{"id":1107,"date":"2020-02-25T18:21:26","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T18:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2020-03-13T15:09:57","modified_gmt":"2020-03-13T15:09:57","slug":"puccini-o-mio-babbino-caro-from-gianni-schicchi-1918","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/?p=1107","title":{"rendered":"Puccini ~ O mio babbino caro<\/em> from Gianni Schicchi<\/em> (1918)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Puccini ~ O mio babbino caro<\/em> from\u00a0Gianni Schicchi<\/em> (1918)<\/h1>\n

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Cover of Puccini’s original score<\/em><\/p>\n

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What makes for a great tune?<\/strong> What is the gift that Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lennon and McCartney, Carole King, and others like them have?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Giacomo Puccini\u00a0is cut from the same cloth.\u00a0<\/strong>The short aria in the video below comes from a moment in his one-act opera Gianni Schicchi<\/em>\u00a0(see poster above) where the heroine is attempting to win her father’s approval of her intentions (“Oh My Beloved Father<\/em>“).<\/p>\n

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For many\u00a0listeners (myself included), Giacomo Puccini’s operas often trigger a kind of musical cognitive dissonance. Objectively, the music is anachronistic — firmly rooted in the 19th century<\/strong> at a time when other composers like Stravinsky (discussed elsewhere in this blog) were pulling music forward in a huge way. The plots are often convoluted, illogical, sappy, or all of the above. The characters are frequently stereotypical and two-dimensional. There is no subtlety in music, words, dramatic gestures, or orchestration — everything is heart-on-the-sleeve. And, oh yeah — how many of us really understand Italian?<\/p>\n

But …<\/strong><\/p>\n

… Somehow the sweep of it all and the perfect way Puccini bonds beautiful melodies to the well-trained human voice — it’s all magic.<\/strong> He pulls us in and we never want him to let us go.<\/p>\n

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Giacomo Puccini<\/em><\/p>\n

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Personal connections<\/h4>\n

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    \n
  • I have seen the performer here — soprano Ren\u00e9e Fleming —\u00a0sing this aria\u00a0in person as an encore. She is a certified national treasure.<\/strong> Her buttery tone and the composer’s heartbreaking melody are made for each other.<\/li>\n
  • A voice teacher friend of mine was a classmate of Ren\u00e9e at Eastman Conservatory. He knew her in the days when she rode around campus on a bike wearing sweats — just like everyone else.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

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    Puccini, like other great songwriters, could spin a melody that goes into the ear, through the cerebral cortex, and from there straight to the heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.oganovic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Poster-for-Puccinis-opera-Gianni-Schicchi-2.jpg?fit=761%2C429&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1107"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1107\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.oganovic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}