Pucciniana

The musical language of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), though deeply rooted in the theatre and in the inflections of the spoken word, possesses a melodic, harmonic and timbral richness capable of standing on its own in the instrumental realm. In this recording project, we explore Puccini’s universe through the interplay of two ensembles closely linked to the art of song: the guitar duo and the guitar–mandolin duo.

The programme of Pucciniana opens with a selection of Puccini’s instrumental works, arranged for two guitars. Pezzo per pianoforte reveals an intimate, understated lyricism, while Scossa elettrica, a march of striking rhythmic vitality, brings to light Puccini’s more brilliant and spirited side. This first section is punctuated by the Intermezzo from Suor Angelica, whose transcription preserves the suspended tension of the original orchestral version. Piccolo Tango, originally written for piano, reveals Puccini’s interest in lighter, dance-inspired forms, while Crisantemi, a funeral elegy of profound emotional intensity, finds in the dialogue between the two guitars a natural continuation of the cantabile style of the string quartet.

Our desire to engage with the present comes to the fore in the album’s centrepiece, Vedrem levarsi… (After Puccini’s Madama Butterfly) (2024), a work commissioned from the Italian composer Gaia Aloisi (b. 1995). The piece draws on melodic fragments and vocal gestures that evoke Cio-Cio-San’s famous aria Un bel dì, vedremo, reimagining them in a contemporary language centred on memory and transformation rather than direct quotation.

The second part of the programme is devoted to Puccini’s great operas, brought to life through the voices of guitar and mandolin. Donna non vidi mai from Manon Lescaut preserves the broad lyrical sweep of Des Grieux’s aria, while in O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi the intimate sound of the mandolin blends naturally with Lauretta’s vocal line, evoking its purity, tenderness and imploring character.

With its powerful intensity, the Intermezzo from Manon Lescaut, the opera’s tragic heart, offers a moment of dramatic suspension within the succession of Puccinian characters, reshaping the original orchestral tension into a finely balanced chamber texture. This inward drama then gives way to the capricious and seductive world of Musetta, who in La Bohème seeks to draw Marcello’s attention by singing and dancing to the rhythm of a waltz in Quando m’en vo.

From the same opera, the Duo also offers the encounter between Rodolfo and Mimì in Che gelida manina, preserving the delicate interplay between declamation and lyrical passion, with the strings tracing the intimate bond that begins to form between the two characters. Finally, Nessun dorma from Turandot assumes, in this transcription, a concentrated form that nonetheless gives full voice to Prince Calaf’s solemn aria, bringing the album to a close in a climax of powerful expressive impact.

Taken together, these reinterpretations present Puccini’s music stripped of theatrical setting, but not of drama, revealing through the intimacy of the duet the structural and timbral depth of his writing.

Marco Surace © 2026

Puccini Transcribed: The Plucked Voice

To speak of Puccini in transcription is to address not a loss, but a test. The theatrical frame is removed; the musical argument remains, exposed to a different light. What survives is not merely a sequence of celebrated melodies, but a system of dramatic signification that has always been partly independent of scenery, diction and stage action. Puccini’s music, perhaps more than that of any other Italian operatic composer of his generation, possesses an unusual capacity for detachment: it can leave the theatre without entirely leaving drama behind.

This portability was recognised very early. Writing in The Musical Quarterly in 1917, D. C. Parker observed, with some unease, that Puccini’s melodies had already been “wrenched from their environment” and dispersed through restaurants, gramophones and the informal spaces of modern listening. The remark was meant partly as a complaint; yet it identifies a crucial feature of Puccini’s afterlife. His music travels because its theatrical force is not simply dependent on theatrical circumstance. It is lodged inside the curve of the phrase, the pressure of a harmonic delay, the sudden intensification of register, the management of expectation before a cadence. A Puccinian melody does not merely adorn a dramatic situation: it carries within itself a memory of dramatic action.

This quality explains why Puccini is so often vulnerable to bad arrangement and yet so rewarding in serious transcription. The danger lies in mistaking recognisability for essence. To transfer a famous aria intact, as though melody alone were sufficient, is to reduce Puccini to a sentimental surface. The more demanding task is to preserve the mechanism by which that surface becomes emotionally inevitable. In his best writing, Puccini’s melodic line is inseparable from harmonic temperature. A note held fractionally too long, an appoggiatura pressed against the harmony, a chromatic inflection that darkens an otherwise diatonic contour: these are not decorative details, but agents of theatre. They are the points at which the body of the singer, the pulse of the orchestra and the psychology of the scene converge.

A transcription for plucked strings therefore does not imitate the opera house; it changes the scale of perception. The listener is brought closer to the grain of the writing. The orchestral mass is absent, but the harmonic skeleton becomes more audible. The voice is absent, but the grammar of breathing remains. The stage is absent, but the temporal logic of approach, hesitation, climax and withdrawal is still present. In this sense, Puccini’s music is not miniaturised by transcription so much as placed under a lens.

