Cambridge Opera Journal, 23, 3, 167–189 6 Cambridge University Press, 2012

doi:10.1017/S0954586712000092

Puccini, in the distance

ARMAN SCHWARTZ

Abstract: This essay charts the contours of a ‘second practice’ in Puccini’s corpus. Whereas
his operas from the 1890s are fuelled by a longing for unmediated access to empirical reality,
his later works unleash a variety of distant sounds that unsettle the aesthetics of verismo opera.
These sounds, which draw on the ontology of wireless transmission just as surely as his
earlier works do on that of phonographic transcription, find their fullest expression in Suor
Angelica. The notorious Marian apparition that concludes that opera has long been mocked
and explained away, and no wonder: for, if we attempt to take the miracle seriously, we
may (like Puccini himself, in the years following Madama Butterfly) begin to doubt whether
modernism ever was an art of confidence and disenchantment.

E anche con teatro a gran proscenio, non mi pare gran male che l’azione rimanga a distanza. È solo
per un atto. E può essere un’idea originale. Pensaci.1
[And even in a theatre with a large proscenium, it wouldn’t strike me as a great misfortune if
the action remained in the distance. It’s only for one act. And it could be an original idea. Think
about it.]

What happened to verismo? It is easy enough to narrate the origins of the move-
ment: the Sonzogno competition of 1888, the triumphant première of Cavalleria
rusticana that resulted two years later, the rash of imitations that exploded in its
wake. It is much harder, though, to pinpoint the moment when the excitement
faded. In part, this is because Italian composers produced no ‘next big thing’, no
coherent movement to challenge the premises of realist opera. Another reason is
that many stars of the giovane scuola remained haunted by their first successes,
watching their works become canonical – indeed, watching themselves become
monuments – as they experimented with new themes and styles and then re-
turned, inevitably and with what often sounds like increasing desperation, to the
ideas that made them famous. Verismo, like so many relics of the Italian liberal
state, persisted, however unnaturally, throughout the fascist period.
It is with one of these untimely remnants that I should like to launch an inves-
tigation into the ghostly afterlife of the verismo movement.2 Puccini’s Il tabarro –
the first ‘panel’ in his triptych of one-act operas, all of which premièred together
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1918 – is easily described as an envoi or
homage to the giovane scuola. The connection is clearest in terms of dramaturgy: the
grim, working-class milieu in which the plot unfolds, the gruesome and sadistic
denouement. More striking, though, are the ways in which Puccini reconfigures a

1 Giacomo Puccini to Tito Ricordi (23 July 1918); in Eugenio Gara, ed., Carteggi pucciniani (Milan,
1958), 463–4 (no. 724).
2 For a nuanced recent history of the fortunes of Italian music during this period, see Alan
Mallach, The Autumn of Italian Opera: From Verismo to Modernism, 1890–1915 (Lebanon, NH,
2007).
168 Arman Schwartz

variety of realist musical techniques that he and his contemporaries had developed
some 30 years before. Central here is a process that might be termed spatialisation –
the reduction of all musical parameters to a cold and eerie stasis. It is a kind
of negative ekphrasis in which music, instead of enlivening the painted backdrop,
aspires to its stillness. Famous examples of the technique include the unrelenting
tonic–dominant ostinato that structures the first act finale of Tosca and the 112-
bar-long pedal point that supports what Eduard Hanslick described, despairingly,
as ‘columns of ascending and descending parallel fifths’, ‘ghastly fifth-rods’ that
beat the characters into submission, during the start of the third act of La bohème.3
More sympathetically, these static passages might be praised as effective evoca-
tions of tomb-like spaces: an old, marble basilica, dense with corpses, a frozen
corner of Paris before the break of dawn.
The first eight bars of Il tabarro employ similar techniques: ticking quavers,
parallel fourths and fifths and a melody, full of internal repetitions, that floats in
some modal netherworld, suggesting but never quite settling on a tonal centre.
Encouraged by the compound metre and barcarolle-like affect, commentators
have described this passage as painting the ebb and flow of the Seine; but in
so doing they miss something of the music’s stasis. Puccini repeats this eight-bar
unit twice more during the opening moments of the opera, at rehearsal numbers 1
and 2. And, while he allows himself a little climax halfway through the process,
this glimmer of conventional development and forward motion does little more
than enforce the underlying sameness of the passage as a whole.
The most striking aspect of this acoustic backcloth is what Puccini layers on
top of it: the two long tugboat whistles – carefully located at different distances
from the audience – and staccato car horn. Realistic sound was, of course, a major
feature of Puccini’s ambient style in the 1890s: Tosca’s ostinatos support a riot of
church bells, organs and ‘authentic’ plainsong, and La bohème’s distant workers
echo through the hollows of the Barrière d’Enfer. The combination of repetitive
and inexpressive orchestral music with ‘objective’ diegetic noise was designed to
support a fiction of authorial abdication, inviting us to believe that we are hearing
nothing more – and nothing less – than the unmediated resonance of the fictional
world.4 This dream of facticity seems inseparable from the documentary claims of
early sound recording; it also brings to mind Jonathan Sterne’s description of the
strange temporality of an Edison cylinder, ‘a little piece of repeatable time within a
carefully bounded frame’.5
Reviewing Tosca’s American première, Life magazine complained about its ‘ultra
modern style, with bells and cannons thrown in left and right’.6 But those bells,
however new, were still pitched and carefully integrated into the harmonic and

3 Hanslick’s 1897 review is excerpted, and here cited, in Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, Giacomo
Puccini: La bohème (Cambridge, 1986), 133–5, here 135.
4 I elaborate this argument in ‘Rough Music: Tosca and Verismo Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music,
31 (2007), 228–44.
5 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, 2003), 310.
6 Monsecret, ‘La Tosca’, Life, 37 (1901), 173. For similar Italian formulations, see Schwartz,
‘Rough Music’, 234–5.
 Puccini, in the distance 169

melodic fabric: not thrown in at all. In contrast, the industrial sounds of Il tabarro
stand out, almost bathetically, from their more delicate surroundings. They resemble
less the visceral noise-music prophesied by the Italian futurists, more the poignantly
inarticulate typewriters in Satie’s Parade, premièred one year before in 1917. If
Puccini was indeed looking back to his earlier style, it was with a note of scepti-
cism, an almost melancholy acknowledgement that the aims of empiricist realism
and operatic composition would never quite add up.
Il tabarro’s opening music returns some 20 minutes later (see Reh. 56, bars 1–
11). The music is nearly identical, save for a change of key and one other differ-
ence: two wordless, off-stage voices accompany the tune. It should be stressed
that these are only voices: although numerous characters enter and exit the stage
while singing, the ‘sopranino’ and ‘tenorino’ designated here are not among them.
One could invent a variety of explanations for this effect – Rhinemaidens, the
ineffable magic of Paris, a fantasy projection of the protagonists’ prohibited affair –
but all would unsettle the realist pretensions of the opera as a whole. Up to this
point, the off-stage world has functioned as an extension of the visible one – the
car horn is there, after all, to insist on a reality beyond the confines of the stage.
Now, in contrast, the space beyond the flats appears mysterious and inscrutable.
You can have tugboat sirens or you can have Homeric sirens; but in a work of
realist theatre you should not have both.
Wordless off-stage singing is a feature of all of Puccini’s later operas. The hum-
ming chorus in Madama Butterfly is the first and most famous example of the
device; the penumbra of sound added by fifteen tenors to the final bars of the
first act of La fanciulla del West is perhaps the strangest.7 These mysterious sounds
suggest the existence of a second, only dimly perceptible acoustic reality, one
inconceivable in Puccini’s earlier style. His new fascination with musical effects
of echoing and distance is refracted on multiple thematic planes. Most obvious is
a move away from the familiar urban locales of Manon Lescaut, La bohème and
Tosca, and towards remote, exotic landscapes: imperial Japan, Gold Rush California,
ancient China. This large-scale interest in temporal and geographical distance is
restaged, within Puccini’s operas, in numerous songs of nostalgic longing: for
rural Hunan in Turandot; for suburban Belleville in Il tabarro; for the soon-to-be-
forsaken Florence of Gianni Schicchi; for the elusive ‘lontano’ of La fanciulla. Also
relevant here is a sense in which many of Puccini’s later works are themselves
echoes of distant masterpieces: La rondine updates and rewrites the plot of La
traviata (to say nothing of his own, already citational, Manon Lescaut); Gianni Schicchi
is modelled on Verdi’s Falstaff; and, as Emanuele Senici has shown, La fanciulla is a
disillusioned look back at the pastoral mountain operas of Donizetti and Bellini.8
Finally, it may be worth mentioning an element of ironic self-parody within
Puccini’s music itself – one seen, for example, in the knowing quotations of ‘Mi

