Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, and Ravel: A Comparison of Operas
Operas of Puccini, Strauss, Debussy, and Ravel
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Giacomo Puccini, the most successful Italian opera composer after Verdi, was the son of a church organist and composer. Initially expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, he chose to focus on opera, studying at the conservatory in Milan.
Puccini gained attention with his first opera, Le Villi, in 1884. His third opera, Manon Lescaut (1893), catapulted him to international fame. Over the next three decades, he produced nine more operas, all of which have found enthusiastic audiences worldwide. Puccini’s letters reveal a constant search for dramatic conceptions that evoke “the spirit behind the words.”
He was interested in realism, embodied by diverse characters, authentic local color, lifelike stage action, and engaging visual effects. To achieve these elements, he chose plots set in places and times that inspired him, such as Florence in 1299, Rome in 1800, California during the Gold Rush, Nagasaki at the turn of the twentieth century, or ancient China. For him, the exoticism of America, Japan, or China was simply another form of realism, enhanced by the appeal of the unfamiliar and distant.
Puccini created a highly individual personal style by blending Verdi’s focus on vocal melody with elements of Wagner’s approach, notably the use of recurring melodies or leitmotifs, freedom from conventional operatic forms, and a greater role for the orchestra in creating musical continuity. In Puccini’s operas, arias, choruses, and ensembles are usually part of a continuous flow rather than set off as independent numbers.
The standard scene structure pioneered by Rossini and observed in most of Verdi’s operas is replaced by a fluid succession of sections in different tempos and characters. Musical ideas grow out of the dramatic action, blurring the distinction between recitative and aria. Puccini often juxtaposes different styles and harmonic idioms to suggest his contrasting characters, such as impoverished artists and other residents of the Parisian Latin Quarter in La Bohème, the idealistic singer Tosca and the evil Scarpia in Tosca, a Japanese woman and her American lover in Madama Butterfly, or various levels of ancient Chinese society in Turandot.
All of these characteristics are evident in the scene of Butterfly’s marriage to Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. The music moves seamlessly between dialogue and brief aria-like moments. The main continuity and many of the most important melodies are in the orchestra, which nonetheless always supports the singers. In a private dialogue before the ceremony, Pinkerton speaks in the Romantic tones of Puccini’s usual style, but Butterfly moves among several different styles to present different personas to Pinkerton, conforming to Western expectations of exotic charm with a Westernized Japanese style, joining in his Western style as an equal, alluding to hymn style to emphasize that she has converted to his religion, and at one point inadvertently letting him see a darker side of Japanese culture and of her own personal history, her father’s ritual suicide. Puccini’s music balances exoticism with a very human portrait of Butterfly, captured in her Act II aria “Un bel dì.” Expressing her faith that Pinkerton will return to her, and also on the cover of a vocal score. Through very simple means, Puccini responds directly to the text and the situation. His melody-centered, colorful, and emotionally direct style has won his operas a permanent place in the repertory and has exercised a strong influence on scoring for film and television.
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
While Mahler focused on the symphony and orchestral song cycle, Richard Strauss followed a different course. Having established himself in the 1880s and 1890s as the leading composer of symphonic poems after Liszt, Strauss turned to opera, seeking to inherit Wagner’s mantle. After an early failure with Guntram in 1893 and moderate success with Feuersnot in 1901, he scored a triumph in 1905 with Salome, and from then on the powers of depiction and characterization that he had honed in his tone poems went primarily into opera. His main models were Wagner and Mozart, composers from the Austro-German tradition whose operas he enjoyed conducting most of all and who were both adept at using contrasting styles to capture their characters’ personalities, articulate their emotions, and convey the dramatic situation.
Like Wagner, Strauss heightened both musical coherence and dramatic power through the use of leitmotifs and the association of certain keys with particular characters. Salome is a setting of a one-act play by Oscar Wilde in German translation. Strauss adapted the libretto himself. In this decadent version of the biblical story, the teenaged Salome performs her famous Dance of the Seven Veils and entices her stepfather Herod to deliver the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter so that she can kiss his cold lips. The subject, actions, and emotions were stranger than any attempted in opera before, and they stimulated Strauss to create harmonically complex and dissonant music that greatly influenced later composers.
