Summary: <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/14075520/puccini.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)<br> <br> <br> <br> On January 14, 1900 – 119 years ago today – Giacomo Puccini’s three-act opera Tosca received its first performance at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. <br> <br> <br> <br> Based on a play by the French playwright Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) and adapted for opera by the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Gioacosa, Tosca has been an audience favorite since the day of its premiere. According to Operabase, an online database of opera performances, Tosca is the fifth most popular opera in the repertoire today. <br> <br> <br> <br> Of course, we will want to know which operas are numbers one through four! They are, starting with number one: La Traviata (1853), by Giuseppe Verdi; The Magic Flute (1791), by Wolfgang Mozart; Carmen (1875), by Georges Bizet; and La bohème (1895), by Giacomo Puccini. <br> <br> <br> <br> We would observe that Puccini is the only composer with two operas in Operabase’s top five. Based on number of performances worldwide, the five most popular opera composers today are, in order one through five: Verdi; Puccini; Mozart; Wagner; and Rossini. <br> <br> <br> <br> Unfortunately, unlike Verdi, Mozart, Wagner and Rossini, Puccini’s popularity with audiences has not been matched with equal acclaim from the critics. No doubt, some critics have said nice things about Puccini’s operas, but they remain in the minority. And unlike so many composers whose music was critically rejected in their lifetimes only to become critically celebrated at a later date, it can be honestly said that the critical disfavor of Puccini’s operas has actually grown since his death in 1924! <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/14075609/harold-schonberg.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Harold Schonberg (1915-2003)<br> <br> <br> <br> For example, Harold Schonberg (1915-2003), for over 20 years the chief music critic for the New York Times (and the first music critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, in 1971), wrote:<br> <br> <br> <br> “The Puccini operas may be naïve; and musicians have accused them of pandering to a listener’s baser instincts. There is no denying that many Puccini operas are frank tearjerkers, and those who regard [opera] as an art of spiritual betterment reject them out of hand.”<br> <br> <br> <br> Many of Puccini’s fellow professionals have been equally unkind. According to the composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976):<br> <br> <br> <br> “[I am] sickened by the cheapness and emptiness of Puccini’s music.”<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/14075730/arnold-schoenberg.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) (what’s he smokin’?)<br> <br> <br> <br> According to composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951):<br> <br> <br> <br> “There are high and lower means [of artistic expression]. Realistic, violent incidents – as for example the torture scene in [the second act of] Tosca – which are unfailingly effective should not be used by an artist, because they are too cheap, too accessible to everybody.”<br> <br> <br> <br> (One wonders if having the name Schonberg/Schoenberg actually requires one to disapprove of Puccini?)<br> <br> <br> <br> Arnold Schoenberg’s comment addresses Tosca specifically, and indeed, no one of Puccini’s twelve operas has been more consistently lambasted by critics than Tosca. My mentor Joseph Kerman (1924-2014), who just last week I correctly identified in a Music History Monday post as being “the greatest musicologist of his generation”, wrote in his tremendously influential book Opera as Drama (1956; revise...