7 Also worth mentioning are the final bars of La rondine, where Magda moves off stage to intone
a mysterious high A; and the on-stage humming chorus that accompanies the off-stage children’s
choir during the first appearance of the ‘Mo-li-hua’ theme in Turandot, Act I.
8 See Emanuele Senici, Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini
(Cambridge, 2005).
170 Arman Schwartz

chiamano Mimı̀’ that pepper Il tabarro. If Puccini’s operas from the 1890s aspire to
a phonographic objectivity, his later works approach reality more circumspectly, as
if through a cloak.
This admittedly breathless survey of Puccini’s seconda prattica has avoided mention
of one work – Suor Angelica, the second panel of Il trittico. In many ways it fits
awkwardly into the story told above. The opera is not especially exotic, nor
overtly nostalgic, nor based on any clear operatic precedent.9 Indeed, its world of
oppressively cloistered ritual seems designed to efface all specificities of geography
and history. However, of all Puccini’s operas Suor Angelica is the most indebted to
both his realist experiments of the 1890s and to the poetics of distance explored
in his later works. It might in this sense be described as an attempt to thematise
and so work through a crisis in Puccini’s style, a crisis that speaks to a ripple of
sorts within modernity, one that musicological accounts of modernism have largely
overlooked.

I
Puccini approached Suor Angelica with the same positivist zeal that had been his
trademark since the time of Tosca. He wrote to the priest and scholar Don Pietro
Panichelli asking for appropriate litanies, and petitioned his sister, the mother
superior at an Augustinian convent outside Lucca, for access to its secret rites.10
While no one would describe the resulting work as documentary, its opening
scene does contain the most explicit catalogue of verismo musical devices the com-
poser ever wrote. Even before the curtain rises, the audience is greeted by the
sound of off-stage bells, playing a simple four-bar melody. Then, as the stage is
revealed, this tune transforms into an unceasing ostinato figure, played by the
strings and celesta, a static effect intensified, as in Il tabarro, by improper voice-
leading, quasi-modal harmony and internal melodic repetitions. One by one, a
parade of off-stage, diegetic noises enter the texture: the sisters in their chapel, a
bird in the trees, a church organ and, finally, Angelica herself. For the first three
minutes of the opera, the audience does not see a single person singing. The
normal priorities of operatic spectacle are submerged behind the mise-en-scène.
But then, as in Il tabarro, the opera’s closing scene presents an effect of magical
distance that utterly contradicts these realist expectations.
Suor Angelica vede il miracolo compiersi: la chiesetta sfolgora di mistica luce, la porta si
apre: apparisce la Regina del conforto, solenne, dolcissima e, avanti a Lei, un bimbo
biondo, tutto bianco . . . La Vergine, con un gesto dolcissimo, senza toccarlo, sospinge il
bimbo verso la moribonda.

9 Helen M. Greenwald’s ‘Verdi’s Patriarch and Puccini’s Matriarch: ‘‘Through the Looking Glass
and What Puccini Found There’’’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1994), 220–36, suggests, however,
that the Grand Inquisitor scene in Verdi’s Don Carlos may have served as a model for the
central duet between Angelica and the Zia Principessa.
10 Panichelli narrates his contributions in Il pretino di Giacomo Puccini ([1962] rpt. Pisa, 2008), 168–
73.
 Puccini, in the distance 171

[Suor Angelica sees the miracle achieved: the chapel blazes with mystic light, the door is
opened: the Queen of Solace appears, solemn, very gentle and, in front of Her, a blond
little boy, all in white. The Virgin, with a very gentle gesture, without touching him, urges
the child towards the dying woman.]
The music that accompanies this apparition emanates from behind the flats, just
like the opening music, and uses many of the same forces: choir, organ, bells.
After having been taught that these off-stage sounds signified a concrete place
within the fictional world, we are now asked to believe that they are echoing
from another place entirely.
It is very difficult to bring this last scene off. Gary Tomlinson has claimed that
Puccini’s operas ‘bring us face to face with a force we can believe only through
a wilfully nostalgic engagement’, and, at least in the case of Suor Angelica, most
critics would agree with him that ‘a part of us knows better . . . than to trust a
pushy salesman’.11 ‘The apparition is an illuminated Christmas card’, exclaimed
James Huenecker after the première, sounding quite a bit like Tomlinson in his
anxious conflation of Puccini’s miracle with the commodified circuitry of mass
culture.12 A critic at the work’s first Italian performances made a similar point
when he suggested that Suor Angelica was ‘more cinematographic than mystical’.13
More recently, it has become common to defend the apparition, but only by
redefining it as a hallucination, the product of Angelica’s fevered mind. There are
problems with this psychological approach, though, including the fact that the
event is unambiguously labelled ‘Il miracolo’ in the score and libretto. In the
most nuanced discussion of the issue, James Hepokoski proposes that the events
of Suor Angelica can only be made sense of within the context of Il trittico as a
whole. Il tabarro, he notes, ‘had presented the gritty, urban material world already
fallen away from spiritual illusions and securities. There had been no deus ex
machina in that brittle arena of things now abandoned by the once-held comforts
of religion.’14 With this contemporary framework in mind, listeners can choose
either to interpret Angelica’s vision as madness, or – through that act of wilfully
nostalgic engagement – participate in her self-deception. To make his argument,
Hepokoski, like Tomlinson, relies on a characterisation of Puccini’s era as one in
which ‘the once-held comforts of religion’ were located firmly in the past. But is it
fair to assume that listeners in 1918 would have understood their world as one
bereft of magic?
It should be noted first of all that, at least from an anthropological perspective,
the Virgin Mary was actually appearing with increasing frequency throughout the

11 Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton, 1999), 149.

12 James Gibbons Hueneker, ‘A World Premier [sic] of Puccini Operas’, New York Times
(15 December 1918).
13 Alastor, ‘Le tre nuove opere di Giacomo Puccini’, Musica (15 January 1919); quoted in Alexandra
Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, Modernity (Cambridge, 2007), 180.
14 James Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication, and the End of Suor Angelica’, Studi pucciniani, 3 (2004),
241–64, here 259–60.
172 Arman Schwartz

nineteenth century. While the eighteenth century has been described as the one
true lull in the history of Marian apparitions, something began to change after
the Revolution. There was the miracle at Rue du Bac in 1830, followed by appari-
tions at La Salette in 1846, Lourdes in 1858 and Pontmain in 1870. The trend
seems to have culminated with the six apparitions of the Virgin at Fatima in
Portugal – the last witnessed by a crowd of 70,000 spectators – in 1917, one
year before the première of Suor Angelica.15 These apparitions fuelled a vogue for
monasteries and miracles on the European stage, as evidenced by works like
Massenet’s Le Jongleur de Notre Dame (1902); Maeterlink’s Sœur Béatrice (1901), itself
the subject of four operatic adaptations between 1912 and 1944;16 and Max
Reinhardt’s ‘grand pageant’ The Miracle, with music by Engelbert Humperdinck,
described by the New York Times as ‘the most profoundly moving thing ever seen
in London’ when it was presented to rapturous crowds in 1912.17 None of this
is to say that Marian apparitions were not debated, discredited, experienced and
interpreted differently by different parties, nor that Puccini, an arch-cynic, would
have believed them. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to cordon off the world
of Catholic credulity, safely placing it in some distant moment prior to the opera’s
composition.
Furthermore, and this may bring us closer to understanding the apparent tension
between realism and magic in Suor Angelica’s dramaturgy, many of the most sober
men of Puccini’s generation trained their gaze not just on the brittle arena of
things, but also on the occult. The names of distinguished scientists and thinkers
drawn to the spiritualist movement at the turn of the century are legion, but it will
be most instructive to concentrate on two.18 The first is Cesare Lombroso (1835–
1909), the militantly positivist criminologist whose conversion to spiritualism is
documented in his final book, a nearly 500-page tome published in English in
1909 under the title After Death – What?19 In it, he describes, clearly and dis-

