) from the aria “Nessun dorma” in Turandot. Everything about this tale of a venomous, man-hating princess whose suitors lose their heads as well as their hearts is over the top—the score, the singing, the sets, the even-less-logical-than-usual libretto. Yet I have loved every one of the half-dozen productions of Turandot I’ve seen, even—as often happens—when the supposedly ravishing empress looked like John Belushi as the samurai warrior. (I have never found a definitive answer on how to pronounce the name Turandot. Some opera purists insist on articulating the final t, as Italian usually does with a consonant ending, but according to the first soprano to sing Turandot, Rosa Raisa, neither Puccini nor his conductor Arturo Toscanini ever did.)
Puccini died of complications of throat cancer treatment before completing Turandot, although he left dozens of pages of notes for its end. At its premiere at La Scala on April 25, 1926, a year and five months after Puccini’s death, Toscanini put down his baton in the middle of act 3 and said to the audience, “Qui finisce l’opera, perchè a questo punto il maestro è morto” (“Here the opera ends because at this point the maestro died”).
Subsequent performances have used a pleasant, if uninspiring ending fashioned by the composer Franco Alfano, with considerable input from Toscanini. Almost everyone agrees that Puccini would have come up with something grander—but who knows? “What a sad irony,” comments William Berger, author of Puccini Without Excuses, “that the whole magnificent tradition of Italian opera should end not with a bang or a whimper but a big, fat question mark.”
For years I dreamed of celebrating Italian opera’s long tradition by attending an
opera at La Scala. My chance came when I scheduled a research trip to Milan. Adriana Lecouvreur, a tragic love story about a French actress by the Italian verismo composer Francesco Cilea, was scheduled for performance on my only free night. The very minute that online tickets went on sale (at nine a.m. in Milan, midnight in San Francisco), I snagged the best available seat.
I booked a room at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, where Verdi lived off and on throughout his life. After the triumphant premiere of his Otello, fans unhooked the horses from his carriage and pulled il maestro back to the hotel themselves. The crowd shouted Verdi’s name until he appeared at his balony with the opera’s tenor, who sang a few arias. When Verdi suffered a stroke in his rooms at “The Milan” in 1901, updates about his health were posted in the lobby, and the streets outside were covered with straw to deaden the clatter of carriages and horses so as not to disturb his final days. Verdi’s apartment remains unchanged, and his music plays continously, even on the hotel’s stylish Web site.
The afternoon before the performance, I toured the La Scala museum, where I was most fascinated by death casts of Verdi’s and Puccini’s graceful hands, and portraits of the women in their lives. At lunch at the adjacent La Scala café, I couldn’t resist a panino called La traviata, a disappointingly prosaic ham-and-cheese sandwich.
When I arrived at the gleaming, recently restored theater, I discovered that my “box” was exactly that—a dark cube with floor-to-ceiling walls that blocked a clear view of the stage except for the two seats in the front row (one of them mine). After I took my chair, a young Asian couple—she in a floor-length silk gown, he in a leather bomber jacket with several cameras slung over his shoulder—entered the box. We all bowed to each other. The husband ungallantly took the good seat next to me; his wife, the inferior one behind. Minutes before the performance two German-speaking women—one so stunning that I assumed she was one of Milan’s many runway models, and her mother—burst into the box.
The older frau—upset that she couldn’t see the stage from her second-row seat (probably a third the cost of mine)—rammed her chair into the minuscule space between the Asian man and me. Thrusting her shoulders between us, she craned forward, so close that if I turned my head we would have touched. After about ten minutes, her neck muscles gave out and she retreated.
Half an hour into the opera I heard a sound not in the score—loud snoring from the Asian man, who had sagged in his seat in a deep sleep, his head cushioned on the balustrade. Then I glimpsed an amazing sight: the German woman, kneeling sideways on her chair, had splayed herself, Spider-Man fashion, against the side of the box. With both arms outstretched, she had inched her torso along the wall so she could just manage to peek out toward the stage. The jet-lagged gentleman sputtered in his sleep. Spidey clung for dear life to the wall. And, of course, the band played on.
This was not the glamorous night at La Scala that I’d expected, but it was likely to be the only one of my lifetime, so I resolutely focused on the stage and the singing. And then it happened. The ineffable melting of words into music, the timeless thrill of spectacle and song, worked their magic. Italian opera once again carried my heart aloft on golden wings.
IN 1860, THE CHARISMATIC GENERAL GIUSEPPE Garibaldi led a band of one thousand red-shirted irregulars (half under age twenty-five) into the region he called Mezzogiorno, the hot land of the midday sun. As they marched in triumph across Sicily, Garibaldi, wearing the trademark poncho and sombrero of his campaigns against Latin American dictators, spotted a robust youth dozing on a little stone wall in the shadow of a carob tree.
Reining in his horse, he asked, “Young man, will you not join us in our fight to free our brothers in southern Italy from the bloody tyranny of the Bourbon kings? How can you sleep when your country needs you? Awake and to arms!”
The young man opened his eyes and silently flicked the fingers of one hand under his raised chin. The timeless gesture (which can still be observed in any Italian piazza) translates into “I don’t give a ****” (insert the expletive of your choice). Garibaldi accepted his wordless dismissal and rode on.
“We have created Italy” one of its founding fathers sighed after the unification of the nation in 1861. “Now we must create Italians.” It seemed an impossible challenge. The liberating troops often couldn’t understand each other’s dialects. Crowds cheering “La Talia,” as they pronounced the unfamiliar word l’Italia, thought it was the name of their new queen. No one could imagine how Italy’s people could ever unite to salute the same flag in a national language all could understand. “It will be spaghetti, I swear to you,” Garibaldi predicted, “that will unite Italy.”
