Giacomo Puccini, who died on November 29, 1924 in Brussels, became the opera composer most dear to the hearts of music lovers and opera directors. Bohemia, Tosca And Madame Butterfly are guaranteed to fill the halls. But the end of the composer’s life leaves a taste of unfinished business, a story that we would like to tell you.
Of all the composers honored in 2024 (Bruckner, Fauré, Smetana, Schoenberg, etc.), Puccini, who died a hundred years ago, is the one whose tune everyone can hum, whose composition they can quote, or whose memory they can recall. The most commonly shared is that of the famous Three Tenors (Domingo, Carreras, Pavarotti) singing “Nessun Dorma” by Turandot in the Baths of Caracalla in the run-up to the 1990 World Cup final in Rome. The album from this legendary concert has since dethroned the 1er Concerto by Tchaikovsky by Van Cliburn and Kirill Kondrashin as the best-selling classical album of all time.
Cancer
Do we really know that in Puccini’s life there remains at least one great enigma? Turandotthe birthplace of his greatest hit, Nessun Dorma, is an unfinished opera, and there is no indication that what we know has anything to do with how Puccini would have really completed his work.
When the composer went to Brussels on November 4 to be treated for what turned out to be throat cancer, he took with him the sketches for the conclusion of Turandot“I hope to see the end of this damn princess,” he wrote to his librettist Giuseppe Adami on 1er September. The opera was to be premiered in the spring of 1925, but the composer had been struggling with the III since June 1923.e act.
In this opera, the icy princess Turandot refuses all her suitors. Subjected to three riddles, they are killed if they do not solve them. A handsome unknown prince finds all the solutions, but Turandot still refuses him. He then challenges the princess to discover his name…
In the elaboration of the last act, the sequence leading from the aria “Nessun Dorma”, where Prince Calaf swears that he will tell Turandot his name in the early morning by kissing her (“I will say it on your lips when the light shines! And my kiss will break the silence. Which makes you mine!”), to the sacrificial death of Liù, Calaf’s servant (“I alone know the name you seek”), is completed. […] By keeping quiet, I give him your love… I give you to him, Princess. And I lose everything!”).
Dissatisfaction
A few months before his death, in the spring, Puccini did not even have the right libretto framing the final confrontation between Calaf and Turandot leading to their final love duet. Toscanini, who was to conduct the premiere, visited Puccini on September 7 and it was still an impasse. In a letter to Adami, which can be found in the remarkable biography by Marcel Marnat (Fayard), we read: “We discussed this duet which he does not like very much. What can be done? I do not know. […] My head is like a pumpkin because of this duo.”
Fortunately, Adami was not the only librettist involved. He had Renato Simoni as an accomplice, who found a solution at the beginning of October that satisfied (temporarily?) Puccini. As Marcel Marnat wrote: “Puccini left for Brussels, taking with him 36 pages of sketches intended for the end of the IIIe act and the love duet”. Ironically, the substantial part of the sketches will be completed after Liù’s death with the sunrise on the words of Turandot “My glory is finished”.
So what we think is Puccini’s choice for the grandiose, this Final of Turandotwhere the princess surrenders and falls into the arms of the man who has won her heart to the cheers of the crowd, is not by Puccini, but by Franco Alfano. The question that the listener hardly asks is whether it corresponds to Puccini’s visions or intentions.
Arm wrestling
At the Brussels hospital, in the neck of the inveterate smoker Puccini, the tumor riddled with radium needles gradually gives way, but the heart gives out on the morning of November 29, 1924. The scenario, although predictable, was not planned. The scenario then becomes that of Requiem Mozart. Should we be content to finish the opera on the death of Liù and play Puccini, nothing but Puccini or have the opera completed? But by whom? It was Toscanini who suggested Franco Alfano (1875-1954) as the Puccinian Sussmayr of the 20th centurye century.
The premiere in March 1926 would give rise to a series of standoffs. First between Mussolini and Toscanini. The conductor who refused to conduct a fascist anthem, leading the Duce to stay at home. Then between Toscanini and Alfano. At the premiere, Toscanini would put down his baton where Puccini had left off on the pretext that “death has proven stronger than art”. Toscanini would never conduct the completed version, which Final d’Alfano presented a few days later under the direction of Ettore Panizza.
It should be noted that despite the aesthetic and musicological reservations, exactly in the same way as the Requiem Mozart’s Sussmayr, for the majority of music lovers, the simplistic and lapidary Final d’Alfano has imposed itself without a doubt, while, for example, attempts to complete the 10e Symphony by Mahler, the 9e Symphony Bruckner or the Unfinished Symphony Schubert’s works remain seen as experiments on the fringes of “real business”.
Center of gravity
There is no shortage of arguments to criticize Alfano, but they are aimed at the entire finishing team. As Piotr Kaminski writes in A thousand and one operas (Fayard): “The exemplary scenario will be struck in the heart by the fatality depriving us of a final duet worthy of making up for the scene of Liù’s sacrifice which precedes it. The challenge which haunted Puccini for years proved insurmountable for Franco Alfano. The clumsy end of the opera […] cannot correct the only and formidable defect of the libretto: how, without a captivating “transfiguration by Love” could the spectator forgive Calaf for satisfying his quest for the absolute by walking on Liù’s corpse?
And Puccini knew this well, since Marcel Marnat notes the presence of a note at the bottom of a sketch: ” And for Tristano ” (in the manner of Tristan and Isolde). For the musicologist, the satisfaction expressed in October on the text would not have lasted long: “Let’s bet that, as many times in the past, this text would have been torn to pieces as soon as Puccini had undertaken its definitive setting to music: Turandot blossoming unexpectedly under the influence of desire truly demands an exceptionally persuasive love duet.”
Moreover, Marnat rightly notes that “the real subject” of Turandot being “love triumphant”, the opera was to reach its climax “not in the scene of the enigmas (as it appears nowadays), but in this final duet, because ‘everything that is strong and brilliant in the opera must be exalted there’ (letter from Puccini)”.
So we think we know this opera, we think it reflects Puccini, when in fact it is only a witness to his hesitations in the face of the difficult birth of a supreme masterpiece that he was never able to perfect. The real Turandot would very possibly have been a Tristan and Isolde Puccinian with a long final love duet in place of the “big spectacular patent” where two chilling characters take flesh a little quickly.
In hindsight, it was discovered that there were three versions of the Final d’Alfano. The first, rejected by Toscanini and the publisher Ricordi, is unknown, The 2edeveloped, played in 1926 was found in 1978. The 3emore concise, aimed at dealing with current affairs, is the one usually carried out.
Luciano Berio proposed another ending, created in 2002 by Riccardo Chailly. It has the merit of innovation and elegance, Berio notably bringing back themes linked to Liù to “recall that she existed and played a determining role in the rapprochement of Turandot and Calaf”. This refined, more modern work has not really established itself since, but leaves more doubts hanging over the last enigma left by the composer.