15 Studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marian apparitions include Sandra Zimdars-
Swartz, Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorie (Princeton, 1991); David Blackbourn,
Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York, 1993);
William Christian, Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (Berkeley, 1996); and
Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, 2004). Also
relevant is Paolo Apolito, The Internet and the Madonna (Chicago, 2005). Thanks to Deirdre de la
Cruz for pointing me in the direction of these texts.
16 See Michele Girardi, Puccini: His International Art, trans. Laura Basini (Chicago, 2000), 396.
17 ‘Reinhardt’s New Spectacle’, New York Times (14 January 1912).
18 Major studies of occultism on which I draw include Alex Thomas, The Place of Enchantment:
British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of
Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford, 2002); and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from
Telegraphy to Television (Durham, 2000). For a discussion of these issues in a specifically Italian
context, see Luciano Chessa, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (Berkeley,
2012).
19 For a reading of this text in the context of Lombroso’s earlier writings, and of post-Unification
discourse more generally, see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, ‘In a Dark Continent: Cesare
Lombroso’s Other Italy’, in The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago, 2007),
229–88.
 Puccini, in the distance 173

passionately, a series of transformative meetings with the Neapolitan medium

Eusapia Palladino, which began in 1891.20 Hands appeared, a mandolin flew across
the room and started to play, and, in one of ‘the most important and significant of
the occurrences’, Palladino ‘was lifted up in her chair bodily, amid groans and
lamentations on her part, and placed (still seated) on the table, then returned
to the same position as before’.21 Alessandra Violi suggests that Lombroso’s
embrace of Palladino represents less a rejection of positivism than its triumph,
describing the ‘emergence of an imaginary that is already inscribed in the project
of the positivist sciences, an imaginary that Lombroso pushes to its extreme
consequences, rendering unto it the contours and character of a phantasmatic
revelation’.22
Lombroso’s new interests also brought him into contact with my second figure,
the novelist Luigi Capuana (1839–1915).23 Along with Giovanni Verga, Capuana
had been one of the lions of the verismo movement until he too underwent a con-
version of sorts. The advocate of narrative impersonalità and what he termed the
‘science of literature’ now began to conduct more practical experiments, building
a laboratory in his home and hypnotising local peasants (hoping, in one case,
to contact spirits that would help him complete a biography of Ugo Foscolo).
Capuana’s research also signalled the beginning of a second literary practice, one
that critics have politely labelled ‘originale e segreto’ and have allowed to languish
at the margins of the canon.24 Those attempting to rehabilitate these texts have,
like Violi, stressed their ‘phantasmatic’ relationship with Capuana’s earlier project.
Paul Barnaby reads his novel Profumo as allegorising the proposition that ‘the insti-
tutional positivism of post-Risorgimento Italy is itself haunted by the self-torturing
asceticism of the medieval Church’.25
Barnaby and Violi’s emphasis on the uncanny underside of Italian positivism
offers a new way to think about the place of Suor Angelica within the larger frame-
work of Il trittico, and the place of Il trittico within the larger context of Italian
liberalism. Poised awkwardly between the gritty realism of Il tabarro and the equally
authenticist historicism of Gianni Schicchi, this perennially maligned opera is itself a
sort of phantom. The aesthetic discomfort it provokes may also inscribe a political

20 For a discussion of Lombroso and Palladino in the context of interactions between male
scientists and female mediums more generally, see Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 214–51.
21 Cesare Lombroso, After Death – What? Spiritistic Phenomena and their Interpretation, trans. William
Sloane Kennedy (Boston, 1909), 49.
22 Alessandra Violi, ‘Storie di fantasmi per adulti: Lombroso e le tecnologie dello spettrale’, in
Locus Solus: Lombroso e la fotografia, ed. Silvana Turzio, Renzo Villa and Alessandra Violi (Milan,
2005), 43–69. Quoted and translated in Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect, 269.
23 In this paragraph I follow the illuminating discussion of Capuana and Lombroso in Jonathan
Robert Hiller, ‘Bodies that Tell: Physiognomy, Criminology, Race, and Gender in Late
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Italian Literature and Opera’ (Ph.D. diss., University
of California, Los Angeles, 2009), 167–217.
24 The phrase derives from Corrado di Blasi, Luigi Capuana: originale e segreto (Catania, 1968).
25 Paul Barnaby, ‘The Haunted Monastery: Capuana’s Profumo and the Ghosts of the ‘‘Nuova
Italia’’’, Romance Studies, 19 (2001), 109–21, here 110.
174 Arman Schwartz

dilemma. Considered (like Profumo) as an intervention into the ideology of post-

Unification Italy, Il trittico seems to imagine two futures for the fledgling nation:
either the nightmare of urban disenchantment presented in Il tabarro or a return
to the glories of trecento Florence evoked in Gianni Schicchi. These were compelling
fantasies, yet Suor Angelica emerges as a symptomatic remainder of the unassimi-
lated legacies of official and popular Catholicism, repressed and left unresolved
by both.

II
A spectre lingering at the margins of realist dramaturgy, Suor Angelica is itself a
haunted work. At three moments there emerge strong occultist undercurrents,
ones that have never been described as such. When taken together, these moments
help tug the opera away from the pieties of sentimental Catholicism, and ground it
firmly in the world of Lombroso and Capuana.
The first and simplest of the three scenes occurs early in the opera, when the
nuns’ thoughts turn to a departed sister.
Un silenzio doloroso è nel chiostro; le suore assorte in un atteggiamento di muta preghiera
sembrano rievocare l’immagine della sorella che non è più.
[A dolorous silence is in the cloister; the sisters, pensive in an attitude of silent prayer,
seem to summon up the image of the sister who is no more.]
The tempo slows dramatically to mark this action, and a series of parallel-seventh
chords, played on the bridge by muted strings, adds to the sense of mystery (see
Ex. 1). A simple melodic figure that had accompanied the nuns’ earlier conversa-
tion suddenly appears as strange and luminous.

