The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity

by Alexandra Wilson

• ISBN13: 9780521106375
• ISBN10: 0521106370
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A detailed investigation of the reception and cultural contexts of Puccini's music, this book offers a fresh view of this historically important but frequently overlooked composer. Wilson's study explores the ways in which Puccini's music and persona were held up as both the antidote to and the embodiment of the decadence widely felt to be afflicting late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italy, a nation which although politically unified remained culturally divided. The book focuses upon two central, related questions that were debated throughout Puccini's career: his status as a national or international composer, and his status as a traditionalist or modernist. In addition, Wilson examines how Puccini's operas became caught up in a wide range of extra-musical controversies concerning such issues as gender and class. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the history of opera and of the wider artistic and intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Italy.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Inventing an Italian composer

La bohTme: organicism, progress and the press

Tosca: truth and lies

A frame without a canvas: Madama Butterfly and the superficial

Torrefranca vs. Puccini

The Italian composer as internationalist

A suitable ending?

Epilogue

Selected newspapers and journals

personalia

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