he tangled personal lives and careers of Giacomo Puccini, Alfredo Catalani, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Alberto Franchetti and Pietro Mascagni often drew them into mutually supportive relationships when they were young. Three of the composers had studied with the same teacher -- Giacomo Puccini's uncle, Fortunato Magi, who taught Catalani and Franchetti as well as Puccini. And as they matured, all five had formal or informal ties to the Royal Conservatory in Milan and particularly to Amilcare Ponchielli, who taught there.
These aspiring musicians stayed in Milan to promote their works in the Galleria and at La Scala and the Teatro dal Verme. Their most important contacts, however, led them to the mighty music publishing houses. Casa Ricordi, headed by Giulio Ricordi, far outclassed its chief rival, Casa Sonzogno. Ricordi published the works of many important composers -- both Italians and foreigners -- but Verdi was its chief source of income. At Casa Lucca, the third contender, the elderly and feared Giovannina Lucca presided. She had been active since the 1840s and could boast of having had Verdi and Wagner under contract, Verdi briefly and Wagner for the long term. The importance of these publishing houses grew in proportion to the waning influence of impresarios and theatrical agents. In fact, Puccini and his companions lived in the era of what John Rosselli, author of The Opera Industry from Cimarosa to Verdi, calls "The End of the Impresario." The all-powerful music publishers came to control the opera industry worldwide as no single impresario had ever done. The reach of the publishers' authority and the fierce rivalry among them affected all composers, young and old. To some it brought fame, to others ruin.
This, then, was the environment in which these young composers fought for survival. Puccini was by no means the wisest of them. In terms of cultural experience, both Leoncavallo and Franchetti had a slight edge over Puccini and Mascagni, for they had been abroad and traveled extensively. Leoncavallo had worked in Egypt and France in the early 1880s; Franchetti had studied in Venice, Dresden and Munich. He was also wealthy and held a title: he was Baron Franchetti. His mother, Marie Louise de Rothschild, had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. Puccini's position was bolstered not by private means but by the generations of composers in his family; the Puccinis had dominated church music in Lucca for nearly a century. He also had the advantages of genius and the vast culture of his background in Lucca but knew nothing of the rest of Europe, to say nothing of Egypt. Compared with the others, the unpolished Mascagni, a baker's son, was crude clay.
As these men set out to launch their careers, a strong comradeship bound them together. In the 1880s, the most promising of the crowd was Catalani, described by Puccini biographer Mosco Carner as "the great hope of Italian opera." Puccini admired his fellow-townsman, and
Catalani responded by inviting Puccini to his house in Milan and offering him sound advice. Their friendship, however, lasted only until Puccini embarked on a serious career of his own. Then Catalani, who was suffering from tuberculosis, began to suspect that Ricordi's support for Puccini, along with Verdi's interest in the newcomer, would drive his own operas from the stage. Catalani was bitter and afraid, seeing Verdi as "the king" bestowing his favor on Puccini, his "crown prince."
Over the next decade, this group became known as the "Giovane Scuola" (Young School). Mascagni and Puccini shared an apartment for a while, living their own "vie de Bohème" in Milan. Later, Puccini and Leoncavallo were down-the-lane neighbors in their Swiss retreat in Vacallo, while Leoncavallo was writing Pagliacci and Puccini was working on Manon Lescaut.
The first of the "Young School" to make his mark was Puccini, whose Le Willis (later revised as Le Villi) reached the Teatro dal Verme in 1884 and La Scala in 1885. His Edgar followed in 1889. Franchetti emerged with Asrael in 1888, winning praise when Verdi saw it at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa. The two were already acquainted, for seven years earlier Verdi had invited Franchetti to dinner in Palazzo Doria in Genoa, a rare privilege for the young composer, who was only twenty-one at the time. Thanks to Verdi's influence, Franchetti got another important commission, Cristoforo Colombo, for the 1892 celebration of the explorer's landing in America.
Soon it was Mascagni's turn; his stunning success with Cavalleria Rusticana in 1890 catapulted him to the top of his profession. At the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, he took twenty-five or thirty curtain calls during the world premiere (but not the sixty he boasted of). Puccini invited his friendly rival to dinner in his humble Milan lodgings and congratulated him on his astonishing achievement. Mascagni quickly followed Cavalleria with works in a different vein, L'Amico Fritz and I Rantzau.
