The American Center for Puccini Studies

The American Center for Puccini Studies hopes to educate as well as entertain. Here you will find notes from our very own founding director, Dr. Harry Dunstan. He is one of today's foremost experts on all things Puccini. Check in from time to time to hear what he has to say. Edgar burns down Puccini’s House while Joseph Campbell Laughs and the Dish Runs Away with the Spoon A few words about Edgar by The American Center for Puccini Studies’ Founding Artistic Director, Harry N. Dunstan, Ph.D. If you have read about Puccini’s opera, Edgar, on the Internet: IT’S WRONG!!! This magnificent work "Puccini’s first from scratch real opera” is the most maligned, neglected, and misunderstood of all his operas. While the most learned and serious Puccini scholars have long recognized that Edgar is a major work, it has taken a while for this opinion to reach the general public. Unfortunately, musicological scholarship often simply kicks around hackneyed, and jaundiced, opinions like a beach ball until an aesthetic opinion finally replaces the dreary positivistic platitudes. In the case of Edgar, it’s been impossible to form a real aesthetic opinion because the original work has not been heard since 1891! With apologies to Allan Tate, it’s rather difficult to evoke the symbolic imagination regarding singing: Edgar must be heard to be believed. To this end, The American Center for Puccini Studies is honored to present The New World Premiere of this glorious opera and hopes that this is but the first step toward establishing a new performing tradition that will result in Edgar taking its legitimate place beside the other Puccini operas. In the final months of his life, as Puccini reflected back on his career, he told one of his first biographers (who also happened to be a dear friend) that I poured my best music into Edgar. The amputated three act Edgar (the only one known today) was last performed in Puccini’s lifetime in 1905. Since Puccini died in 1924, that means he lived another two decades without ever hearing this opera again. He, no doubt, took solace in the fact that parts of Edgar lived on in his other operas, as it was such a prescient work that he was able to bodily transfer entire passages into Manon Lescaut, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La fanciulla del West, and Turandot. Puccini must have howled with laughter to know that the rejected, derided passages from Edgar were receiving enthusiastic global approbation when placed in his other operas. In that sense, Edgar has always been very much alive! It is well beyond the scope of this brief essay to address all of the vicissitudes of Edgar; however, the ACPS does intend to produce a critical study that will do full justice to this neglected masterpiece. The simple reasons as to why Edgar has not entered the standard repertory are: (1) it’s an incredibly difficult opera to produce, and (2) much of the original source material is missing! Edgar’s absence from the repertory has more to do with practical performing realities then with negative aesthetic judgments. The Act Four manuscript of Edgar (and copyist’s parts) is still missing and a large portion of the Act Two manuscript is also missing. This performance by the ACPS is based on the piano/vocal score, which was published between the La Scala premiere of April 1889 and the final performances in Lucca during September of 1891. To fully realize Edgar it is necessary to have the missing parts re-orchestrated and the ACPS looks forward to completing this final step in the near future. Rather than wait, however, the ACPS believes that it is time to reawaken Edgar Consciousness and begin presenting this opera to the public. Today’s performance is truly an historical event as this is only the third time in history that the four act version of Edgar has ever been performed and the first time outside of Italy. This performance will feature about an hour of Puccini's vocal music that has not been heard anywhere in the world since 1891. It is at once thrilling and sad to encounter this Edgar for the first time. Thrilling because we hear music of ineffable beauty and emotional immediacy, yet we realize that due to the necessities of commercial music, Puccini’s profound genius and artistic vision had to wait another twenty years before he could return to the place where he had originally started with Edgar. Puccini was the best educated composer of his generation and the prodigious culmination of four previous generations of highly respected musicians. As his biographer, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, has said: Puccini was simply a colossal intellectual who went to great lengths to hide that fact, as he was also very shy and humble. Above all else, Edgar is the work of two brilliant intellectuals, Ferdinando Fontana and Giacomo Puccini, who were seeking to bring a mythological work to the operatic stage. Edgar’s lack of success is not because the story is preposterous, as many commentators have written, but it’s because Edgar has not been properly placed within its cultural/musical context. When seen within an Italian grand opera tradition that produced works such as Mefistofele, La gioconda, and Otello, while still following the musical-philosophical aesthetics of the scapigliatura of the 1880s, a clearer picture of Edgar begins to emerge. What the aforesaid three operas have in common is a libretto by Arrigo Boito. In many respects, Fontana can be thought of as a Boito type of figure within his own generation. In fact, Boito and Fontana were friends and it should be noted that it was Boito himself who helped launch Puccini's career by helping to secure performances of Le villi. Puccini acknowledged this by dedicating the score of Le villi to Boito. It is also imperative to understand that Puccini was following in the steps of another successful composer from his hometown of Lucca, Alfredo Catalani. Catalani was Puccini’s senior by four years and he achieved early success in the Italian opera world only to be later eclipsed by Puccini. Catalani, however, was the first Italian composer to successfully blend the transalpine influences of Wagner with Italian vocality. Catalani was Puccini’s immediate role model and Edgar must be seen as an attempt to bring a type of Wagnerian music drama to the new