“Mediocrity in the musical world? Yes. There’s a lot of that and many will point to the Venetian restored to notoriety via a twentieth century drama: Salieri. Of course it’s largely dramatic make-belief and cooked up for stage effect. But as in all these things there’s a modicum of truth. The trouble is that Salieri was affected more by mental delusion: the idea of being Mozart’s poisoner which, of course, he wasn’t: Wolfgang died of Rheumatic fever instead.
I can’t believe just how Antonio has sprung back into some performance fashion after that film. Mind you, Salieri’s music was thought well enough in his time. Even Beethoven felt inspired to write a set of ten variations on one of his themes. And Salieri was quite a master of reformed French opera à la Gluck. witness ‘Les Danaides’.
I too was thought highly of in my time. A strong competitor to Rossini? A rival to the melodic supremacy of Bellini or the dextrous wit of Donizetti? Indeed. Many melomaniacs thought that. The point is, however, that unlike some others I could name I bowed out gracefully when my time came. I knew I couldn’t keep up with those budding compositional stars…and as for the young Verdi? Christ! I even said in my memoirs that I confessed I had been surpassed by the divine Vincenzo Bellini, a fact that is testified by my Requiem mass written in homage to the great Catanese. (By the way, although of Tuscan descent I also was born in Catania.)
Yet as a young lad I was considered a worthy successor to the likes of Cimarosa and the Italian operatic school. I was feted in the great opera houses of Europe and – more than that – adored by several women. Singers lay themselves at my feet in the hope that they might receive one of my specially-tailored arias and exult as prima donnas. Ballerinas would dance their pirouettes imploringly before me. I admit I was quite the handsome young gentleman and a genial composer to boot.
I only mentioned my greatest love in passing in my memoirs however. Just two lines for the most beautiful woman in the Empire. She who when sculpted in the nude by Canova as a wedding anniversary present from her husband riposted to scandalised tongues with ‘actually my boudoir was very well-heated’.
She whose father declared that he had had to choose between his own ambitions and keeping an eye on her and wished he’d made the former choice as his life would have been a deal easier. Hence Carlo Maria’s comparatively modest position in Corsican society. No matter, his son Napoleone took over the important matter of fulfilling family ambitions!
You would think that a difference of twenty-six years between Paolina and me might not be scandalous today. In my time however, I could not possibly marry her, that wildly tempting cougar, that quasi-Messalina in a neo-classical silk tunica. In any case Paolina was still married to Count Borghese although no longer living with him. As a wit at the time said she made love to a multitude of men and sometimes even to her own husband… What a frenetic woman she was! Operatically hysterical too. Paolina could have been the basis for several of the heroines in the almost eighty melodramas I wrote in my lifetime. Our relationship was frenzied, fraught but always fond… in the end.
Nonetheless Paolina would threaten suicide if her Nino (that’s the nickname she gave me) ever left her and she would torment me with a list of names of dancers and sopranos I was supposed to be having affairs with. So tiresome! So untrue!
It was getting all a bit too much for me and after a saccharine surfeit of postulations, passions and pleadings I decided I would opt for a conventional marriage with a woman more in keeping with my age and class; I said so to Paolina in no uncertain terms. Gone were our escapades to the sylvan bowers of Bagni di Lucca and the Royal villa near the terme where we would disport ourselves in the thermal waters which filled its marble baths. The same went with the villa Paolina had built as her love nest at Viareggio. With its encrustations of stucco and mythological erotic scenes it had transformed itself into a mausoleum for me. I thought, let Paolina entomb her within its gaudy bowers! Let her languish in its dappled summer gardens. Let her drown herself in reptilian tears before ever swallowing me up with her inescapably honeyed bites! That villa, once by the ocean’s edge now in the centre of a worldly resort. Now with its magical garden built-over with holiday condominiums…that centre of our love’s most intimate, most adventurous aphrodisiac sports
And so I left my Paolina and never more uttered a word about her to anyone. Nor did I do more than say I’d met only once the eternally victorious Venus in my posthumous memoirs. It was actually so sad. Paolina did eventually resign herself to an utter loneliness from which death soon lovingly released her for she died shortly afterwards of liver cancer aged forty-five
Yet the irony is – as is natural for anyone or anything that is truly beautiful – that Paolina Bonaparte is remembered for ever while I, Giovanni Pacini, am forgotten. I, the most celebrated composer of the age. I the author of over seventy melodramas ranging from’ Adelaide e Comingio’ to ‘Il Barone di Dolsheim’ to ‘La Schiava di Bagdad’ to ‘Alessandro nell’Indie’ to ‘Gli Arabi nelle Gallie’. I, the author of the ‘Sinfonia Dante, commissioned specially for the Florentine commemoration of the six hundredth year of the birth of the ‘sommo poeta’. I, the great music teacher and director of the Lucca conservatoire – originally named after me but now retitled after someone equally prolific, but not in opera rather in string quintets, one enclosing that familiar minuet.
Anyway I’m glad that a few recordings have since been made of my music and that at least my memories are available as an e-text. However, I can’t help thinking I shall never become as well-known as I was in the heat of nineteenth century European opera houses and certainly never steal a glimmer of limelight from that great young love of my life: Maria Paola ‘Paolina’ Bonaparte”.
‘L’ultimo Amore. La fin du re^ve’. A play written and directed by Orlando Forioso with the part of Paolina Bonaparte played by Francine Massiani and that of Giovanni Pacini played by Lucca Tanganelli was performed at the Real Collegio di Lucca last Monday. It was a performance Sandra and I enjoyed very much and it prompted me to write this monologue spoken by the hapless composer.