Leoncavallo's brilliant Pagliacci reached the stage in 1892. In that same year, Catalani reaffirmed his position with La Wally and Franchetti gave his premiere of Cristoforo Colombo. As a result of all this activity, critics and the public began to take Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Franchetti very seriously. Puccini had reservations about them all and felt threatened by them, more or less from 1892 until the end of his life. Even after the triumph of Manon Lescaut (1893), he remained suspicious and sometimes testy about his rivals. As late as 1898, by which time both Manon Lescaut and La Bohème had had their premieres, one critic was asking in print whether Puccini might someday become a serious rival of Mascagni and Leoncavallo.
Puccini's friendship with Leoncavallo ended abruptly in a dispute over rights to Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. Leoncavallo had been Puccini's friend for several years and was the first of several librettists who worked on Puccini's Manon Lescaut. Leoncavallo had found a powerful patron in the celebrated French baritone Victor Maurel, whom Verdi had chosen to sing the first Iago in Otello. Maurel had been able to convince Giulio Ricordi to add Leoncavallo to his roster, so that, in a sense, Puccini and Leoncavallo were competing under the same roof. Then came the day in 1893 when Leoncavallo told Puccini that he was writing an opera called La Bohème. Puccini swore that he, too, had been thinking for two months about writing his own opera on that subject.
A war of words between the two men raged in important Italian newspapers, with each accusing the other of dishonesty and bad faith. From then on, Puccini's contempt for Leoncavallo was reflected in letters to and from his closest colleagues, referring to Leoncavallo, whose surname means, literally, "Lion-Horse," as "Lion-Ass," "Lion-Beast" and "The Grand-Kaiser." "When I go hunting, if I don't send you a wild boar, I will send you a Lion or a Horse," Puccini wrote to Illica in 1895. Decades passed before Puccini and Leoncavallo were reconciled; they met quietly in Viareggio shortly before Leoncavallo's death.
uccini had a long, convoluted relationship with Franchetti. Puccini was particularly sensitive to Franchetti's rank, mocking him in letters as "Il Barone" and "Il Baronissimo." In fact, Puccini had every reason to be jealous; Franchetti's wealth and position gave him a substantial material advantage. (He was also a very good musician, described by Alvise Zorzi in Canal Grande as "an extremely cultured and productive composer.") In 1887, as Franchetti was preparing for the world premiere of his Asrael, Puccini was appealing to the conductor Luigi Mancinelli for financial support and complaining that he didn't even have enough money to get through the month.
Franchetti had no such worries. According to the lore of the time, the Franchettis gave banquets at which the "party favors" were unset diamonds, hidden by the host in the ladies' napkins. His family owned several residences, including two Gothic Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal. One was the most famous private house in Venice, the Ca' d'Oro (House of Gold), which Giorgio Franchetti restored to its former glory with the help of Gabriele D'Annunzio. In it, he housed his magnificent art collection, which is open to the public today as a museum.
The other Franchetti palace was the grand mansion next to the Accademia Bridge. At the end of the last century, the Franchettis asked architect Camillo Boito to restore that building for them. Because Camillo was the brother of composer Arrigo Boito, a Verdi librettist, he was part of a network of contacts that helped to advance Franchetti's theatrical career. In the music business, it was widely rumored that Franchetti used his wealth to guarantee sumptuous productions of his operas. His social connections may also explain why Franchetti could engage the celebrated poet D'Annunzio as his librettist, while Puccini's several attempts to collaborate with D'Annunzio all failed. D'Annunzio loved power.
Puccini and Franchetti were quite close in these early years. Puccini went to hear one of Franchetti's symphonies and loved it. He also sent his congratulations on Cristoforo Colombo. But it was hardly a mutual admiration society. When Franchetti aired his criticisms of Puccini during a dinner at his house, he must have known that gossips would carry his remarks back to Puccini.
