God, I just don't want to die of happiness

Puccini has dominated the repertoire of all the world's opera houses for more than a century. His popularity is so great not only because of his outstanding music and great sense of orchestration, but also because of the specific way in which Puccini dramaturgically presented his main protagonists. He had a particular affinity for the perfectly nuanced creation of heroines. It is precisely his heroines who are the main feature of his entire work.

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The term "Puccini's heroine" has been present for more than a century in the circles of musicologists and music critics and basically describes a woman who, suffering for love, does not shy away from self-sacrifice or even death. Mostly all of them are victims of cruel fate and in other words "live and die for love", which makes them close to some of the most famous female heroes of world literature in general.

Puccini's first two operas, Villas i Edgar did not leave a major mark in the history of opera music.

Only the third, Manon Lesko, represents his first mature opera, which elevated him to the very top of the world's opera composers. It was a great boldness to take the same steps as Gilles Masne had done ten years before him, but Puccini had a daring and fearless attitude in business as well as in life and was guided by the same adventurous spirit that made him, apart from music, the most important things in the world were his countless love adventures, fast cars, boats and hunting. He was not afraid of the comparison with Massenet, saying that Massenet experienced Manon entirely in the French style, and he in the Italian manner, full of desperate passion... And indeed, it was passion that led Manon through all her adventures, until her death on the American prairie where in the last aria, although exhausted and dying, she shows the same enormous passion for life.

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Has anyone seen the opera? Bohemians, without immediately getting attached to the bohemian group that survives hungry and frozen happy student days in a Parisian loft? Mimi is one of Puccini's favorite heroines for audiences around the world. Probably because everyone in this world can identify with her and with the heroes of this opera. When the unhappy Mimi says goodbye to life in the last act, it is also Puccini's farewell to his own youth. Everyone in the audience can identify with that sentiment. It was Puccini's typical way of touching the audience's soul. Because of so much sentimentality, many critics condemned him, but that is exactly why the audience loved him so much and still loves him to this day.

Of all Puccini's heroines, Tosca is perhaps the most complete. The range of emotions given to her by the maestro surpasses all others. In the same woman, in the course of just one night, so much is stirred up - from the first act when she enters the temple as a woman in love with the painter Kavaradosi and a devoted believer who devoutly kisses the statue of the Madonna, until in the second act he turns her into a woman who is so desperate that is even ready to kill her tormentor just to save the man she loves. Puccini develops her character in a fierce crescendo until the very end, when Tosca does the worst thing a religious woman can do - she takes her own life by jumping from the fortress.

Despite the catastrophic and unprecedented failure it experienced at the premiere at the Teatro Milanska skala, the opera Madame Butterfly it has been delighting opera lovers around the world for a whole century with its exotic melodiousness. Regardless of race and color of skin, everyone on this planet already at the entrance aria gets involved with the excitement of the little geisha Ćo-Ćo-san, with her almost childlike appearance in the first act when she takes out all her possessions from the pockets of her kimono sleeves with childish cuteness. The audience is always touched and carried away by the famous aria in the second act "Un bel di vedremo" in which she waits for her meeting with her beloved. She imagines that she will first see a wisp of smoke looming in the distance, then the ship's entry into the harbor heralded by cannon fire, then the arrival of Pinkerton who will shower her with hugs and gentle words ("God, if only I don't die of happiness..." - says Ćo-Ćo -san at the climax of the aria). And at the end of the opera, in the aria with which she says goodbye to her only child, begging those blue eyes to remember the mother she will never see again, there is not even the hardest heart in the hall that was not touched by the unfortunate fate of the little Japanese girl.

Opera plot Girl from the West it is set in California during the gold rush. It was a completely new approach to opera, an adventure set in the Wild West, the creation of a new type of heroine that hadn't appeared in his operas before - a woman who wears trousers, runs a saloon and gambles surrounded by rough gold diggers. What a contrast to gentle Mimi, fragile Butterfly and passionate diva Tosca! And the Wild West scenery itself was completely new.

