Angela Gheorghiu has recorded an album of Puccini’s little-known songs to mark the centenary of the composer’s death. The star soprano speaks to Christopher Cook about a lifetime dedicated to the great Italian’s music
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MILLAR
‘There’s something cinematic about Puccini. In a song or an aria of perhaps no more than two pages he can write a whole story. He knew how to go to the heart of it.’
Angela Gheorghiu might well be describing herself. On stage she has the presence of a movie star and cuts straight to the emotional chase. Strong men have gone weak at the knees at her Tosca confronting Baron Scarpia and Gheorghiu’s Butterfly must have done wonders for the sale of handkerchiefs.
Now, along with pianist Vincenzo Scalera, she has made a recording (for Signum) of Giacomo Puccini’s songs. ‘I feel I need to sing Puccini. I’ve been recording for 30 years now, so I thought for the centenary of Puccini’s death, and because I recognise that he is really suitable for my voice, I would sing all of his music, including the songs.’
Not all of the extant songs for, as Gheorghiu reminds me, the provenance of some are now challenged by the Puccini Foundation. The singer has selected 17 of them. ‘To tell the truth, I adore everything connected with the number seven! I was born on the seventh,’ says Gheorghiu. ‘Of course, this is a happy coincidence.’
Puccini wrote songs throughout his composing life, from his student years in Milan in the 1880s to his last days after World War I, when he was acknowledged as the Grand Old Man of Italian Opera. It’s tempting to think of him as embracing a tradition of song writing, which, by the early-19th century, had become the birth-right of every Italian composer.
But unlike Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and later Tosti, Puccini’s songs are not really for the drawing room or salon. He wrote them for himself, for his friends and sometimes as commissions, which is not to say that they are footnotes to the operas. As musicologist Michael Kaye shrewdly observes, ‘His songs reflect the stages of development of his very personal musical language’.
He wrote ‘E l’uccellino’, a beguiling lullaby, for Memmo Lippi, the son of a doctor friend who had died of typhus a few days after his marriage; ‘Avanti, Urania!’ was composed two years earlier in 1896 to celebrate the purchase of Urania, a 179-ton iron screw steamer, by his friend the Marchese Gino
