Toscanini at La Scala placed his baton on the lectern for the posthumous homage to the genius of Giacomo Puccini

The fourth enigma of «Turandot» is in the score, but Giacomo Puccini never wrote it. What it was was revealed on 26 April 1925 by Arturo Toscanini, conducting the Lucchese composer’s last opera in its world premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. At the moment in which the dead slave Liù was carried off the stage in a funeral procession, Toscanini hieratically placed his baton on the lectern and stopped the orchestra and singers exactly where Puccini’s pen had left off. Throat cancer had killed him on November 29, 1924, less than a month before his sixty-sixth birthday, leaving «Turandot» unfinished. Not even in Brussels had the luminaries managed to rescue him from his destiny, which he had helped by never sparing himself the pleasure of Tuscan cigars. He had taken many other pleasures from life, and he had given so many to the world with his music. The publisher Ricordi had commissioned Franco Alfano to complete the score using the author’s notes, but Toscanini had decided otherwise on that evening at La Scala which commemorated one of the greats of music and the last great opera composer of the superb Italian tradition who spoke to the world with the language of Dante.

A family history summarized in first names

Puccini’s path was already marked in the first four names that were given to him when his birth in Lucca was registered on 22 December 1868: Giacomo as the progenitor, Antonio, Domenico and Michele starting from his great-great-grandfather and arriving at his father along the bloodline: all musicians, as in the Bach family. From genius to genius the step was inevitable. The fact that his parents had also called him Secondo and Maria is completely irrelevant, also because he was the sixth of nine children and the first son. However, his talent emerged forcefully within a framework of solid scholastic and cultural education. In Milan, what he didn’t learn at the conservatory came to him from direct contact with the theater and the vitality of melodrama. He already knew what to do and how he wanted to do it: to be modern, using a personal and innovative language, despite having absorbed techniques, formulas, forms and inspirations from Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner, French authors. Originality as an expressive feature, Italian singing and those singular harmonic mixtures that broke away from tradition without the harshness that would explode in the twentieth century until the dissolution of the tonal system. Puccini’s music has always been liked, and in fact even contemporaries reproached him for the “ease” of listening, while academic pedants preferred to exchange originality with lack of respect or ignorance of the rules of composition and counterpoint. He was the one with the “empty fifths”, the double chords that lacked the note that determined the major or minor mode, and were therefore completely forbidden. Claude Debussy in France with the hexatonic scale (six tones instead of the seven that distance C from B with 5 tones and 2 semitones of the classical scale) did something similar in principle but it is absolutely impossible to confuse one with the other. Yet his first score, «Le Villi», did not even receive a mention in the competition organized by Sonzogno and the performance at the Teatro Dal Verme on 31 May 1884 was only made possible thanks to a subscription promoted by friends.

The great passions of a restless life

The publisher Ricordi purchased the rights and commissioned him to write a new opera, investing in that true Tuscan to make him Verdi’s successor. In the five years between signing the contract and the premiere of “Edgar”, Puccini caused a public scandal by going to live with Elvira Bonturi, already married and with a daughter, from whom he would have the heir Antonio. She will be his only wife, married as soon as he can regularize his union (1904), but not the only woman in his experience who is emotionally restless to say the least. He loved many pleasures in life, besides women, such as good food, hunting, smoking cigars and smoking cars which even caused him a serious accident. Contrary to many of his colleagues, he was a composer and that was it: no lessons, no direction, nothing other than the pentagram paper with all that this entailed in terms of economic income, at least in the early days. Having archived «Edgar», in its conventionality impervious to any reworking that would improve the whole, Puccini concentrated on the project of «Manon Lescaut» without worrying too much about the fact that it was the same subject chosen by Jules Massenet, amidst a thousand difficulties of libretto and with his continuous interference on the texts. The premiere in Turin, on 1 February 1893, was a good success, but limited in time, so much so that it instilled doubts in the author whether to continue in this career; then, suddenly, that work exploded across half the world and even George Bernard Shaw praised it publicly. He and the librettist Luigi Illica then looked at Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1849-1851), and together with Giuseppe Giacosa created «Bohème»: just as «Manon» had overshadowed Massenet’s, «Bohème» overshadowed the work of the same name by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The premiere, on 1 February 1896, still in Turin, was entrusted to a young Arturo Toscanini, who immediately entered the good graces of Puccini who preferred him among all orchestra conductors. The public was generous, the critics were not, either because they were preconceived or because they just couldn’t tune in to Puccini’s aesthetics. «Bohème» will become his most performed work, and in the present it brought him fame and wealth. 1900 was the year of the villa in Torre del Lago and the composition of «Tosca»: a triumph.

The voice of Italian melodrama and bel canto

The following year, the death of Giuseppe Verdi automatically crowned him as his successor on the throne of melodrama and in 1904 the exotic «Madama Butterfly» legitimized him with all the trappings, despite the sensational fiasco of the first one (very probably piloted from the claque) to the overwhelming and irreversible success three months later, on an international scale. Puccini traveled and looked for subjects and ideas, and rejected many things out of dissatisfaction and perfectionism, as Gabriele d’Annunzio continually experienced. To see his signature on a work again, he had to wait until 1907, when he was struck by another drama by Belasco which in 1910 became “La fanciulla del West”, premiering on 10 December at the Metropolitan in New York. Then it will be the turn of the «Trittico», i.e. the three one-act plays «Il tabarro», «Suor Angelica» and «Gianni Schicchi», also at the Metropolitan in 1918, interspersed with «La rondine» whose composition began in 1914, with first in 1917 in neutral Monte Carlo because Europe was devastated by a ferocious war. The old world had been subverted by the First World War, which he opposed, and by the post-war problems.

The latest project and the cultural and popular heritage

From 1920 Puccini dedicated himself to the project of «Turandot». Meanwhile, throat cancer appears and advances. When he was admitted to the Institut médico-chirurgical in Brussels to undergo radiotherapy and a desperate operation, he had completed and orchestrated two acts, but not completed the third. Precisely at that point of caesura in the score, published formally concluded, Toscanini at La Scala had interrupted the performance and put down his baton. He thus paid homage to the genius who had combined the quality of his compositional vein with the popularity that has never detached himself from his music, refined and emotionally engaging, nowadays all too often trivialized by advertising and coarse-grained pop.