The guitar is particularly well suited to this act of concentration. Its nature is at once harmonic and vocal: it can sustain an accompaniment, suggest inner counterpoint, articulate bass motion and project a melodic line whose expressive life depends on attack, resonance and decay. Unlike the piano, whose percussive clarity can sometimes impose a vertical logic upon operatic music, the guitar allows harmony to bloom and vanish. Its sonority is intimate, but not neutral; it colours every interval with the slight fragility of sound produced by touch. In Puccini, where emotional intensity often emerges from the friction between tenderness and theatrical inevitability, such fragility is not a limitation. It becomes an interpretative principle.

The mandolin introduces another kind of vocality. Its tremolo, far from being a merely picturesque effect, creates the illusion of sustained breath through reiterated impulse. It sings by refusing to be still. This makes it especially apt for music whose expressive identity depends on the paradox of continuity and agitation. In the mandolin, a Puccinian line acquires a luminous nervousness: not the long-breathed expansion of an operatic soprano or tenor, but a vibrating thread of desire. Placed against the guitar, it can assume the role of protagonist, obbligato, echo or remembered voice. The pairing is not an exotic curiosity. As Paul Sparks’s work on the mandolin and guitar tradition suggests, the two instruments form a historically and acoustically natural alliance: comparable in scale, complementary in function, and capable of joining melody, harmony and resonance within a single chamber frame.

This is important because transcription is too often discussed as though it were a diminished form of composition. Historically, however, it has been one of the principal ways in which operatic music has circulated, been understood and been loved. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the passage from stage to salon, from orchestra to keyboard, from voice to domestic instrument, was not an accidental degradation but part of the social life of music. Transcription allowed a work to be re-heard, re-owned and re-imagined. It was both dissemination and analysis. To arrange Puccini for guitar, or for guitar and mandolin, is therefore not to remove him from tradition, but to return him to one of music’s oldest economies of survival: the capacity of a work to inhabit new bodies.

The programme recorded here is especially valuable because it does not treat Puccini’s operatic and instrumental output as two separate provinces. The instrumental pieces reveal that Puccinian expression was never exclusively dependent on the theatre. Even in miniature forms, one finds the same concern with line, pacing, timbral suggestion and emotional compression. Conversely, the operatic transcriptions show that his theatrical music contains a chamber dimension awaiting release. The two worlds illuminate one another. The early or occasional piece is not a footnote to the opera; the aria, when transcribed, is not merely an extract. Both are evidence of a musical imagination in which song, gesture and colour are mutually embedded.

The intermezzo occupies a particularly revealing position in this respect. In Puccini, the intermezzo is not simply a lyrical pause between dramatic events. It is often the point at which the orchestra thinks on behalf of the drama. Freed from words, it gathers emotional consequence into purely musical continuity. When such writing is transferred to plucked strings, its architecture becomes more exposed: harmonic direction, registral spacing and the distribution of tension must replace orchestral breadth. The result can be strikingly lucid. What had seemed atmospheric becomes structural; what had seemed orchestral becomes linear.

Modern Puccini scholarship has increasingly drawn attention to the complexity beneath the composer’s apparent immediacy. Suzanne Scherr’s study of Puccini’s early style emphasises the formation of a language shaped by both national and international influences, already tending towards dramatic focus and efficiency. Helen M. Greenwald’s work on Suor Angelica similarly reminds us that Puccini’s theatre may contain deep structural and symbolic relationships not always apparent at the level of plot. Arman Schwartz, writing of “Puccini in the distance”, has further suggested that the later works cultivate forms of sound that unsettle a simple veristic model of direct presence. These perspectives are useful here because transcription also creates distance: not the distance of remoteness, but the distance that allows a familiar object to be heard anew.

The listener who comes to this music from outside the opera house may in fact hear certain things more directly. Without costumes, voices, surtitles or narrative apparatus, Puccini’s musical language must speak through proportion and sonority alone. Its appeal then appears less as theatrical seduction than as structural persuasion. A phrase rises because it must; a harmonic turn wounds because it has been prepared; a climax convinces because the line has made resistance impossible. The external listener is not excluded by the absence of words. On the contrary, transcription may reveal how much of Puccini’s drama was already wordless.

What emerges, then, is not a Puccini reduced, prettified or domesticated, but a Puccini translated into proximity. The great public theatre is drawn into a smaller acoustic chamber; the operatic body becomes touch, pulse and resonance. The drama remains, but it no longer declaims from the stage. It leans towards us. In the dialogue of guitar and mandolin, Puccini’s music discovers another form of singing: more private, more fragile, yet no less eloquent. It is a theatre without scenery, but not without characters; a song without voices, but not without breath.

DV © 2026