PUCCINI OPERA GIANNI SCHICCHI FULL

However, Puccini managed what even the greater composers did not achieve he created his personal style, a forceful style, although it frequently turns into manner or descends to the level of operetta. His limitations are obvious.” In the summation of creative qualities, Puccini is not a composer of great format.

At the beginning of his monograph on Puccini, Adolph Weissmann wrote, “I do not want to understand Puccini as a tragedian. Intensive orchestra emphasis of drama, surprising contrasts, great gradations, often artificial and implausible, temperamental outbursts, vocalisation of melodic lines in style of Italian tradition – were main characteristics of Puccini’s operatic style. When analysed from a technical point of view, Puccini’s scores consist of mosaic musical contents, superbly and wittily instrumented and formulated into a unity by a hand of a master. Puccini’s sentimentality comes partly from his Manon Lescaut and partly from Verdi’s Traviata. When brutality, naturalism, rough contrast and wide lines are concerned, Puccini’s style represents a direct continuation of verismo style. The two characteristics of his style have their special origins. His operatic style presents more or less harmonic mixture of brutality and sentimentality. Puccini paid much attention to the nerves of his audiences and influenced them, frequently using even external stimulations. Puccini formulated the secret of every theatre success, “There are three laws when theatre is concerned: stir interest, surprise and impress.” This is his aesthetic motto. Being a man of a certain theatre instinct, Puccini had a feeling for stage and looked for exciting drama plots and upheld the cult of grand gestures and desperate actions resulting from strong passions. However, his searches for a new libretto had always been successful.

PUCCINI OPERA GIANNI SCHICCHI FULL

Puccini was always searching for new and interesting texts full of life, excitement and kindness. He told his biographer, Fraccaroli, that he could not live without writing scores and that he always searched for the next opera as soon as he had finished one, since he was not skilful in writing symphony music. Puccini chose his librettos quite effectively.

Later on he wrote scores for La fanciulla del West (1912), La rondine (1917), Il trittico ( Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, 1918) and finally, his last piece, Turandot (performed in 1926). After his first attempts ( Le villi, 1884 Edgar, 1889) and first successes ( Manon Lescaut, 1893), he became internationally popular with his most significant and most popular operas, La Boheme (1898), Tosca (1900) and Madam Butterfly (1904). Since he possessed much sense for opera theatre, Puccini dedicated himself exclusively to opera compositions. He graduated from the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with Bazzini and Ponchielli at the time, Ponchielli was famous for his opera La Gioconda. Puccini was born in Lucca, a small town in Tuscany, on 22 December 1858. Puccini did that by modifying, to some extent, basic rules of verismo aesthetics. Although their works had much success and made significant influence to European opera at the end of XIX and beginning of XX century, Mascagni and Leoncavallo did not raise verismo style to universal significance. Only Mascagni in Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo in Pagliacci accomplished pure verismo.

Italian ‘realistic’ verismo style, with its dramatic scenes from people’s lives, without fine psychological analysis, musically unsystematic and random, with extreme fluctuations between lyric and brutal effects, was a reaction to Wagner’s influence, which in Italy could be partly observed in Verdi’s Othello and especially in Mephistopheles by Arrigo Boito. It was quite natural that reaction to Wagner’s principles occurred in Italy where, due to exceptionally strong opera tradition, Wagner’s influence was least appreciated. There are numerous undistinguished imitators of Wagner, composers of lesser talent, in all European countries, especially in Germany, who composed long and boring pieces, completely forgotten today, who brought Wagner’s principles to absurdity. Wagner’s musical and drama works made the greatest influence in the history of music. Nonetheless, as doubtlessly the greatest musical dramatist, Richard Wagner is at the centre of musical and drama creation of XIX century. Besides Mascagni and Leoncavallo, Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) was one of representatives of the Italian verismo style, although with certain limitations.

When we talk about Italian verismo style, we have to observe musical and drama works of XIX century.

Puccini opera gianni schicchi