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There’s nothing unduly weird about this passage – no ghost appears on stage –
but Puccini would invoke a similar sound-world during a more disturbing scene of
conjuring later in his work. At the heart of the great duet between Suor Angelica
and her imposing aunt, the Zia Principessa describes a series of colloquies she
held with her dead sister.
 Puccini, in the distance 175

Di frequente, la sera,
là, nel nostro oratorio,
io mi raccolgo.
Nel silenzio di quei raccoglimenti,
il mio spirito par che s’allontani
e s’incontri con quel di vostra madre
in colloqui eterei, arcani!
Com’è penoso
udire i morti dolorare e piangere!
Quando l’estasi mistica scompare,
per voi ho serbata una parola sola:
Espiare! Espiare!
Offritela alla Vergine
la mia giustizia!
[Often, in the evening, / there, in our chapel, / I meditate. / In the silence of those
meditations, / my spirit seems to move off / and meet that of your mother / in ethereal,
mysterious conversations! / How painful it is, / to hear the dead suffer and weep! /
When the mystic ecstasy disappears, / I have retained for you only one word: / Expiate!
Expiate! / Offer my justice / to the Virgin!]
This monologue reads like a textbook account of fin-de-siècle séances: the domestic
interior, the out-of-body experience, the contact with a departed family member,
the physical manifestations of cries and sobs, the prophetic message from the
beyond. While the Zia Principessa’s vocabulary of meditation and ecstasy might
seem to draw on a longer tradition of Catholic visions, it is striking that none of
the actual nuns in the opera uses anything like this language. This is one of the
most telling ironies of Suor Angelica: the opera’s most credulous account of mystical
experience is placed in the mouth of the sole representative of secular society.
Puccini’s music for this scene draws on many techniques encountered earlier.
Here, too, are the muted, ponticello strings, now made more mysterious through
the addition of muted brass, a celesta doubled by a ghostly piccolo and a remark-
ably low harp. The clearest echo of the earlier scene comes in the form of three,
just-barely functional, parallel triads (F-sharp minor, B major, C-sharp minor: iv–
VII–i in the home key) that sound at the beginning, the climax and the conclusion
of the monologue (see Ex. 2). (If Puccini had previously reserved ‘impressionist’
voice-leading for ekphrastic landscape music, in Suor Angelica he seems to associate
it with visions of a different sort.) Against this spectral backdrop, the contralto’s
line leaps by fourths from the lowest to the highest extremes of its range. It would
be hard to think of a melodic style further removed from the little declamatory
arcs through which Puccini normally constructs his vocal lines. In many perform-
ances, it sounds as if the Zia Principessa’s voice is being pulled upwards by a
magnetism beyond its control.
The parallel triads that structure ‘Di frequente, la sera’ will return once more
after the conclusion of the duet, as an ostinato that accompanies the opening
section of Angelica’s aria ‘Senza mamma’ (see Ex. 3).26 Although the tonality has

26 This connection is noted, if interpreted somewhat differently, in Girardi, Puccini, 406.

176 Arman Schwartz

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& # #c j r j r œ™œ ˙ œ j r j j j jœ œ ˙ œ ‰ œ™ œ
œ œ ™ œ œ™ œ J R œ™ œ œ œœœ œ J J J J R
- len - zio di quei rac-co gli -men - ti, il mio spi - ri - to par che s’al -lon - ta - ni e s’in-
“” œ œ œ
####(Celeste e Ottavino) œ œ œ
& Ó œ œ J
Andante molto sostenuto q = 52
##
pp

& # #c œ œœ
œ
w
w
w œ œœ
œœ
w
w
w

{
w
pp pp
˙ œœ œœ w ˙˙ œ
? ####c ˙˙˙ œœ œ
w
w ˙˙œ œ œœ j‰Œ
˙˙ œ
œ œJ ‰ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ ˙ œ
. . . . .œ œ ˙ œ
.
Ex. 2: Suor Angelica, Reh. 50, bars 4–7

U œ
œ œj œJ œj œj
SUOR ANGELICA (sempre in ginocchio, con voce desolata)

& Ó Œ Œ ∑ Ó Œ J œ 43 œJ
J J
Andante desolato Sen -za mam -ma,o bim - bo, tu sei

˙˙ ™™ ˙˙ ™™
Lento grave q = 42
U
molto sostenuto
œœ œœ 3
‰ Œ Œ œœœ œœ ˙˙™™ œœ œœ ˙˙™™
& œ œœ œ œœœ 4 ˙˙˙ œ œœœ

{ ? œ
j œœ œœœ
œ‰Œ Œ œ
œ
.J
p
˙˙ ™™™
˙ œœ œœœ
œ
˙˙ ™™™
˙
pp
U œœ œ 3 ˙
œ 4
œœ œ
œ

j j j
& œ œ
j ‰ œ
J œ
J
œ œ
J J œ œJ œ œj œ œ
j ‰ œ
J œ
mor - to! Le tue lab - bra, sen - za i ba - ci mie - i, sco - lo -

& ˙˙ œœ œœ ˙˙ œœ œœ ˙˙ œœ

{
˙ œ ˙ œ ˙ œ œ
œ œ b œœ
? ˙ œ œ ˙
œ œ ˙
œ œ
Œ œ Œ ∑ Œ Œ
œ œ
pp
- -
Ex. 3: Suor Angelica, Reh. 60, bars 1–5
 Puccini, in the distance 177

been shifted from C-sharp minor to A minor, and the metre from 4/4 to 3/4, the
connection between the two passages is highly audible and alerts us to other
resonances between the scenes. The Zia Principessa’s phrase ‘estasi mistica’ is
echoed in a stage direction that describes Angelica’s ‘esaltazione mistica’, and the
Gothic ambience of her narration anticipates another stage direction, which calls
for an effect that would not have been out of place at one of Palladino’s séances.
I lumi del cimitero sono tutti accesi; il chiostro è ormai quasi oscuro. Le suore escono dal
cimitero e si avviano verso Suor Angelica che è come in estasi. Il gruppo delle suore si
avvicina in silenzio. Nella semioscurità sembra che le figure bianche, camminando, non
tocchino terra.
[The lights of the cemetery are all illuminated; the cloister is now almost dark. The nuns
come from the cemetery and head for Suor Angelica, who is as if in ecstasy. The group of
nuns approaches in silence. In the semi-darkness it seems that the white forms, as they
walk, do not touch the ground.]
This occult backdrop – flickering candles, levitating nuns – sets the stage for
the climax of ‘Senza mamma’, where Angelica initiates a mystical conversation of
her own.
Ora che sei un angelo del cielo,
ora tu puoi vederla la tua mamma,
tu puoi scendere giù pel firmamento
ed aleggiare intorno a me, ti sento.
Sei qui, mi baci e m’accarezzi.
Ah! dimmi, quando in ciel con te potrò vederti?
Quando potrò baciarti? [. . .]
Parlami, amore, amor!
[Now that you are an angel in heaven, / now you can see her, your mother, / you can
come down from the firmament / and hover about me. I feel you. / You’re here, you kiss
and caress me. / Ah! tell me: when will I be able to see you in heaven? / When will I be
able to kiss you?/ Speak to me, my love, love!]
These lines have been interpreted as marking the onset of Angelica’s derange-
ment, and their overt eroticism and desperate demand for prophetic knowledge
are certainly unnerving. If Angelica is mad, however, the connections between
‘Senza mamma’, ‘Di frequente la sera’ and the nuns’ earlier scene suggest that
there is nothing singular about her condition. Indeed, it seems a default mode
for women in this opera.27
III
Although Suor Angelica and the Zia Principessa draw on the discourse of fin-de-
siècle spiritualism, they part company with it in one key regard: both women imag-
ine the dead contacting them directly, without the aid of a medium. Jeffrey Sconce

