Choral singers are occasionally surprised to be told by their musical director that they will be doing some Verdi or Puccini. What could that be? Transcribed opera choruses, perhaps? Boosting a choral society that finds itself short-handed for the Verdi Requiem? If Verdi, then it will most likely be the Quattro pezzi sacri: if Puccini, then it will most likely be the brief Requiem commissioned in 1905 to commemorate the 4th anniversary of the death of Verdi1, and this is indeed what the Portsmouth Baroque Choir is rehearsing for its next concert, ‘Stanford 100 and other anniversaries,’ on October 19th. There is a connection between the Puccini and the Verdi: both make use of or allude to a particular scale that has become known as the scala enigmatica.
Other passing references to Verdi’s music can be heard, I think, in the Requiem, but first, that scale. Verdi coined the term scala enigmatica for a scale, ascending and descending, that had originally appeared in the Gazette musicale di Milano in 1888 as a challenge:
From Bologna we’ve been sent the following scale . . .that, when harmonized properly, says its inventor, will prove effective. Leave the undertaking of the task to those musicians who enjoy the study of harmony.
Whether it’s ciphers, magic squares, palindromes, tone rows, In Nomines, intricate fugue subjects, cantus firmus or architectural proportions, composers have always enjoyed tackling problems and puzzles. The inventor of this particular puzzle turned out to be Adolfo Crescentini who most likely had his ingenious, certainly “effective” harmonisation up his sleeve when he submitted the challenge. You can read more about this puzzle in Richard Burke’s thorough examination2 of the competition and what composers, including Verdi and Puccini did with the scale3. Or if you prefer a more light-hearted exposition of the enigmatic scale, head to YouTube4.
Verdi may have heard about this challenging puzzle from his librettist Boito, who was something of a puzzle-addict himself: Verdi could hardly resist. After all, he’d been harmonising scales in astonishing ways for most of his career; take, for instance, the “Quam Olim Abrahae” passage from the Offertorio and the ending of the Sanctus in his Requiem. The competition long since closed, Verdi took the challenge further for his own amusement and in 1889 utilised the scale for a four-verse setting of the Ave Maria, the scale appearing like a cantus firmus consecutively in each of the four voices, transposed for tenors and sopranos. Not many people, other than Verdi and Boito would have known about this at the time, as Richard Burke explains:
“In 1895, the composer conducted a performance of the Ave Maria for a private audience at the conservatory in Parma. He was not happy with the piece, and in 1896 wrote Boito saying that the Ave Maria would be shelved, “never seeing the light of day”…. Yet in 1897, Verdi revised it; later, however, even with Giulio Ricordi’s strong efforts to convince him otherwise, Verdi refused to allow the piece to be published. The Ave Maria would eventually become the opening movement of the Quattro Pezzi Sacri, although not at the first performance (Paris, 1898), when the Pezzi Sacri were only “tre”.5
And Verdi’s reason for withholding the Ave Maria? “It is not true music, it’s a tour de force, it’s a game (sciarada)” and games such as this had little to do with the music of the day. They belonged to sacred music of the past. The first performance of all four pieces was in Austria in November of 1898. After that it is anyone’s guess how often they were performed: they are infrequent even today. Therefore it is unlikely that Puccini ever heard them or even knew about the pieces. But it seems very likely that he knew about the scala enigmatica and Verdi’s interest in it as he was living in or around Milan when the puzzle was published: and, as Richard Burke demonstrates, Puccini made use of it himself in Tosca (1900).6
One can assume that when Puccini received the commission to write the Requiem it would have been seen not only as an opportunity to pay tribute to his operatic forebear but also as a welcomed distraction. Puccini would still have been recovering from his near-fatal car accident in January 1903 and was also troubled by the poor reception given in 1904 to his sixth opera, Madama Butterfly7 . The autograph score of the Requiem is dated 14 January 1905, which is possibly the day it was composed as such a short and uncomplicated work is unlikely to have taken much time to complete. It was first performed a fortnight later on 27 January 1905 by the choir of La Scala in Milan at the chapel of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti that Verdi had founded.
Puccini was a master at scene-setting; think of the opening bars to any scene of La Boheme or Tosca. The Requiem opens with a solemn descending phrase over a D pedal for the organ, sounding like muffled bells being tolled. The phrase is repeated identically three times after each choral passage, like a ritual, alternating with a ‘calmissimo’ tread for organ over which a mournful viola plays a simple, emotional melody. For any singer who has tackled the intonation challenges of Verdi’s Ave Maria, the 3-part unison scale is not a problem provided it stays in tune with the organ’s harmonic surprises.