school of Italian opera. If the ultra-sophisticated audience of Turin found La boheme too modern in 1896, what must the sectarian audience of La Scala thought of Edgar in 1889? [No wonder Puccini had Edgar burn his house down and renounce his paternal heritage!] In seeking to bring a work onto the operatic stage that blended myth with new musical-philosophical notions, Fontana and Puccini perhaps asked too much of their audience at the time. Philosophy has never been initially well received on the Italian stage and the earthy realism of Mascagni’s wildly successful Cavalleria rusticana in 1890 meant the end of the grand opera genre in Italy. The story of Edgar is the classic arc of The Hero’s Journey: Departure; Initiation, Enlightenment/Atonement; Death; Return. Edgar’s departure is signaled by the burning of his paternal home and his departure with Tigrana. The crux of the drama is realized during the hero’s initiation. This notion is underscored in a preface that Fontana wrote for the libretto and which will be recited before each performance. The great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, tells us that the hero’s initiation develops as he confronts the Woman as Temptress (i.e., Tigrana): The testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. What has just been described is Edgar’s developing relationship to and from Tigrana toward Fidelia. Anything tainted with the odor of flesh provokes a moment of revulsion and that woman who was seen as the agent of life (Tigrana) is renounced as intolerable to the pure soul. There are a number of parallels between Edgar and Hamlet and, like Hamlet’s pure relationship with Ophelia, Edgar sees Fidelia’s profile outlined in heaven as an image of pure love. Through the sensual, Edgar achieves enlightenment and atonement; what follows is then a spiritual death and return (Acts Three and Four). What further complicates Edgar is that the archetypal, mythic figure is also blended with a Byronic Hero who also looks forward to the anti-hero of the twentieth century. [Perhaps Edgar can be seen as a cross between Faust and Jim Rockford?] Again, that’s a lot to ask of an opera audience who maybe only wanted to hear a few good tunes and was not seeking a dramatic catharsis of Aristotelian proportions. Seen in this way, it’s obvious that Edgar must be considered within its proper context before being dismissed as silly or frivolous. It must be said that the full Hero’s Journey is only encountered in the original four act version. Unfortunately, the mutilated three act version leaves most of the archetypal material in disarray and the story line does subsequently lack motivation. Upon encountering the real Puccini within the four act original, however, for those who can’t see and hear the profound genius at work we must ask Who’s the real fool here? With regard to the music, Michael Elphinstone tells us that noted musicologist Roman Vlad has asserted that: Various facets of Edgar’s harmonic language anticipate structures theorized by Messiaen and pages of the score display a return to the Greco - Gregorian modes later adapted by Respighi, Pizzeti, Malipiero, and Casella and claimed as their invention. . . . With Edgar, Puccini prepared the way for Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok, and even Schoenberg; the particular characteristics of Puccini’s harmonic language that earned him mention in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1922) are evident as early as Edgar. We are further amazed when one realizes that Puccini was not yet 28 when he finished composing Edgar and, in fact, significant portions of the opera were drawn from his earlier compositions. It is a testament to both Puccini’s genius and his original thinking that he was able to incorporate passages from preexisting orchestral compositions in a seamless yet dramatically effective manner into Edgar. Several of the most prominent musical themes of Edgar date from the time of his student days (1880-1883), and the theme sung in church in Act One is actually lifted from the Kyrie portion of the mass Puccini composed in 1880: when he was just 22 years old! In many respects, the climaxes of Acts Two, Three, and Four are built upon music Puccini had composed during his studies at the Milan Conservatory. Large passages from his Adagetto (probably written sometime before 1883), Preludio sinfonico (1882), and Capriccio sinfonico (1883) are used throughout Edgar. In addition, a passage from his song Storiella d’amore and several sections from his Mass of 1880 are used as well. Has any other composer in western art music written music during his student days that can keep pace with his later development as a composer? And Puccini was always considered to be a composer who was au courant with all musical trends and a modern composer in every sense of the word. The reason that Puccini was able to place this instrumental music into a vocal, operatic context was because he was always thinking about music as a direct, communicative language, and he should be thought of as a musical philologist whose compositional style is an outcrop of the Italian language itself. To borrow a phrase, the Italian language is the very earth from which Puccini’s music grows and the finest aspect of his art has always been that he can combine the abstraction of language with the emotional directness of music. This is the essence of Edgar! To those who deride the story of Edgar as silly or preposterous, we would point the accusing finger and suggest that they never again attend a performance of Die Zauberflote, Il trovatore, or any opera by Wagner: lest they be regarded as hypocrites. Dramatic and spiritual truths are not revealed by perfectly logical plot lines and literal, linear thinking, but by insights which emerge from transcendent experiences. Truth is not fact; truth is insight, and Edgar is a work of great honesty and insight. The German novelist Thomas Mann defined myth as a story about the way things never were, but always are literally not true, but in reality the ultimate truth. In many respects Edgar's travails mirror those of Puccini himself and it was fitting that Edgar's funeral music from Act Three was played at Puccini's own funeral. It’s time to rebuild Edgar’s house. As Fontana said in his preface: We are all Edgar, sharing the same life’s journey.