Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music by Franklin Peter

Author:Franklin, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520280397
Publisher: University of California Press

People, even serious people, are fond of Puccini, but they do not profess allegiance to him as they do to Wagner or Mahler or Richard Strauss. When men of merit confess their liking for his music, they always do so with a touch of embarrassment, just as they might be ardent readers of Eugene Sue or Conan Doyle without quite liking to admit it.40

Later in his admiring study of the composer (in which he too felt obliged to categorize Puccini as a “minor master of the first rank”),41 Specht isolates one aspect of what was likely to be problematic for a Wagnerian about that “shameless theatricality,” for all that it might also have marked Wagner’s works in ways that I have indicated. Writing about Manon Lescaut, he admitted that non-Italians were astonished by the fact that Puccini had appeared onstage to acknowledge applause in the middle of that opera’s first act at its premiere in Turin in 1893. The incongruity of Puccini appearing “in modern [dress], surrounded by the singers in their stage attire” was clearly uppermost in his mind, as he supplied his own explanation:

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