27 Given the pervasive gendering of mediums during the fin-de-siècle, it is perhaps no surprise that
these themes emerge most fully in Puccini’s one all-female opera. For more on occultism and
gender see, in addition to the texts by Luckhurst and Sconce already cited, Alex Owens, The
Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago, 2004).
178 Arman Schwartz

has suggested that, as a cultural fantasy, the idea of unmediated auditory contact
with the beyond emerged only at the beginning of the twentieth century, where it
helped make sense of a fundamental shift in mass communication technology.
Victorian spiritualists, he argues, imagined ‘streams’ and ‘wires’ that linked mundane
and transcendental spheres – one way of thinking through the networked cables of
Morse’s telegraph. With the advent of Marconi (whose first overseas transmission
was broadcast in 1897), however,
Wireless replaced this comforting and often utopian ideal of extraordinary interconnection
with a more bittersweet presence, one that evoked a no less marvelous yet somehow more
melancholy realm of abandoned bodies and dispersed consciousness. In this respect, wire-
less was not a technology that stood as an analog to the body, but an apparatus that
possessed the power to atomize and disperse both body and consciousness across the
vast expanses of the universe.28
This more ethereal, mysterious form of communication gave rise to an unsettling
new soundscape, ‘a lonely realm of distant and estranged consciousnesses, a vast
ocean where the very act of communication reminded the operator of his or her
profound isolation’.29 They also inspired the emergence of a peculiar narrative
genre: ‘tales [that] frequently centered on lovers separated by death but reunited
through wireless [communication]’.30
So much of the world of Suor Angelica is present in Sconce’s essay: from the
opera’s basic narrative structure and pervasive emphasis on alienation and the
impossibility of physical contact to its vocabulary of ether and disembodiment.
Furthermore, a convent – or, at least, this convent – provides a remarkably useful
figure for thinking about the ‘realm of distant and estranged consciousnesses’
described by Sconce: not an intimate community as much as an atomised field of
solitary women, all waiting anxiously for messages from beyond their cells. This is
a feeling that Puccini would have encountered first-hand in his sister’s convent.
As she later recounted to a television interviewer,
He came many times here to Vicopelago. I’ve been here for 47 years and I remember it
well. One day he arrived and sat right there at the harmonium – that very one, it’s still the
same – and he began to play. We nuns stood listening from behind the iron grate.31
Igenia’s narrative breaks off here, although other versions of the story report the
sisters all bursting into tears.32 I wonder if this experience – the experience of

28 Sconce, Haunted Media, 14. The influence of Marconi’s invention on Italian literature of the
period is discussed in Timothy Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (Minneapolis,
2006).
29 Sconce, Haunted Media, 15.
30 Sconce, Haunted Media, 15.
31 ‘Veniva tante volte qui a Vicopelago. Sono 47 anni che sono qui e lo ricordo bene. Un giorno
arrivò, si mise seduto proprio lı̀ all’armonium. È sempre quello, il solito. E cominciò a suonare.
Noi sorelle si stava a sentirlo dietro le grate della clausura.’ The video is available on YouTube
at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOpq1_xdEEw (accessed 29 April 2012).
32 See, for example, Dante del Fiorentino, Immortal Bohemian: An Intimate Memoir of Giacomo Puccini
(New York, 1952), 168–9. Panichelli notes that ‘quando il maestro mi parlavo di quelle ‘‘Cuffie’’
era esilarante e nello stesso tempo commosso’; see Panichelli, Il pretino, 169.
 Puccini, in the distance 179

playing for countless hidden ears, ears that would carry the memory with them
decades after the event – left a greater mark on Suor Angelica than any specific
prayer or ritual.
At the centre of the convent’s aural architecture sits Mary, silently. ‘Every word
is heard by the Blessed Virgin’, the Abbess warns Angelica before her fateful
reunion with her aunt. ‘May the Virgin listen to me’, Angelica responds. Later,
she will repeat this warning to the Zia Principessa:
Perché tacete? Perché? Perché?
Un altro istante di questo silenzio
e vi dannate per l’eternità!
La Vergine ci ascolta e Lei vi guidica!
[Why are you silent? Why? Why? / Another moment of this silence / and you damn
yourself for eternity! / The Virgin hears us and She judges you!]
These lines seem to imagine the Virgin as the ultimate radio operator – a figure of
‘electronic omniscience’, in Sconce’s formulation – and the withholding of sound
as the gravest sin.33 Their fantasy of divine audition also brings to mind a recent
claim by Emanuele Senici:
What Puccini attempts in La fanciulla, and specifically in the man-hunt scene, is an expan-
sion and internal articulation of the fixed space of the theatre by means of a multiplication
and strategic placement of the sound sources. In the impossibility of moving the ear to
follow the sources of sound as a way of substituting for a movable eye, Puccini tries to create
a particularly powerful ear, a giant one, capable of hearing the action beyond the fixed field of visibility –
an ear capable of ‘seeing’ the action that the eye cannot see.34
Senici connects La fanciulla’s staging of an impossibly vast acoustic terrain to Italian
fantasies of the American landscape, ‘the sonic equivalent of what is known as the
‘‘big sky’’ of the West’.35 The affinity between his image of a giant, all-powerful
ear and the terms through which the Virgin is described in Suor Angelica might
also direct our attention beyond the immediate purview of La fanciulla, though,
suggesting the contours of a broader poetics of radiophonic listening in Puccini’s
later style.

IV
Although musicologists have devoted considerable effort in the last ten years to
exploring the influence of the phonograph on modernist composition, they have
paid significantly less attention to the impact of the wireless.36 But are there any

33 Sconce, Haunted Media, 63.

34 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 255. Emphasis mine.
35 Senici, Landscape and Gender, 258.
36 See Carolyn Abbate, ‘Outside the Tomb’, in In Search of Opera (Princeton, 2001), 185–248; and
Alexander Rehding, ‘On the Record’, this journal, 18 (2006), 59–82. A few of the more influen-
tial studies of the cultural impact of Edison’s invention include Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone,
Film, Typewriter [1986], trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto, 1999);
John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford, 2003); and Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How
Technology Has Changed Music, rev. edn (Berkeley, 2010).
180 Arman Schwartz

distinctive tropes – analogues to mechanicity, deadness and other signifiers of the

phonographic uncanny – that might alert us to the presence of a competing radio
discourse in early twentieth-century music?
When national broadcasting networks began to take form in the 1920s (the
BBC was founded in 1922, the Unione radiofonica italiana, a precursor to the
RAI, in 1924), many musicians embraced the possibilities promised by the ‘new
electronic community’ of mass communication. Edgard Varèse began drafting a
global successor to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which ‘would be timed pre-
cisely in seconds so that choral entries in Paris, Moscow, Peking or New York
could be exactly synchronised, creating a vast song of liberation for all the peoples
of the world’.37 Leopold Stokowski anticipated the construction of vast pleasure
gardens devoted to electric listening.
In one part of the gardens might be a high tower from which at night colored light would
be diffused, which in time would create a new art of color in motion and form. From this
tower music of several kinds might be sent out over this part of the gardens . . . Perhaps
every day two periods of jazz for dancing, both open-air and under cover; about three
times a week the finest symphony concerts; at other times singers, violinists, pianists of
the highest order.38
These dreams of cohesion are reflected in the music Kurt Weill wrote for Bertolt
Brecht’s radio play Der Lindberghflug (1929), a work in which Charles Lindbergh’s
literal transversal of physical space is conflated with the radio’s more metaphoric
powers. Although the recalcitrant natural elements in the story, personifications of
fog and wind, are assigned neo-Bachian fugues, what would seem to be the actual
polyphonic voices in the drama – isolated wireless operators in New York and at
sea, dispersed communities of newspaper readers in America and Paris – sing in a
style that is unremittingly homophonic.
A similar optimism motivated musical experiments before the 1920s, but it was
often undermined by the material realities of wireless transmission. When the
Metropolitan Opera attempted its first live operatic broadcast in 1910 (a double-
bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, perhaps not incidentally), it promised an
acoustic miracle – the voices of Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn ‘borne by
wireless Hertzian waves over the turbulent waters of the sea to transcontinental
and coastwise ships, and over the mountainous peaks and undulating valleys of
the country’. But, as the New York Times reported, ‘the homeless song waves
were kept from finding themselves by constant interruptions said to come from
the Manhattan Beach station’.39 The only voice the reporters could make out
seemed to be talking about beer. As even Stokowski conceded: ‘physicists have

