GIACOMO PUCCINI, Messa a 4 con orchestra e Mottetto di San Paolino

Francesco Grollo (tenor), Bjorn Waag (baritono) Athestis Chorus conducted by Filippo Maria Bressan
Orchestra Regionale Toscana conducted by Michel Corboz
Lucca, Cattedrale di San Martino, 28 November 1999, 9 p.m.

Liturgical music in nineteenth century Italy was beset by problems relatively unknown north of the Alps, where a sturdy tradition nourished at its roots by the German classics was kept alive by choral festivals and the proliferation of amateur choral societies. If this did not produce a string of masterpieces (for the Romantic age was not one of collective worship) it yielded a certain homogeneity of style and technique evident in composers as diverse as Mendelssohn, Gounod, Brahms, Saint-Saëns and Dvorak, only Berlioz, the perpetual 'outsider', standing somewhat apart.
In Italy, however, sacred music had long ceased to have any commercial value (far gone were the days in which Pergolesi's Stabat Mater was the most widely printed composition in Europe), and while masses and motets were produced in abundance for the yearly feast days, they rarely travelled beyond the city for which they were written. Consequently each composer in his attempt to keep up with the times went very much his own way - a situation aptly illustrated by the composite Messa per Rossini of 1869, in which no two solutions are alike. There is no common denominator to bridge the extremes of arid scholasticism on the one hand and cloying sentimentality on the other. Indeed, by the mid-century the saying had become a commonplace that more truly devotional music was to be heard on the stage than in the church. Such, at any rate, was Rossini's view; and by way of illustration he once played to his friends (from memory!) the 'Salve Maria' from Verdi's I lombardi alla prima crociata.
Among the cities capable of offering genuinely religious fare, Lucca was better placed than most. In four generations of the Puccini family it could boast a succession of maestri who upheld a worthy tradition of liturgical craftsmanship. Michele Puccini, Giacomo's father, was sufficiently eminent to rate a fairly detailed entry in Arthur Pougin's supplement to Fétis’ Biographie Universelle des Musiciens, admittedly as an academic and teacher rather than as a creative artist. His masses, notable for their elaborate part-writing and the independence that they allow to the orchestra, at least command our respect. But, though frequently revived during Giacomo's days as a student in Lucca, they are too old-fashioned and heavy-handed to have provided a model for his son's Messa a quattro voci, the summing up of techniques learnt in his native city, and at the same time a pointer towards the future.
A more likely clue as to its starting point is given by an undated Msssa in Sol for four-part soloists and chorus written by his teacher Carlo Angeloni and preserved at the Istituto Musicale Boccherini, Lucca. That Puccini held Angeloni in high esteem is clear from a letter written in 1898 to Toscanini recommending the performance of his Stabat Mater at the Paris Intemational Exhibition of that year ('Credi che l'Angeloni è proprio un autentico compositore distinto, da chiesa.'). His Mass is simpler than those of Michele Puccini, his ideas less austere, with smooth contours and beguiling harmonies that recall the "Lux eterna" contributed to the Messa per Rossini by Teodulo Mabellini, organist of Florence Cathedral and a frequent presence at Lucca's Festa della Santa Croce. His textures abound in contrast and variety. In the "Qui tollis" the tenor solo is interwoven with a countermelody for oboe over an accompaniment of strings. The solemnity of the "Quoniam tu solus sanctus" is enhanced by a marching pattern of chords for trumpets and trombones, while the "Cum Sancto Spiritu" is launched by a light-fingered interplay of soprano and contralto soloists in two-part counterpoint. A clarinet cadenza of several bars leads from the massively assertive "Credo in unum Deum" to the more intimate "Incarnatus".
Though in no sense a masterpiece, Angeloni's Mass offers a wide range of options which his more distinguished pupil was able to turn to his own advantage. Thus Puccini opens his "Kyrie" not with a gesture of high solemnity but with a melody of seductive sweetness, a darker-hued "Christe eleison" following by way of a central episode, both ideas furnished with contrasted imitation points and deftly woven into a peaceful, delicately scored coda. The main theme of the "Gloria", naif to the point of obviousness, is enlivened by an extension of its final phrase into one of those successione of unresolved parallel chords, subtly varied with each repetition, that will become a personal hallmark. There is breadth and nobility in the "Laudamus te"; while an even clearer glimpse of the future is offered by the "Gratias agimus", a lyrical tenor solo introduced by an orchestral motif that exerts a strong subdomiant pull with each recurrence. The independence of the orchestral part, scored throughout with rare imagination, allows an element of dialogue with the voice, while the concluding phrase of the main period is emphasised by a doubling of the outer parts - a device soon to be regarded as a Puccinian mannerism, though he was not the first to employ it. Still more remarkably, the melody itself debouches into the dominant key with a perfect sense of finality. Is it too fancifal here to see a faint foreshadowing of a similar, though infinitely more succinct tonal progress in the far from ecclesiastical "Nessun dorma"?