In the conclusion of the opera, Salome speaks to John’s head, musing that his lips taste bitter and wondering if they taste of blood or of love, which she has heard has a bitter taste. She concludes that it does not matter, because she has finally kissed his lips. The strange and shocking situation is perfectly matched by Strauss’s music, which achieves a high level of dissonance and drama through remarkably simple means. The beginning of the passage features a diminished seventh chord, used to create tension as far back as Scarlatti in the late seventeenth century, overlaid with elements that are related but augment the dissonance: melodic and harmonic minor triads derived from the minor thirds in the diminished seventh chord itself; a chromatic trill embellishing one note of the chord; and Salome’s recitative-like declamation that hovers around notes from the chord. Remarkably, this overwhelmingly dissonant passage, which seems to verge on atonality or polytonality, resolves through a familiar tonal progression (i—IV—I4 —V7—I) in a blissful C-sharp major, the key associated with Salome throughout the opera. The move from stomach-churning dissonance to untroubled consonance and from tonal ambiguity to a clear tonal cadence captures in music the catharsis of erotic ecstasy Salome experiences, framed by our horror at that she has done.
Such fiercely dissonant music as heard at the beginning of this excerpt inspired some later composers to abandon tonality altogether. But the resolution to C-sharp and many other passages in this opera sound as sweetly diatonic, consonant, and clearly key-centered as this excerpt’s opening passage is chromatic, dissonant, and ambiguous. The intense effect Strauss achieves here is predicated on our expectations that the dissonances will resolve. For his purposes of musical dramatization Strauss needed the polarities inherent in tonal music between dissonance and consonance, chromaticism and diatonicism, instability and stability, tension and resolution, all basic oppositions that composers since the sixteenth century had used to create drama and expression. In this he was the direct heir of Wagner, who relied on the same polarities to convey intense longing in Tristan und Isolde.
With Elektra, Strauss began a long and fruitful collaboration with the Viennese playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal that would result in seven operas. Adapted from a play by Sophocles, Elektra dwells on the emotions of insane hatred and revenge. Accordingly, Strauss intensified the chromaticism, dissonance, and tonal instability at times even beyond Salome, offset at other times by serene, diatonic and tonally stable passages.
Der Rosenkavalier takes us into a sunnier world of elegant, stylized eroticism and tender feeling in the aristocratic, powdered-wig milieu of eighteenth-century Vienna. Here deceptively simple diatonic music dominates, while chromaticism, novel harmonic twists, unpredictably curving melodies, and magical orchestral colors suggest sensuality and enchantment. The whole score, with its mingling of sentiment and comedy, overflows with the lighthearted rhythms and melodies of Viennese waltzes, a witty anachronism, since the waltz craze began in the early nineteenth century, well after the events in the opera.
The anachronisms of Der Rosenkavalier are multiplied in Strauss’s next opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, which combines characters from Greek tragedy with characters from the eighteenth-century improvised comic commedia dell’arte and Mozartean music with Strauss’s most Romantic effusions, using the conceit that the richest man in late-eighteenth-century Vienna has ordered up a tragic opera and a light comedy for his banquet and at the last moment, to save time for his guests, orders them both to be performed simultaneously. This self-aware play with past traditions, freely mixing elements from different eras to create something entirely new, is as typical of modernism as Salome’s sensuousness or Elektra’s howls of hatred. Strauss’s later operas also exhibit his cunning use of musical styles and his intensification of the polarities inherent in tonality to depict characters and convey the drama.
Ultimately, Strauss’s art is rhetorical, seeking to engage the audience’s emotions directly, as a film composer might do, and he needed just as wide a range of style and effect. After four decades of operas, Strauss turned in his final works to other genres better suited for expressing his own feelings rather than those of his characters. His Metamorphosen for string orchestra is a lament on the disasters brought on Europe and Germany by Hitler and World War II; only gradually do we realize that its intense outpourings are based on the theme from the Funeral March movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, finally stated near the end. And his Four Last Songs for voice and orchestra evoke images of autumn and sunset, revisiting the theme from his early tone poem Death and Transfiguration and now accepting death as a culmination. These works remain tonal, in an age when others were creating electronic music and total serialism, but their tonal language is unlike anyone else’s, and would have sounded utterly radical even forty years before.
