HNAC: IRNA PRIORE MUSIC AND CULTURE LECTURE SERIES

Friday, January 27, 2023, 4:00 PM
Music Building, Lecture Hall 217

“Rescued from Obscurity: Classical Form and Diegetic Music in Puccini’s Operas”
Dr. Karen E. H. Messina
Lecturer of Music Theory

Despite his enduring popularity in opera houses around the world, Puccini’s academic respectability has only solidified in the twenty-first century. Even with a deluge of studies in the last decade, the Puccini problem remains: should he be regarded as a traditional or modern composer? In this presentation, I argue that when Puccini writes diegetic music – which is music that exists within a portrayed world and is therefore heard by characters as music – he steps inside
the drama itself, adopting the persona and producing the work of a composing character. These moments rationalize the presence of Classical phrase structures in Puccini’s otherwise Romantic idiom.

Three increasingly obscure examples of diegetic music illustrate this premise. First, “Ave, sera gentile” from Mann Lescaut (1893) systematically sheds all textual and musical diegetic markers in its nondiegetic repeat. Next, an explicit textual reference marks “Quando men vo'” from La bohème (1896) as diegetic despite textual features that typically align with nondiegetic music. Finally, “L’alba vindice appar” from Tosca (1900) relies upon creative interpretation of the passage as a
war anthem to explain its emphatically sentential structure and resolve both musical and dramatic
deficiencies raised by a nondiegetic reading. Together, these analyses alleviate three levels of obscurity: the presence and function of Classical form in late Romantic opera, the hidden diegetic status of the excerpts from La bohème and Tosca, and the extent of Puccini’s dedication to drama through his use of stylistic variability to convey the work of a fictional composer.