The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity [Hardcover]

 

 

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Puccini is a problematic composer at the best of times, in spite of his deserved popularity, and any new academic approach to discussing the ambivalence that many feel about his operas is to be welcomed.

Ms. Wilson, to use an academic phrase, seeks to locate Puccini within contemporary reactions (primarily from critics), and those contemporary reactions within the social contexts of his time. So far, so good, but she also seeks to locate all of that within a current paradigm of race, gender, and ethnicity (for which read nationalism), and herein lies the problem with the book. It reads like a PhD thesis, for which those three sacred shiboleths are now essential to get the PhD, and in doing so, almost from the beginning of the book, one is aware of a very heavy agenda going on here, of preconceptions overriding objective evaluation. The main sign of this is that the book is riddled with logical falacies. To give two random examples: she seems to condemn critics for seeing pastoralism, or invocating place, in the music of Vaughan Williams - I presume she does not know Vaughan Williams' own titles for his named symphonies. As a second example, she claims "Scipio Sighele's lengthy critique of [a book by Weininger] in Eva moderna, demonstrates how readily pan-European ideas on fluid gender boundaries were taken up in Italy". One single article does nothing of the sort (she may well be right, but she would need to show many other examples, and she doesn't), and this technique of drawing conclusions (sometimes contentious) from single instances quickly gets very wearisome. A long discussion of the Japanese influences on Italian art, in considering Madama Butterfly, arrives at Mascagni's Iris only at the very end, and then only in one paragraph (which rather suggests Ms. Wilson hasn't seen or heard the opera), whereas I would have throught it pretty central to discussing Puccini's opera in such a context, given the considerable earlier success of Mascagni's work. Indeed, there is a singular lack of mention of operas by Puccini's contemporaries (and critical reaction to them), as if the whole of contemporary Italian opera was irrelevent to 'the Puccini problem'.

All of this is a pity, because her newspaper and magazine sources are very extensive, and many of her ideas are illuminating and interesting - one simply doesn't trust them in the context of her whole approach. She has a chapter deconstructing (and excoriating) Torrefranca's attack on Puccini; by the end of it I thought wryly that her own methods were really not that different from the critic she was criticising.

If you are interested in Puccini from an academic angle, then I would not miss out on this book, but, however distinguished its publishers and the series in which it is issued, it needs to be read with a certain amount of critical caution.

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