Despite the difference in their social standing, Franchetti and Puccini both worked with librettist Luigi Illica. The friction between the two composers came to a head over the question of the rights to Illica's libretto of Tosca. Puccini was the first to express interest in the subject. After seeing Sardou's play three times when Sarah Bernhardt toured Italy in the title role, he asked Giulio Ricordi to secure the rights to the drama for him, but Sardou let Ricordi know that he did not like Puccini's music. Puccini then told Illica that he was not happy about the project. Sardou later accepted Puccini, but by then, the situation was changing.
Ricordi had ordered Illica to write the libretto for Tosca, and when the scenario was finished in January 1894, it went to Franchetti, not Puccini. Illica then began serving two masters: Puccini for La Bohème, Franchetti for Tosca. All went relatively smoothly at first, although Illica was having problems with Franchetti, who finally gave up on the opera. Puccini then decided he could compose Tosca himself, and Ricordi handed the finished libretto to him. Puccini wrote to a friend on August 9, 1895, and announced, "I will do Tosca, an extraordinary libretto by Illica, in three acts, [and] Sardou is enthusiastic about the libretto." There are many conflicting accounts of how Ricordi got Franchetti to surrender Tosca to Puccini. Some writers say the publisher deceived Franchetti by telling him that the drama was too violent and coarse to succeed as an opera, then handed Puccini the libretto that same day. But Franchetti told his children that he willingly and graciously withdrew in favor of Puccini, saying to Ricordi, "Give it to Puccini. He has more time than I have."
It was also said that Puccini used part of Franchetti's music for the beginning of the opera, although that is unlikely. American scholar Deborah Burton, author of the most recent studies of these accounts, determined that Franchetti stopped working on Tosca because he was not convinced of its merit and did not, in his words, "feel the music" in the drama. Yet when the premiere came, at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in 1900, Ricordi and others suspected Franchetti, Mascagni, Francesco Cilèa, the "Puccini hater" Ildebrando Pizzetti and other purported enemies of Puccini of conspiring to stir up trouble in the audience. In fact, the group went to Rome for the event but apparently bore no responsibility for the opera's chaotic baptism.
Whatever their professional squabbles, Franchetti and Puccini shared a love of automobiles, which drew them together just after the turn of the century. In 1900, Franchetti was elected president of the Italian Automobile Club. He owned a Mercedes and a Renault and was scouring Europe for a car that could reach fifty-four miles an hour, in an era when most cars could not go forty. Puccini went to the huge automobile show that Franchetti mounted in Milan's Public Gardens in 1901. This interest in cars was nearly the death of Puccini; he emerged from one crash, in 1902, with minor injuries; in 1903, he narrowly escaped death in a second accident. In its wake, Puccini received about three hundred telegrams of sympathy, but he heard nothing from Franchetti. "Il Baronissimo" had let him down. Franchetti continued to attract the critics' attention with his operas; in the end he became known as "The Meyerbeer of Italy."
Throughout their careers, the two were composing on not-quite-parallel tracks. Puccini's Japanese Madama Butterfly followed Mascagni's Japanese Iris. They fought angrily over I Due Zoccoletti, which Puccini coveted. He won the rights, then discarded it almost at once. Mascagni finally composed it as Lodoletta. Later, Turandot followed to some extent the lead Mascagni had taken with Le Maschere in its use of commedia dell'arte figures.
Puccini's resentment and half-voiced fear of Mascagni lasted until the final years of his life, when Puccini fought above board and below to win the honored nomination as Senator of the Kingdom of Italy before Mascagni might be so honored. His political finagling in Rome did him no credit. Neither did his worry that Mascagni's Il Piccolo Marat might actually succeed. Puccini milked soprano Gilda Della Rizza for news of the rehearsals and in the end went to Rome to hear and see the opera for himself. Not surprisingly, he spoke disparagingly of it. Once again, Puccini's suspicion and animosity toward his rivals brought a long-term friendship to an end.
MARY JANE PHILLIPS-MATZ is the author of Verdi: A Biography (Oxford) and Rosa Ponselle, American Diva (Northeastern University Press).
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photos: Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milano (Puccini); Opera News Archives (Leoncavallo)
OPERA NEWS, January 2000 Copyright © 2000 The Metropolitan Opera Guild, Inc.