He was right. Pasta, in its seemingly infinite varieties, did indeed bring Italians together—and then proceeded to conquer more people in more countries than any dish from any cuisine. “What is the glory of Dante compared with spaghetti?” the twentieth-century journalist Giuseppe Prezzolini dared to ask. Yet one of the glories of Italy’s food is that when we eat pasta, we ingest a bit of its culture too.
Italy’s food and language meld together as smoothly as cacio sui maccheroni (cheese on macaroni). Both boast a rich and rollicking history dating back to ancient times. Both vary greatly from region to region, even from village to village. Both reflect centuries of invasion, assimilation, and conquest. And both can transform daily necessities into vibrant celebrations.
Italians have long realized that we are, quite literally, what we eat. Sapia, Latin for “taste,” gave rise to Italian’s sapienza (wisdom). In pursuit of divine wisdom and saintly virtues, as Carol Field recounts in Celebrating Italy, Italians developed the tradition of “eating the gods.” Through the yearly cycle of church holidays, they devour dita degli apostoli (“fingers of the apostles,” crêpes filled with sweetened ricotta), minni di Sant’ Agata (“breasts of Saint Agatha,” stuffed with marzipan), occhi di Santa Lucia (“eyes of Santa Lucia,” circles of durum bread), and at Christmas cartellate (the cloths that cradled the baby Jesus, made of flour, oil, and dry white wine).
I have adopted a similar strategy of “eating Italian” to make the language part of me. I read aloud the lilting words for simple culinary techniques, such as rosolare for make golden, sbriciolare for crumble, and sciacquare for rinse. I revel in the linguistic pantry of pasta shapes: little ears, half sleeves, stars, thimbles—and the tartly named lingue di suocera (“mother-in-law tongues”), and strozzapreti (“priest stranglers,” rich enough to sate ravenous clerics before the expensive meat course). Desserts such as zuccotto (sponge bombe filled with ice cream), ciambellone (ring cake), sospiro di Monaca (a nun’s sigh), and tiramisu (pick-me-up) glide so deliciously over my tongue that I agree with cooks who claim they can fare respirare i morti (make the dead breathe). Only Italians would christen candy sugar pearls filled with the same sweet syrup parents serve children for a toast on special occasions lacrime d’amore (tears of love).
Italian’s gastronomic words—like the dishes they describe—do more than tease or appease the appetite. They spice up daily conversations. Italians deftly describe a busybody who noses into everything as prezzemolo (parsley), someone uptight as a baccalà (dried cod), a silly fool as a salame (salami), and a bore as a pizza or a mozzarella. Gotten yourself into a mess? You’ve made an omelet (fatto una frittata). Fed up and can’t take any more? You’re at the fruit (alla frutta). Have a crush on someone? You’re cooked (cotto). Italians dismiss a story told time and again as fritta e rifritta (fried and refried), a worthless or banal movie as a polpettone (large meatball), and something that’s all sizzle and no steak as tutto fumo e niente arrosto (all smoke and no roast).
Italian cuisine, like Italian itself, has many tongues. Rather than una cucina italiana, every region developed a gusto della geo-grafia, a geographic taste based on climate, topography, local products, and distinctive ways of baking bread, growing olives, aging cheese, and shaping pasta. The wives of Ligurian fishermen, for example, created la cucina del ritorno (“homecoming cooki
ng”) that includes a marvelous torta marinara, which is not a fish pie but a savory flan served to welcome their men back from the sea. Sardinian bakers rolled flat breads so thin that shepherds could fold the almost transparent carte da musica (sheets of music) and carry them in their pockets for a snack. Different regions use slightly different recipes and names for the fried pastries served at Carnevale: cenci (rags), chiacchiere (gossips), lattughe (lettuce leaves), nastrini (ribbons), and nodi degli innamorati (lovers’ knots).
When I asked a waiter about the golden hue of risotto alla milanese, he claimed its origins dated back to the construction of Milan’s multispired Duomo, which began in the fourteenth century. A young apprentice glassmaker working on windows for the cathedral created such radiant colors that his colleagues relentlessly teased him about adding saffron to the pigments to make them so brilliant. To retaliate, he mixed saffron with the rice for his master’s wedding. The appetizing result proves the wisdom of one of my favorite Italian proverbs: Anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte (the eye too wants its part). In Italy food must be bello as well as buono.
Although I enjoy cooking, in Italy I prefer the company of wonderful women such as Maria-Augusta Zagaglia, who transforms the matchbook-size kitchen at L’Ercolana, the villa we rent each summer, into a culinary Merlin’s cave. Bob and I gobble up her featherweight fiori di zucca (fried zucchini flowers) before they have a chance to cool. Our guests tell us—and I certainly believe them—that she makes the best pappardelle al cinghiale (pasta in a sauce of wild boar), a local specialty, in the west Tuscan region called the Maremma.
I have never asked Maria-Augusta for a recipe because such a request might seem brutta figura. After all, could any ordinary cook replicate her delicious dishes just by following standardized directions? Not I—especially since she, like many Italian cooks, measures out oil by the dito (finger) and flour by the pugno (fist). But as we mixed a salad together one day, Maria-Augusta did share an old Italian axiom for flavoring a salad perfectly: find un prodigo (a spendthrift) to pour the oil, un avaro (miser) to add the vinegar, un saggio (a wise man) to add the salt, and un pazzo (a crazy man) to mix them all together. But she has kept her secrets for handmade pasta to herself.