This is the passage that is supposed to make use of the enigmatic scale but this is obviously not a strict application, rather an allusion, an homage to Verdi’s use of it. The choir’s scale does include similar, surprising seminal twists towards the top and the augmented 5th chord at the word ‘Domine’ is indeed the chord rendered by notes of the enigmatic scale built on the ‘tonic’.
I detect other Verdi references here and at the end of the piece. Use of chromatic passing chords characterises the music of the late 19th century and anything Wagner and Liszt could do over on the other side of the Alps, Verdi could match in his late operas. Verdi was 80 when he completed his final opera Falstaff (1893), aware, like the opera’s hero, that time is short and an age is passing. Falstaff‘s humour tinged with nostalgia was not well-received by audiences at the time: only in the mid-20th century was it perceived as a masterpiece. But composers were impressed. Busoni, for example, maintained that a performance of Falstaff in 1894 marked a turning point in his own creative development, a contemporary connection, he felt, had been made with Rossini and Donizetti, and ultimately, Mozart.8 One, brief moment from Act 3 attracted a lot of attention and still casts a spell. The character Falstaff has been given an assignation, to wait by the Hearne Oak at midnight. The momentum of the opera ceases as the clock strikes, the F pitch of the bell echoed by Falstaff (uno, due, tre… ) while the hushed orchestra traces a suspenseful progression9 resolving only at the stroke of 12.
This is the sound and atmosphere that those opening vocal bars of Puccini’s Requiem conjure for me: a still, meditative moment about time and music. Benjamin Britten greatly admired this passage from Falstaff. 10
There is another surprise at the final cadence of the Requiem. The choir unexpectedly ends, unaccompanied, on the subdominant before the organ closes on the tonic.
Verdi employed a similar device, even more surprising, at final cadence of the Lachrymosa section of his Requiem. The word ‘Amen’ in the chorus unexpectedly veers to G major, the submediant key of the prevailing B flat minor, before resolving peacefully to B flat major.
Whether or not you perceive these enigmas in Puccini’s Requiem, his commemoration of a national hero and master of operatic form is sincere, direct and heartfelt. It was probably not expected to be performed again after the intended occasion but it is too good to ignore and I am sure, almost a century later, that the audience at St George’s, Whyke on October 19th will be moved by our performance of the Requiem, as effective in its own quiet way as parts of the Requiem by Fauré.
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Footnotes & sources
- Puccini wrote four choral works before he turned to opera: a cantata I figli d’Italia Bella, a motet Plaudite populi, a Credo for St Paolino (all from 1877) and a Mass (1880). Of these, only the Mass has been published, and not until 1951 as Messa di Gloria. ↩︎
- Richard Burke “That awkward scale”: Verdi, Puccini, and the Scala enigmatica. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.2/mto.15.21.2.burke.html ↩︎
- I was intrigued to see in Richard Burke’s article that use of the enigmatic scale disappeared for almost a century, re-surfacing in the late works of Luigi Nono and the Mass (2002) by Peter Maxwell Davies. ↩︎
- The enigmatic scale: music as a puzzle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspWDE3gN0A ↩︎
- Richard Burke, op. cit. ↩︎
- Richard Burke op. cit. [20] ↩︎
- Puccini made his final revisions to Madama Butterfly in 1907 and it is this fifth version that has become the “standard version”. However, the original 1904 version is occasionally performed and has been recorded ↩︎
- Jim Samson Music in transition: a study of tonal expansion and atonality, 1900-1920.– London: Dent, 1977. p.27 ↩︎
- Alex Ross mentions this particular passage as an “astonishing” example of what an elderly composer is capable in terms of their music spinning off in a new direction: “When, in the last act, Falstaff arrives in Windsor Park, about to be tricked and merrily humbled, he counts off the strokes of midnight… and there is a musical foreshadowing of the dejection that takes hold of Falstaff at the end of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2 (“We have heard the chimes at midnight”, The old man sings on one note while a weird mist of chords revolves around him. The moment passes quickly, as such moments do in late Verdi, but it gives the sense of a chasm opening”. Alex Ross. Listen to this.- London: Fourth Estate, 2010.- p.305 ↩︎
- Dr Martin Pickard ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight: Verdi, Falstaff and time’ Newcastle University lecture, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KPJxhfI_U&t=226s ↩︎