37 Malcom MacDonald, Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (London, 2003), 304.

38 Leopold Stokowski, ‘New Vistas in Radio’, The Atlantic Monthly, 155 (1935), 1–16, here 15.
39 ‘Wireless Melody Jarred’, New York Times (14 January 1910). A similar modulation between the
utopian promise and prosaic reality of the wireless is described in Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht,
In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, 1997), 242–3.
 Puccini, in the distance 181

not found a way to protect music that is conveyed by space radio against these
extraneous sounds . . . fading, static, and disturbances of every kind’.40
Static, fading, voices coming in and out of focus: these are the new structural
principles that organise the prelude to Joaquin Turina’s piano suite Radio Madrid
(1931), one of the first pieces written explicitly for a wireless broadcast. Glancing
at it may give us insight into how disorientating the new medium was. The piece
opens with three ‘uncanny’ parallel triads (B-flat minor, E major, C minor), sounded
slowly;41 this unholy chorale then comes into conflict with a series of genuinely
dissonant improvisatory flourishes: arpeggios, accented appoggiaturas, trills. Out
of this music of mystery and interference, a Satie-like waltz ( ppp and marked
‘lontano’) emerges, only to pause on a dominant-seventh chord, at which point
the opening music returns. A loud galop is sounded – the result of a stronger
signal, perhaps – until it too vanishes into the ether; the chorale theme and the
appoggiatura gesture return once more. Now a staccato fugal exposition (identi-
fied as ‘los locutores de la Radio’ – the radio announcers) begins but, quickly
and surprisingly, it bleeds back into the earlier waltz tune. Finally, and as before,
the waltz breaks apart on a dominant-seventh chord and the opening chorale, now
hushed, re-emerges as the substitute for a clear conclusion. We are used to hear-
ing splices, fade-outs and ‘white noise’ effects like these in the compositions for
radio of a later generation: Cage’s Williams Mix, Berio’s Visage. But to encounter
them in an obscure and unassuming character piece by a composer known more
for Sevillian grace than modernist fragmentation is even more remarkable. Radio
Madrid reminds us that the unsettling implications of new technologies were not
only a subject for the avant-garde.
Puccini produced no composition as schematic as Turina’s prelude: the closest
he came was ‘Scossa elettrica’ (Electric Shock, 1896), a jaunty march for piano
commissioned by a committee of telegraph operators to celebrate the centennial
of Alessandro Volta’s invention of the electric battery. Nonetheless, what might
be described as the two musics of the wireless imagination – sounds that tran-
scend the normal limits of the human body and fragile, unmoored voices that
emerge like phantoms – both leave a mark on Puccini’s later operas. On the
one hand, as we have seen, they give rise to fantasies of aural omniscience: Suor
Angelica’s all-hearing Virgin, La fanciulla’s giant ear. On the other hand, they
motivate the strange passages of wordless, off-stage singing discussed at the
beginning of this essay: moments in which we seem suddenly to ‘tune in’ to
voices – indistinct, bodiless, dispersed, ethereal – that will soon fade away. Nor
are Puccini’s the only operas of their time that engage with these themes. For an
example of listening to ‘homeless song waves’, think of the protagonist of Franz
Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1912), grasping at a melody forever just out of reach.
For an example of omnipotent hearing, recall those notorious lines given to
Strauss and Hofmannstahl’s Elektra: ‘How should I not hear? How should I not
hear the music? It comes from me.’

40 Stokowski, ‘New Vistas in Radio’, 7.

41 On the use of similar triadic juxtapositions as a signifier of the uncanny, see Rick Cohn,
‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 57 (2004), 285–324.
182 Arman Schwartz

The aural effects in Strauss and Schreker have been described as ‘post-Wagnerian’,
in the sense that they thematise the ‘phantasmagoric’ occlusion of time and space
that Adorno identified as one of the more dubious features of music drama.42 For
Adorno, however, the real inheritor of Wagner’s phantasmagoria – acoustic tricks
in which ‘the near and the far are deceptively merged, like the comforting Fata
Morgana that brings the mirage of cities and caravans within reach’ – was the
wireless itself.43 What radio accomplished, he suggested, was the creation of a
truly invisible orchestra, one that produced music that sounded neither identical
to a live performance nor like a second-order, phonographic reproduction of it.
The result was a sort of acoustic dizziness:
The listener feels as if presented with something totally familiar, and familiar it may be
indeed, yet in such a manner that it assumes an air of strangeness . . . The strangeness of
the phenomenon expresses itself in the somewhat vague and half-conscious awareness of
being at home with it and yet quite far away.44
Searching for a metaphor to describe this paradox of proximity and distance,
Adorno proposed the echo, a sound that ‘possesses not only the characteristic of
remoteness but also of derivation’.45
Adorno’s notion of echoic estrangement might be used to describe, quite pre-
cisely, the relationship between the two passages in Il tabarro discussed at the
beginning of this essay. The first is an example of ‘realistic’ aural presence, the
second sounds both ‘totally familiar’ and, at the same time, mysterious, oblique.
We listen to the first passage the way we listen to any music in the opera house.
The second, however, invites us to step outside normal theatrical space, listening
as if from a distance, or at home. Perhaps this explains why Puccini’s first word-
less, off-stage chorus was invented to depict Cio-Cio San as she sat waiting for
Pinkerton’s ship to arrive at port. In this scene she appears like one of the nuns
in Suor Angelica (or one of the bereaved wireless operators described by Sconce):
lonely, isolated, ears trained on the beyond.

V
A process of rehearing similar to the one in Il tabarro is at play, much more elabo-
rately, in Suor Angelica. As Hepokoski has argued, the last fifteen minutes of
Puccini’s opera are structured around two ‘rotational cycles’, in which four dis-
tinct musical ideas – each assigned a fixed tonality, harmonisation and melodic

42 See Carolyn Abbate, ‘Elektra’s Voice: Music and Language in Strauss’s Opera’, in Richard Strauss:
Elektra, ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge, 1989), 107–27; and Sherry D. Lee, ‘A Minstrel in a
World without Minstrels: Adorno and the Case of Schreker’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 58 (2005), 639–96. For Adorno’s own attempt to connect Wagnerian phantasmagoria
to Schreker’s style, see his radio lecture ‘Schreker [1959]’, in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern
Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), 130–44.
43 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner [1952], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 2005), 75.
44 Adorno, ‘The Radio Voice [1939]’, in Current of Music, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge,
2009), 345–91, here 348–9.
45 Adorno, ‘The Radio Voice’, 349.
 Puccini, in the distance 183

profile – appear twice, in the same order.46 (These ‘full rotations’ are preceded
by a third, ‘partial’ rotation, in which only the first three elements appear.) For
Hepokoski, this formal conceit performs an essentially symbolic function: Angelica’s
increasing alienation from the world around her is depicted through her progres-
sive separation from the normal flow of Western music. Although his analysis
is compelling, there may be other ways to account for Puccini’s use of this tech-
nique. Adorno’s theory of wireless listening allows us to explore a different ques-
tion: not what rotational form ‘means’ in Suor Angelica, but what effect its highly
audible repetitions might have on an audience in the theatre.
It may be helpful to begin by focusing on the first of the four elements identi-
fied by Hepokoski.47 We hear this music for the first time in a short scene that
immediately precedes the central duet, as Angelica presses an alms-collector for
information on the carriage that has just arrived (see Ex. 4). If the simple F-major

2 j j œ œ œj r r r r r r j r r
œ œ 43
PRIMA SORELLA CERCATRICE

& b4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
J J J R R
- gno - ri. Cer - to a - spet - ta qual -cu - no che è en - tra - to nel con -ven - to, e
Andante mosso (lo stesso movimento)
. . . . . .
misterioso e un poco agitato
. . . . . .
2 œœ œœ 3
& b4 œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ
œœ œœ 4
œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ
œ œ

{
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
j
pp
? 42 j ‰ j ‰ j ‰ j ‰ œ ‰ j ‰ 3
4
b œ œ œ œ œ
œ. œ. œ.
œ. œ. œ.

