A recital of Giacomo Puccini’s music for the piano? It sounds almost as absurd as a recital of Chopin’s operatic arias. But not quite…. for Puccini had an intimate relationship with the piano. Although not a professional pianist (at the conservatoire he only had a year’s tuition on the instrument before changing to the organ which his family assumed would be his main job – as organist to Lucca’s churches) Puccini had firm views on the kind of instrument he wanted to play. He said that it must be sonorous, almost orchestral in tone. Steinways were to become his favourite: big, full of the most varied dynamics. For Lucca’s most famous composer the piano was principally a means to an end: a way of touching in domestic surroundings the sound-vision of his operatic masterpieces. I am reminded here of how shortly before the maestro’s death one hundred years ago (that’s why he’s particularly celebrated now) Puccini played the ending to ‘Turandot’, his last, incompleted opera, to a close friend in the basement studio of his new villa at Viareggio. Pity no-one recorded what he played…but then it was well before the age of smart telefonini!
It’s true to say that a large chunk of Puccini’s piano music consists of transcriptions made from his operatic oevre: some almost literal, others pot-pourris. However, among these there are pieces originally written for piano.
The concert given yesterday in Bagni di Lucca’s splendid Pardini-designed casino, inaugurated in 1839 with a piano recital given by none other than Franz Liszt (!), was the first time Puccini’s piano music was performed complete: a world premiere in fact and one which included several recently discovered pieces never heard before.
The concert was introduced by Professor Marcello Cherubini, the indefatigable chairman of Bagni di Lucca’s cultural association, the Fondazione Michel de Montaigne. Prof Virgilio Bernardoni, a world authority on Puccini’s piano music then gave the very well attended audience an insightful talk on Puccini’s relationship with the piano.
This was the programme;
Puccini’s piano music can conveniently be divided into three phases. The first consists of juvenile works and academic exercises. These show a rococo-like flavour much in the style of his eighteenth century predecessors. They are charming, they while away the time. Little more one might say but, there again, Puccini’s first triumph with his opera ‘Manon Lescaut’, set in the age of Enlightenment, show how useful it had been for him to master that out-moded style.
The fugue which followed showed that the maestro can pull out all the stops regarding this most difficult type of composition. Again his discipline proved very useful in his early church masterpiece, the ‘Messa a Quattro Voci’ which won him his graduation and a seemingly staid career as an ecclesiastical composer.
The recital by the truly excellent and most idiomatic pianist Silvia Gasperini continued into the second main phase of Puccini’s creative life. A grand waltz, a la maniere of Johnann Strauss gave us an indication of how Giacomo would have delighted his audiences at fashionably intimate ballroom gatherings. Was the ‘little waltz’ written after Musetta’s capricious outpouring in ‘La Boheme’ act two, or did it precede it?
‘Scossa Elettrica’, the lively little march composed for a competition involving a bevy of female telegraphists (and, incidentally, a continuing favourite with our local village bands in Italy in its transcribed form), proved to be the most difficult item to play for our pianist. Great fun it was too: ‘a crappy trifle’ Puccini is reported to have said about it!
The final period of the maestro’s limited but very indicative repertoire of music for the piano concluded with some heart-felt items, one written just a couple of years before his untimely death caused by smoking fifty gold-tipped sobrainies a day from teenage years. With their harmonic ambiguities and unsolved cadences they showed that Puccini was alert to new musical currents, especially those coming from the French impressionist school.
This was certainly not a concert to compare with a Schumann or Brahms recital for the same instrument. It showed, however, that Puccini was fully aware of the possibilities of the piano and was equally, while not a virtuoso, an adept hand at the instrument which he mainly found useful in the creation of his operatic masterpieces which will survive as long as our tortured world survives.
