In studying Puccini, I'm struck by how often the lyrics are banal: "The bill - already?"; "I bought this house for ninety nine years, but with the option, at ev'ry month, to cancel the contract!..." and yet without the subtitles I hadn't noticed the banality.
"There is so much that shouldn't be sung," is a criticism I've heard made about contemporary opera. Yet, Puccini didn't seem to care. If he felt like writing a melody he wrote it. Banal text or not; the melody supersedes everything. Above all there is a melodic structure.
And yet the drama is no less important. I wonder if the problem lies nowadays in composers trying to underline the words - a lesson misunderstood from Wagner? People speak of Wagner's trying to marry the words to the music as one of his innovations, and tend to say, also, that when he resiled from this his 'experiment' failed. But what he realised is that the true level of marriage is music and action. And action is what Puccini keeps up, at the level of melody.
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