Less distinguished is the "Qui tollis", a somewhat jovial melody announced by the basses and taken up by the full chorus over a tramping accompaniment. A homophonic "Quoniam" coloured by touches of modal harmony and punctuated by fanfares prepares for the "Cum Sancto Spiritu", a tour de force of polyphony, whimsically described by the "Provincia di Lucca" as a 'fugone coi baffi', in which all the standard devices of canon, imitation, augmentation, diminution, pedal point and stretto are used with a freedom of invention that raises it far above the level of a school exercise. By a crowning stroke of ingenuity the opening strain of the "Gloria" is introduced as a countermelody to the fugue subject, which, admittedly, has to be smoothed out in order to accomodate it. The same theme, thundered out in full choral and orchestral panoply, takes charge of the conclusion so rounding off a massive structure which, if not an expression of deep religious feeling, at least shows a remarkable flexing of musical muscles.
A similar strength of architecture marks the "Credo", composed two years earlier. Here the prevailing mood is sombre, though charged at the outset with a sense of energy inherent in the wide sweep of the opening statement and the propulsive thrust of the orchestral syncopations in the fourth bar. This same melody provides the main thematic nucleus of the movement, within which the "Incarnatus" and "Crucifixus" form a double episode, the first a tenor solo above murmuring chorus, the second a dark, sepulchral cantilena for basses that rises and falls with a weary insistence beneath poignant harmonies (see also the corresponding prayer in Angeloni's Mass). The minor mode is preserved throughout the "Et resurrexit", conceived as a build-up of imitative entries leading to a re-statement of the inital theme ("Et in Spiritum Sanctum"). There is a tranquil oasis in the "Et unam sanctam catholicam", after which the earlier syncopations raise their menacing heads, this time to dissolve into a graceful melody with a typically Puccinian downward gradient over a bass of purling semiquavers. It is as though the composer envisaged the life of the world to come in terms of the rural retreat to which he loved to retire in later years. But this too will be whipped up into an emphatic conclusion.
Neither the "Sanctus" for chorus nor the "Benedictus" for baritone solo, each cast in a different key and rhythm and each with its own "Hosanna", call for special comment (indeed the first was criticised in the "Provincia di Lucca" as being unduly short, the reviewer adding that this was a common defect in contemporary settings). It has been left to more recent critics to fault the "Agnus Dei" for ending a solemn Mass with insufficient emphasis. In his monumental study, Puccini: a Critical Biography Mosco Carner hazards the guess that the music was originally intended for a different contest and that only the need to finish the work in time for its performance at the Festa di San Paolino of 1880 induced Puccini to patch it on to the conclusion. But he had a perfectly valid precedent in the Mass by Angeloni mentioned above: a lilting, lightly scored "Agnus Dei" in pastoral 6/8 which ends the work on a similar note of intimacy. In both settings (unlike those of Michele Puccini) the "Dona nobis pacem" is not hived off into a separate movement. In Puccini's case the mood of the words is encapsulated in a pattern of caressing triplets which, echoed by the orchestra in the final bars, form a suitably haunting envoi.
With this Mass Puccini had in the eyes of his fellow-citizens proved himself fully worthy of his forefathers. Its technical mastery is indeed striking, not least in the treatment of the orchestra, whether in the accompaniments or in the interstices between vocal paragraphs. Here was one who, in Verdi's words, had learned how to move notes around to his own purposes. Had he chosen to remain in Lucca he would doubtless have enriched the city's treasury of liturgical music with works of comparable vitality. But even in the Mass the seeds of the operatic composer are evident. It is not by chance that both the opening and closing numbers should have found their true home on the stage. The "Kyrie" would serve in Edgar not only as a congregational hymn but, no less effectively, to express the evil blandishments of Tigrana. The "Agnus Dei", reset for mezzo soprano solo and female chorus, would form a characteristic interlude in Act 2 of Manon Lescaut, suffused with that faintly affected melancholy typical of the rococo age. Arrived at the pinnacle of his success in the liturgical field, Puccini's feet were already pointing in the direction of the theatre.

Julian Budden (© CSGP 1999)