The silent maestro. Giacomo Puccini and the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik

The article studies the use of Giacomo Puccini’s creations in one of the most complete and complex catalogues of music for silent films: the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik (1927), by Giuseppe Becce, Hans Erdmann and Ludwig Brav. The presence of Puccini in this compilation consists of 86 fragments from 6 operas: Gianni Schicchi, La Fanciulla del West, Manon Lescaut, Suor Angelica, Il Tabarro and Le Villi. The fragments are extracted from instrumental “fantasies” by Emile Tavan, Gaetano Luporini and Adolphe Gauwin. The excerpts are classified by an elaborated system based on a series of verbal “labels” referring to emotions or situations, which are ordered in a hierarchical scale. However, the hierarchy seems to present some intrinsic contradictions, as the “labels” with the higher rank appear to be slightly different between the main index and the actual catalogue. It’s nonetheless possible to infer a tripartite hierarchy, based on the concepts of “Dramatic”, “Lyric” and generic “Situation” (Dramatische, Lyrische and Incidenz). A throughout analysis of the puccinian selection reveals that most of the fragments appear in the “Lyric” section. Moreover, the greatest part of them are joined with labels referring to positive emotions (“Love”, “Luck”, “Joy and Peace”, “Hymn” etc.). Puccini’s music tends to be completely separated from its original context and meaning. Becce seems to have been guided by the mere “acoustic” feeling of the fragments to assign them their respective places. In this selection, Puccini’s operas like Il Tabarro or Suor Angelica are depicted as overall bright works, incline to fantasy, melancholy and occasional gaiety. It’s possible to explain this apparently unacceptable interpretation of Becce with a quotation from the first volume of the Allgemeines Handbuch: «The best film music is the one that cannot be listened to alone.» Becce, Erdmann and Brav were already aware of one of the main principles that modern film composers use in their work: the music has to depend on the moving images, and these images have to be completed by music. If Puccini’s music would have been catalogued in strict respect to its original finalities, it would have resulted in being inappropriate for cinema performances: it would have recalled memories and sensations that would likely have given a wrong sense to a film sequence. That kind of logic is perhaps the same that made Becce avoid to use excerpts from operas such as La Bohème, Tosca and Madame Butterfly: their melodies may have been too well-known to be effectively “disguised” through a clever work of classification. Puccini’s music, in the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik, contributed to the consolidation and to the explication of an important aesthetic tendency in early film music. However, it managed to do such a thing by losing its dramatic sense and its verses. In the cinema hall Puccini became a silent maestro, who gave a life and a future to flickering shadows on a luminous screen.