3 2 j r r
& b 4 nœR œR œR œR œJ œJ œJ œJ 4 œ œ œ œr œr œr œr œ œ
for -se fra un mo -men - to suo - ne - rà la cam -pa -na a par -la - to - rio.
. . . . . .
b 3 nœ œ
œ œ
œ œ
œ œ œ 2 - . .- . .
& 4 œœ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ 4 œœ œœ œ
œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œœœ n œœœ œœœ œ œœœ œœœ œ

{
nœ œ œœ
œ œ
? 3 j ‰
b4 œ j ‰ œj ‰ 2 œ œ œ j ‰ œj ‰
œ œ. 4 œ. œ œ œ
œ. . œ. œ. œ.
œ. œ.
Ex. 4: Suor Angelica, Reh. 36, bars 2–7

46 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’. The interaction of ‘rotational form’ with other, more con-
ventional formal structures is explored in Andrew Davis, ‘Formal Multivalence in Suor Angelica’,
in Il trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style (Bloomington, 2010), 108–37.
47 For Hepokoski’s own description, see ‘Structure, Implication’, 245. For a different analysis of
the same motivic material, see Girardi, Puccini, 399–400.
184 Arman Schwartz

melody suggests the alms-collector’s naivety, her obliviousness to the tragedy

about to unfold, the frequent shifts of metre capture something of Angelica’s
anxiety.
At the climax of ‘Senza mamma’ – the moment that signals the beginning of
Angelica’s mystical conversation or, for other critics, the onset of her madness –
Angelica sings this music again, initiating the second (and first complete) rota-
tional cycle (see Ex. 5). The melody and harmonisation are unchanged, although
the tempo has been slowed drastically and the jumpy metre smoothed out into
a more even duple, alterations that serve to make the music calmer, more incanta-
tory and less physical. The orchestration is more distant too, a conventional
battery of strings and winds replaced by a more ethereal palette: muted stings,
one muted horn (instructed to play con voce velata) and harp.

4 j j 2 j r r j4
& b4 œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ
J J J J œ 4 œ œ œ œj œ 4
O - ra che sei un an -ge - lo del cie - lo, o - ra tu puoi ve-

- - 4
a tempo, ma ben sostenuto
4 2
& b4 ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ 4 ≈ œ œ œ œ 4

{
œ œœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ
pp legato
˙ ˙
? 44 ˙ ˙ 2 œ
4 œ œœœ
œœ 4
œ 4
b ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
ÆœJ ÆœJ
ÆœJ - -
ÆœJ ÆœJ

4 œ ˙
& b4 œ œ nœ n˙
der - la la tua mam - - ma,

4 œ œ
& b 4 ‰ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ ≈ œ nœ ‰ ‰
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ n œ

{
œ
nœ œ ˙ n˙
? 4 ˙ œ
b4 ˙ œ œ ˙ n˙
˙
ÆœJ ÆœJ ÆœJ

Ex. 5: Suor Angelica, Reh. 61, bars 1–5

The libretto suggests an intriguing link between these passages. The first occur-
rence of the F-major melody accompanies an image of mundane human connec-
tion: the arrival of the carriage at the convent. The second, in contrast, describes a
rather more impressive scene of transportation: ‘Now that you are an angel in
 Puccini, in the distance 185

heaven . . . you can come down [scendere giù] from the firmament’. Fittingly, then,
the third rotational cycle begins with the most miraculous moment of contact yet.
‘Grace has descended [discesa] from heaven’, Angelica proclaims, before falling
silent, for the last iteration of the F-major melody is purely instrumental (see
Reh. 66, bars 3–13). Just as the three visitors that greet Angelica – the carriage,
the angel, grace itself – have less and less purchase on physical reality, so too her
melody is made to sound ever more disembodied and distant from the world on
stage. The orchestration of the third, instrumental version of the F-major melody
is identical to its previous iteration in ‘Senza mamma’. It is as if we were looking
at Angelica’s shadow, but now without Angelica herself.
Although Hepokoski imagines a moment of formal elucidation here, describing
the ‘slow-churning deep structure of Suor Angelica, where . . . rotations successively
‘‘grow’’ in clarity of statement’, the preceding discussion suggests that Puccini’s
use of rotational form might alternatively be described as a process of dematerial-
isation, of music echoed, loosened, blurred.48 From this perspective, the real
model for Puccini’s use of rotational form in Suor Angelica might be something
more modest than late nineteenth-century symphonic music: it might be that
hackneyed strategy, inherited from Ponchielli, of reiterating a readily identifiable
sung melody in purely instrumental form at the conclusion of an act. (The bom-
bastic restatement of ‘E lucevan le stelle’ in the final moments of Tosca is the most
notorious example.) Or, then again, maybe not so hackneyed. Gary Tomlinson
has suggested that there is an almost Nietzschean dimension to orchestral ground-
swells in late Romantic Italian opera – Dionysiac moments when music breaks
free from the words that had confined it. To describe these passages, Tomlinson
invokes a series of astronomical metaphors that could not be more relevant to the
subject of Suor Angelica: ‘Verdi uncovered in his new practice a potential leverage
of Archimedean dimensions . . . one that could move the whole opera, wrenching
it out of one orbit and into a new one’. And again, quoting Franco Faccio:
‘Heaven seems to open up’.49

VI
When heaven opens up at the end of Suor Angelica, we are greeted not, as might be
expected, with the voice of absolute acoustic alterity, but with sounds already
heard in human form.50 The music intoned by the angelic choir during the climactic
miracle is based on the fourth (and final) element in the rotational cycle. The first
time we heard this music was immediately after the conclusion of ‘Senza mamma’
(see Ex. 6). ‘Grace has descended from heaven’, Angelica sang, anticipating
the line that would soon mark the start of the third cycle, accompanied by an
off-stage chorus of nuns intoning hymns to the Virgin. Puccini’s music for this

48 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 244.

49 Gary Tomlinson, ‘Learning to Curse at Sixty-Seven’, this journal, 14 (2002), 229–41, here 240.
50 It seems to be this lack of difference (‘the note of transfiguration that the event requires’) that
leads Julian Budden to conclude that ‘The exalted regions open to Verdi and Wagner were
closed to Puccini’; see Puccini: His Life and Works (Oxford, 2002), 405.
186 Arman Schwartz

passage – much more elaborate than the F-major melody that begins the cycles –
is constructed from three parallel triads that are sequenced up by thirds – a ‘non-
progression’, in Hepokoski’s phrase, giving rise to a ‘ritualized, circular proces-
sional’.51 The sequence is then itself cycled through twice more; cadences are
deferred again and again until finally we settle into the implied tonic of C major.52

4 œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œJ œ œ œ #œ œ œ
&4 œ ˙ œ
SUOR ANGELICA

J J J J J J J J
gra - zia è di - sce - sa dal cie - lo, già tut - ta, gia tut - ta m’ac-

Moderato con moto q = 72

4 ˙˙ œ œ ˙˙˙ #˙˙˙
& 4 ˙˙˙ ˙˙ w˙˙ ™
w ™
˙ #˙
œ œ

{
˙
p

? 44 Œ œœ Œ œœ
œ Œ œœ œœ
œ œœ Œ œœ
œ Œ #œœœ
œ œ œ ˙ ˙
j ˙ j ˙ j w j j
œ œ œ
œ œ

˙ œ œ #œ œ œ œ
& ˙ œ ‰ #œJ J J œ œ œ œ œ œ œj
J J J
- cen - de, ri - splen - de! ri - splen - de! Già ve - do, so - rel - le, la

œ #œ ˙˙ #˙˙˙ #œ˙˙ œ œ œœ
w˙˙ ™ œ˙ œ œ nœœœ
™ ˙˙
& w œ #œ ˙ #œ œ œ œœ œœ
œœ œ˙ œ œ œ
œœ
œœ

{ j w
œ
œ
? Œ œœœ œœ œœœ
j
œ
Œ œœœ Œ # œœœ
˙ j
˙
œ j

œ
Œ #œœœ
˙ j
œ
Œ œ
˙
j
œ
Œ œœ
˙
œ
Œ nœ
j ˙
œ

Ex. 6: Suor Angelica, Reh. 64, bars 1–7

Nothing changes during the miracle scene except the orchestration and the
placement of the sound source (see Ex. 7). The music previously assigned to
Angelica and the orchestra is now taken over by an off-stage ensemble: children’s
voices supported by sopranos and later a full choir (including the only male voices
in this opera) plus a coldly virginal instrumental group: two pianos playing arpeggios
in their highest register, organ, hushed cymbals, muted trumpets. Angelica remains
silent during the start of the miracle music, and the orchestra drops out too, save
for a few plucked string chords. This decision emphasises the remoteness of the

51 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 252.

