In defence of Puccini

During my opera-going lifetime the most sensational change in the repertoire has, of course, been the immense expansion of the baroque repertoire, with Monteverdi, Rameau and above all Handel being not only revived but also seen now as mainstays in most opera houses. To think that only 50 years ago it was regarded as daring for Glyndebourne to mount L’incoronazione di Poppea, even in Raymond Leppard’s abbreviated and sumptuous version, which has been most unfairly denigrated in recent years.

Yet just as remarkable, though hardly ever remarked on, has been the instatement of Puccini (who never needed reviving, since after initial scandals and flops he has always been more or less responsible for opera houses sometimes being in the black). But he was routinely thought of by opera-goers whose primary affections were for Mozart, Verdi and Wagner as second-rate, depending for his reputation on sex, sadism and sentimentality, a kind of operatic version of the Sun.

That view hasn’t entirely died, though it is much less often voiced now. For thoughtful opera-goers of my generation, Joseph Kerman’s book Opera as Drama, published in 1956, made an immense impression. Kerman, who died earlier this year, wrote a lot more about opera, but that is the book by which he will be remembered: his dismissal of Tosca as ‘that shabby little shocker’ is the single phrase that ensured his survival as an opera critic — not an occupation with a high degree of immortality. That phrase, often used even now, but more in derision of the man who coined it than of the work he applied it to, seemed to sum up the snootiness of academic criticism. Yet the rest of the book, which also dismantled Richard Strauss and indeed most works of even the composers whom he admired, is primarily a celebration of the small number of operas that Kerman felt did what opera should do: present drama in musical form, the point being that through the music we are given a genuinely dramatic experience, not a story on which to hang memorable tunes and B-movie-type thrills, which is what Kerman thought that Puccini offered.