Puccini was born 150 years ago today in the Tuscan town of Lucca. Here's what the Second Viennese School – well, two of them – thought of him. "A score with an original sound throughout, splendid, every bar a surprise, with not a trace of kitsch," said Anton Webern of La Fanciulla del West. And in 1924, the year of his death, Puccini journeyed to Florence from his idyllic home at Torre del Lago to attend the first Italian performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Afterwards, Schoenberg was flattered by Puccini's praise, gaining the imprimatur of someone he regarded as a great composer.
I think we should listen to Schoenberg and Webern. Puccini was not just a guy who wrote a few good, slushy tunes, but a lifelong perfectionist, an innovator, and a man and musician of the modern world. Above all, his sense of dramatic timing is second to none, and he's able to cut straight to the emotional core of a character.
That's why, when you go to a performance of La Bohème, Tosca or Turandot, you have the sense that the characters are speaking directly to you: Puccini's genius is in the way he uses the gigantic artifice of the opera house to create something so natural, so apparently unmediated. I got him wrong when I was growing up, unable to relate to the soaring expressivity of his music, and then snobbishly thinking of him as the composer of poperatic football tunes.
Anton and Arnold knew the truth though, which is why you should buy this box set for anyone who hasn't discovered the Tuscan maestro yet. Have a happy, Puccinian Christmas – I'll be back in a couple of weeks in 2009, otherwise known as classical music anniversary-ville (will we be able to escape Mendelssohn, Purcell, Haydn and Handel?).