Despite his continued use of tonality, all of Strauss’s music is new and highly individual, yet constantly looking to the past. Both Mahler and Strauss claimed a place in the permanent repertoire next to their great German forebears, but they staked out different turf. Mahler became the last great Austro-German symphonist, capping the tradition stemming from Haydn and in his symphonies with voices writing the most significant successors to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Strauss proved to be the great successor to Wagner in German opera, using similar tools from leitmotifs to stylistic contrasts and producing a body of operas with a far greater range of subject than Wagner. Both Mahler and Strauss also found a place in the tradition of German Lieder and raised the orchestral song to a new prominence.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a unique, timeless work, much like its characters, who evolve in another world, lost in the mists of a never-ending dream, set to hypnotic music that serves as a blurry mirror image of it. When he wrote it, Debussy asserted it is “an opera after Wagner, not inspired by Wagner.” The composer faithfully follows the plot of the Symbolist play penned by Maurice Maeterlinck, which unfolds in a sensual and dreamlike atmosphere. The singing follows the rhythms of natural speech, and symphonic interludes depict the opaque beauty of the imaginary kingdom of Allemonde. It offers five acts of continuous mystery and passion, infused with music that is not much more than a shimmering veil.
The story takes place in the imaginary kingdom of Allemonde, governed by the aged King Arkel. After meeting Mélisande, a fragile and mysterious creature, while hunting in the forest, Prince Golaud marries her without learning anything about her and then presents Mélisande to his half-brother Pelléas. A secret bond forms between the two…is it love? Golaud starts to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande. First, he tells his half-brother to stay away from his wife, but then becomes more threatening as he is devoured by fear and jealousy. Pelléas and Mélisande end up confessing their love for each other. As they kiss, Golaud surprises them and kills Pelléas with his sword as Mélisande escapes. In the presence of Arkel and Golaud, who is filled with remorse, the mysterious Mélisande gradually dies of an unidentified affliction. Golaud never finds out the truth about her relationship with Pelléas.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Ravel’s operas L’Heure espagnole (1907/1911) and L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1919-25) are pivotal works in the composer’s relatively small œuvre. Emerging from periods shaped by very distinct musical concerns and historical circumstances, these two vastly different works nevertheless share qualities that reveal the heart of Ravel’s compositional aesthetic.
L’enfant et les sortilèges: Fantaisie lyrique en deux parties
(The Child and the Spells: A Lyric Fantasy in Two Parts) is an opera in one act, with music by Maurice Ravel to a libretto by Colette.
Part 1
This is the story of a rude child who is reprimanded by the objects in his room which he has been destroying. After being scolded by his mother in the beginning of the opera, the child throws a tantrum destroying the room around him and harming the animals nearby. He is then surprised to find that the unhappy objects in his room come to life. The furniture and decorations begin to talk; even his homework takes shape as it becomes an old man and a chorus of numbers. They all sing out their pain and misery that the child inflicts on them and wishes to punish him for his misdeeds.
Part 2
The bedroom becomes a garden filled with singing animals and plants which have been tortured by the child as well. The child attempts to make friends with the animals and plants, but they shun him because of the injuries he did to them earlier before they could talk. They leave him aside, and in his loneliness, he eventually cries out “Maman”. At this, the animals turn on him and attack him in an act of vengeance, but they wind up jostling among each other as the child is tossed aside. At the culmination, a squirrel is hurt, which causes the other animals to stop fighting. The child bandages the squirrel’s wound, and collapses exhausted. Seeing this act of kindness, the animals have a change of heart toward the child, and decide to try to help him home. They mimic the cry of “Maman”, carry the child back to his house, and sing in praise of the child. The opera ends with the child singing “Maman”, as he greets his mother, in the very last measure of the score.
L’heure espagnole
L’heure espagnole is a 1911 one-act opera, described as a comédie musicale to a French libretto by Franc-Nohain, based on Franc-Nohain’s 1904 play (‘comédie-bouffe’) of the same name. The opera, set in Spain in the 18th century, is a Feydeau-esque sex farce about a lusty Spanish woman juggling lovers while her husband is preoccupied with clockwork mechanisms, evokes a Spanish flavour through Ravel’s use of native dance forms including the jota, the habañera and the malagueña.