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Puccini's opera Turandot, as a kind of stage spectacle, completely deviates from his usual style, which he consistently followed throughout his entire career. For the first time, and at the end of his life, the composer decided to insert grandiose effects and mass scenes into the opera. Princess Turandot will only marry the suitor who answers her three riddles. To save the life of her beloved master, the little slave Liu takes her own life with one of the most subtle arias in opera literature. Opposite the cold princess Turandot, stands the warm and faithful Liu.

Many stories are woven around the character of Slave Liu. Most biographers accept the theory that the character Liu was created by the maestro only to dedicate it to his unfortunate maid Doria Manfredi, who took her own life, unable to bear the shame of being accused by Puccini's jealous wife Elvira of having an affair with Puccini. To make matters worse, an autopsy revealed that the unfortunate girl was innocent and Elvira was sentenced to prison for defamation resulting in death. With the help of connections and a large sum paid to the Manfredi family, the lawsuit was withdrawn and Elvira was released, but the scandal and the trial filled the columns of all Italian newspapers for months. It was a shadow that hung over Puccini's marriage like a black cloud and never left.

Many analysts of Puccini's work go so far as to attribute Elvira's qualities to Princess Turandot - cruelty and callousness. In any case, in this work, Puccini not only created a character in the character of Turandot that completely deviates from his previous painting of warm and fragile heroines, but he also made a departure from his veristic creative approach by going to a completely different extreme, that is, to a fairy tale.

Unfortunately, he died before he could finish the opera, on November 29, 1924. At the first performance of the opera Turandot in Milan Scala, after the scene of the death of the slave Liu, Toscanini stopped the performance and, respecting Puccini's wish, quietly addressed the audience with the words: "This is where the opera ends, this is where the maestro lowered his baton." It was a farewell to the great maestro, and at the same time a farewell to the golden era of Italian opera, which, according to the unanimous opinion of all music historians, ended precisely with the opera. Turandot.

The genius Puccini managed to infuse his characters with completely honest and real emotions, because they are no longer typical characters from an earlier period, they are heroines whose destinies have their own logic and whose emotional ascent happens before the eyes of the audience. Those emotions were unusual for the norms of stage art at the time, but that's exactly why his characters were so lifelike. He expanded the palette of emotions experienced by his characters on stage to unimagined limits, thereby enriching operatic art and breathing new life into his characters. Puccini made heroines "out of flesh and blood", and the fact is that in his operas the heroines are the pivot around which the action revolves.

Of the twelve operas he wrote, he named seven of them after his heroines, and almost all of them die at the end. Puccini considers the death of his heroine the central concept of the opera, although it is clear that he felt great affection for each of them.

The question remains as to why Puccini felt it necessary for each of them to die. How to explain the fact that Puccini's passionate love for each of them was always accompanied by a sadistic impulse? He alluded to it himself when he jokingly called his tendency to kill his heroines the "Neronian instinct". Rather, one could support the position that Puccini created his heroines with strong strokes, then threw them on stage into a whirlwind of life and love passions, and then often brought them to death, usually tragic, in order to fulfill the three laws that a theater play must he respects, that is, as he himself says: "A theater play must interest, surprise, excite or laugh". This Puccini chalk can be used to answer the question about the reasons for the cruel fates experienced by Puccini's heroines. He directed all his creative efforts towards just that - to reach the hearts of the audience at any cost.

Puccini's musical script was completely unique. His music had a unique stamp given to it by his passionate temperament. The incredible sense of theater that he possessed allowed him to put on stage a whole gallery of heroines, shaping them with so much love and dedication that each of them is forever etched in the memory of the audience and that each of them leaves an emotional imprint in their hearts. At the mention of their names, not only visual, but also emotional memories of gentle and young Mimi, passionate and daring Tosca, ice princess Turandot and childish but endlessly lovely Butterfly appear as shadows.