52 Hepokoski, ‘Structure, Implication’, 252–6.
 Puccini, in the distance 187
Ragazzi
° b 4pp
& 4œ œ œ œ
CORO INTERNO

O glo - - rio - - sa
i i i
Sop. 1 2 e 3

b4 œ œœœ nœœœ œœœ

pp

¢& 4 œœ
O glo - - rio - - sa

˙ n ˙˙˙
4 ˙˙
Organo

& b 4

{ 4
& b 4 ˙˙˙
pp

n˙˙˙

“” “” “” “”
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
œ œ œ œ
Pianoforte interno
4
& b 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

{ 4
& b 4 œ
œ œ
pp
10

œ œ
œ
10

œ œ
nœ
œ œ
nœ

Andante appena mosso q = 72

4
& b4 Œ ?œ Œ nœœ.
œ.

{ ? 4 j
b4 œ
œ
pp subito

‰
œœ
œ.
Œ
œœ
œ.

° b ‰ j œ
& j œ œ #œ œ
nœ ™ œ œ
j
vir - - gi - num, Sub - li - mis in - ter

b nœ ™ œœœ œœœ ‰ œœœ œœœ œœœ n#œœœ œœœ

¢& œœ ™™ J
vir - - gi - num, Sub - li - mis in - ter
˙˙˙ #˙
n ˙˙˙ ™™™ n ˙˙
& b Œ

{ & b n˙˙˙ ™™™ Œ ˙˙

˙ n#˙˙˙

“” œ œ œ “” œ œ œ “” # œ “” œ œ œ
“” n œ
œ œ œ œœœœ œœœœ œ œœ
“” œ “” œ
nœ œ
œ œœ
œœ
œ œœ
œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ #œn œ œ œœ œœ
& b œ œ œ
∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏
∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏∏

{ & b nœ
œ œ
nœ œ
œ
nœ œ
œ œœ n œœ
œ œ œœ
œ
œœ
œ
∑#œ
nœ œ #œn œ
œ

?b Œ nœ. œ. Œ Œ œœ. Œ #œœ.

{ ? Œ
b
n œœœ
.
œœ
œ.
Œ Œ œœ
œ.
Œ
#nnœœœ
.
Ex. 7: Suor Angelica, Reh. 81, bars 1–3
188 Arman Schwartz

new sound-world but it also suggests that Angelica’s voice has quite literally been
taken away from her, wrested from her body and allowed to echo through the
atmosphere. When Angelica re-enters at the start of the second iteration of the
sequence, she may be able to muster the force for a final high C, but she is also
no longer singing ‘her’ melody, only one of the inner voices of its harmonisation
(see Reh. 82, bars 1–8). At the start of the third iteration, she emits two horrible
unpitched moans. They are, to return to Sconce’s formulation, the sounds of a
body being atomised and dispersed and (unless you count the chilling, wordless
high C the off-stage sopranos unleash in the final four bars: chilling because it is
calibrated so precisely to echo – or, as if by some electric force, prolong – the
voice of a now-dead woman) the last ones she will ever make (see Reh. 84, bars
7–9).

VII
There are, then, two new ways one might describe this final miracle. On the one
hand, it seems to appropriate both the actual sound of early wireless transmissions
and the magical effect they had on many listeners. On the other hand, remember-
ing that radiophonic communication was still, in the early twentieth century, a
two-way process, we can also hear the protagonist desperately broadcasting her
own voice into the ether as we listen to the ever-more-distant echo of her cry.
Choosing between these options is less important than observing how far, in
either case, we have moved from the aims of realist opera.
And so, to return to our initial question, what happened to verismo? What
Puccini’s later career suggests – and Suor Angelica, in its move from convent bells
to heavenly ones, narrativises – is that a phonographic regime ceded to, or came
into conflict with, a radiophonic one. A movement founded on objective tran-
scription and unmediated presence became haunted by echoes, unreal voices,
distant sounds.
This shift was noted by Ferruccio Busoni, who made it the subject of a short
fable published as an April Fool’s Day joke (the author is listed as ‘Aprilus
Fischer’) in 1911. Framed as an urgent dispatch from New York, the story centres
on one Kennelton Humphrey Happenziegh, a conscientious positivist who ‘has
devoted the greatest part of his studies to the experimental criticism of acoustic
phenomena’. His great invention is a ‘super-sensitive apparatus (intended for
phonographic discs)’, a device that can record sounds beyond the range of normal
human hearing.53
As the story begins, Happenziegh has accidentally left his device turned on and,
after a short nap, has returned to discover ‘certain impressions which he could not
account for . . . an accumulation of obscure diagrams which were systematic, com-

53 Ferruccio Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, in The Essence of Music and Other Papers, trans.
Rosamond Ley (London, 1957), 190–3, here 190. The story originally appeared in the magazine
Signale für die musikalische Welt.
 Puccini, in the distance 189

plicated, and at first unintelligible’.54 Has Happenziegh’s disc recorded sounds

from the surrounding area? All restaurants were closed, no parties hosted, and
yet the disc, when played back, seems to have transcribed the sounds of music.
There is only one explanation.
As the air needs an instrument to make its vibrations perceptible to our ear, so the air
itself is only an instrument which transmits the not yet fully fathomed wave-lengths.
These original wave-lengths . . . have the characteristic quality of being similarly effective
in a time-sphere, as, for instance, wireless telegraphy in that of space . . . Thus, through a
chance not yet cleared up, a demonstration of music in the future seems to have found its
way on to the super-sensitive disc and to have impressed itself there.55
Just as the wireless can tune into sounds from far-flung locations, that is to say,
Happenziegh’s device has picked up the noise of some future epoch. (The years
around 2050 are presented as a plausible point of origin.) Seemingly objective and
impersonal recording techniques have yielded results that defy all logic. In a con-
crete demonstration of Adorno’s theory of phantasmagoria, time and space have
fused.
As for the music itself, it sounds not unlike the final miracle in Suor Angelica.
‘One might almost suppose that all the instruments, which one knows of or can
guess at, play muted and that in addition to this the space in which they are placed
is sharply separated from the listener.’56 The implication here – that we are not
just listening to an orchestra from the future, but to an off-stage orchestra from
the future – is astonishing, and suggests how elaborate fantasies of musical disem-
bodiment had become in the aftermath of Wagner and Marconi. It is telling,
though, that Busoni himself would soon flee from this world of dangerous enchant-
ments, embracing the cooler verities of neo-classicism (a stylistic shift marked, as
it was for Puccini, by a sudden interest in Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot). Neo-classicism,
of course, is the movement usually associated with the impersonality of the
phonograph. The triumph of musical objectivity in the 1920s should not, though,
be understood as the inevitable by-product of technological innovation, but rather
as the return to an earlier dream of acoustic certainty, one that had been unsettled,
if only briefly, by the amorphous voices of the wireless and the even more haunt-
ing music of the First World War.57

54 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 191.

55 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 192.
56 Busoni, ‘A Fairy-like Invention’, 193. Original emphasis.
57 We would, however, be remiss not to note the surprising re-emergence of wordless singing in
the Zeitopern of the Weimar republic. Whether the omnipresent Männerchor in Kurt Weill’s Der
Zar lässt sich photographieren and the humming tango dancers in Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins
are best described as parodying or mourning an earlier practice – whether, that is to say, Zeitoper
was willing to exorcise fully the post-Wagnerian ghosts it disavowed so showily – is beyond the
scope of the present essay.