"God has touched me with his
little finger and said; Write for the theatre, only for
the theatre."
Puccini's Women
is an homage to the heroines Puccini created with
'desperate passion'. A fusion of theatre, opera, and
visual media it explores the nature of Puccini's unique
talent for the dramatic, his fascination with love as
suffering and the female voice, and the cinematic nature
of his musical worlds. From the teenage longings of the
Giselle-like Anna to the mythic ice-princess Turandot
rebelling against love we walk an intriguing path.
Immersing oneself in Puccini's heroines one soon begins
to discover that his subjects are not pale, fragile,
suffering creatures but complex, layered women who have
to deal with the realities of life and with surprising
results. Puccini agonized when creating these
characters but his librettists agonized more! Great
attention was paid to every detail to distil the
emotional
The challenge for the five
women we have onstage tonight is to find the points of
separation between Puccini's characters vocally,
emotionally, and gesturally. Further, where more than
one singer is playing the same character, to reveal how
a character resonates across performers in
acknowledgement that there are many responses and
interpretations possible - which is what keeps
these characters alive and interesting. There is no
fixed reading of these women. In presenting Puccini
himself through his correspondence, interviews, and
reviews revealed is a man who declared himself to be
'almost always in love' but who felt isolated and
misunderstood much of the time. Who was incredibly hurt
by the envy of others and the often critical response to
much of his work from reviewers. Finally the visual
landscape, created by Kaoru Alfonso, acts firstly as
visual documentary narrative. Moving beyond this we then
enter more impressionistic zones capturing the inner
heart of the work presented.
Few artists have ever achieved such enduring
popularity as Puccini. He believed opera should
interest, surprise, and move an audience to emotion
or laughter and I hope you laugh, exclaim, and weep
with us tonight.
Caroline Stacey
Director
It is not hard to see why Puccini associated butterflies
with his suffering heroines. They were both amazingly
beautiful and delicate creatures, both had a short life
spans and die in their prime, and it was always through
circumstances beyond their control that dictated the
transformation or metamorphosis. In the beginning I
thought Puccini used the butterfly analogy mainly
because of the ‘transformation’ similarity -
butterflies undergo a physical transformation dictated
by nature, and his suffering heroines, through
sacrificing themselves for love, undergo their own
emotional metamorphosis. This may be true to a certain
extent, but I think Puccini really associated his
“piccole donne” with butterflies because of the
fragility of life they shared, which is strongly
illustrated with his butterfly specimen board.
