'Without fever there is no creation': the tumultuous talent of Giacomo Puccini

Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines.

Giacomo Puccini was an adman’s dream — Mad Men’s Peggy Olson and Don Draper would have recruited him for a photographic campaign on the spot. He possessed saturnine good looks, a twirly moustache, a casually graceful way with a cigarette, flamboyant dress sense (he had a fine hat collection) and was a keen game shot, as well as an early adopter of the motorised vehicle.

The cars almost killed him and the cigarettes did: he had a near-fatal car accident in 1903 that left him with a permanent limp and he died in 1924, aged 65, after horribly painful treatment for throat cancer at a Brussels clinic.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of his death and has seen even more performances of his enduringly popular operas than usual. Of the top 10 most performed operas around the world, three are by Puccini: La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly. Two of his best-loved tunes, The Humming Chorus from Butterfly and the aria O mio babbino caro (Gianni Schicchi), featured in the Last Night of the Proms on September 14.

Music ran in the family — on his father’s side, he came from a dynasty of church musicians in his home town of Lucca. After the early death of his father, Michele, Puccini was expected to follow in his footsteps as an organist, but, despite his mother Albina’s unshakeable belief in his outstanding natural gifts, displayed little talent or interest. His school reports singled him out as being ‘conspicuously lazy’; reluctantly, he became a choirboy in the church choir and, from the age of 14, played the organ for services.

Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti as ‘Mario Cavaradossi’ in the Metropolitan Opera/Franco Zeffirelli production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca. Credit: Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

He started to improvise tunes, some of which he played on the piano in local bars to contribute to the meagre pension from which his mother had to provide for nine children. By the time he was 16, he was composing in earnest and studying the opera scores of fellow countryman Giuseppe Verdi, deciding that opera must be his future after walking, with two of his friends, to attend a performance of Aida in Pisa, 20 miles away.

It became evident that if he truly wanted to compose operas, the Milan Conservatory was the only place to go. Money was scraped together, he was awarded a scholarship and the town council chipped in with a grant. Famously, his student days were to provide a basis for plot details in one of his most successful works, La bohème.

When sharing rooms with another would-be composer, Pietro Mascagni (greatest hit Cavalleria rusticana), he hid in a wardrobe to escape the landlord calling round for his rent; according to letters home, he lived on soup and beans and begged his mother to send him some olive oil (‘There’s one thing I need but I’m afraid to tell you about it because I know too well that you have no money to spend’). He once pawned his only coat in order to entertain a young dancer from La Scala.

Although he lost out in a competition to get his first opera, Le villi, performed — the score was written in such a rush that it was almost illegible — he managed to attract the attention and backing of an influential group of Milanese music lovers and the opera was produced. It swiftly attracted both praise and, crucially, a publisher, Giulio Ricordi, who was to become a keystone of the composer’s career.

Puccini was always on the look out for stories around which to base an opera and librettists to craft those stories into texts. He became notorious for badgering his writer collaborators to the point of nervous exhaustion and was not averse to jumping onto other composers’ coat tails; he used a plot that had twice been made into an opera, breezily writing his own version of Prévost’s Manon when it had only recently been set to music by the French composer Jules Massenet. Leoncavallo’s La bohème of 1897 was pipped to the post by Puccini’s in 1896, the latter claiming to have had no idea that his fellow composer was working on the same subject.

The floating stage of Bregenz opera house during the rehearsal of Tosca on July 13, 2007, in Bregenz, Austria. Credit: Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Bullying his librettists seems to have been as wearing for Puccini as it was for them. Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica were his collaborators on La bohème, Tosca and Butterfly, both eminent in their own right, but foot soldiers when it came to libretto writing. Illica recollected: ‘Those battles of ours! Real battles in which there and then entire acts were torn to pieces, scene after scene sacrificed, ideas abjured which only a moment ago had seemed bright and beautiful; thus was destroyed in a minute the work of long and painful months. And Puccini? After each session he had to run to the manicurist to have his fingernails attended to. He had bitten them off, down to the bone!’

Home was essential to Puccini’s equilibrium. As soon as he could afford it, in 1891, he bought a house in Torre del Lago, near Lucca. It’s a marshy, reedy, insect-buzzing place, not an immediately obvious idyllic country retreat, but Puccini worked out almost every one of his operas there and, when he wasn’t working, he was up at dawn with gun and game bag, rowing his boat through the rushes in pursuit of waterbirds to shoot. He wasn’t sentimental about it; his needs were more basic, as he memorably expressed in a letter to a sister: ‘For me the country is a necessity, something urgent, like when you are desperate to go to the lavatory and there are people there and you cannot go.’

Puccini was a loving father, he had many male friends and a long and rewarding friendship, expressed in prolific correspondence, with an Englishwoman, Sybil Seligman, but he was not easy to be with. Charming and convivial at times, but frequently beset by bouts of paralysed lethargy, a morbid dread of illness and deep-rooted self doubt, his music reflected that sense of unease. One of the most common markings in his scores is ‘come un tremito’ (‘like a shudder’).

The composer wrote to a friend: ‘Without fever there is no creation, because emotional art is a kind of malady, an exceptional state of mind, an over-excitation of every fibre and every atom of one’s being.’ This is what brings such vital intensity to Puccini’s music and makes those sobbing, soaring melodies swirl and dizzy the senses like the intoxicating smoke of one of his own cigars.

Henrietta Bredin is deputy editor of ‘Opera Magazine’