Le vendredi 11 juillet 2008 à 13:50:47 UTC+4, Premise Checker a écrit :
> Scandalissimo! Puccini's sex life laid bare
> http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/scandalissimo-puccinis-sex-life-laid-bare-859666.html
> 8.7.6
> [Thanks to Sarah for this.]
> The private life of Giacomo Puccini was famously as colourful as his
> operas, but only now has the truth emerged about the scandal that
> almost undid him. It's an extraordinary tale of infidelity, jealousy
> and vengeance that continues to haunt the lives of his descendants
> to this day
> By Adrian Mourby
> This year, the many celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of
> Puccini's birth are set to include the unveiling of a new al fresco
> opera house on the shores of the lake where many of his masterpieces
> were composed. Giacomo Puccini was the most commercially successful
> opera composer there has ever been. At his death in 1924 he was
> worth well over £130m by today's standards.
> Much of this wealth came from the wonder years (1895-1904) when the
> Tuscan maestro turned out in rapid succession three of the most
> widely performed operas in the world, La Bohème, Tosca and Madama
> Butterfly, while living in idyllic surroundings in Torre del Lago on
> the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli. Then he seemed to run out of
> steam, not finishing his next work, La Fanciulla del West, until
> 1910. While accomplished, La Fanciulla isn't in the same league as
> Bohème, Tosca and Butterfly. So what went wrong?
> For years it was assumed that the suicide of a maid working in the
> Puccini household may have had a lot to do with it. The story is
> well-documented. On 23 January 1909, Doria Manfredi committed
> suicide by taking three tablets of corrosive sublimate. It took
> three days for her to die from what today we would call mercury
> poisoning. Elvira Bonturi, the composer's 39-year-old wife, was
> blamed for her death, for she had hounded Doria and publicly accused
> her of having an affair with Puccini. When the local court ordered
> an autopsy, it was found that Doria was a virgin and Elvira was sued
> for slander. She was sentenced to five months and five days and only
> escaped prison when the composer offered 12,000 lire compensation to
> the Manfredi family. Subsequently the couple were estranged for some
> months, but this tragedy hardly accounts for the seven years it took
> Puccini to complete La Fanciulla. Besides, Elvira's persecution of
> Doria only began in the October of 1908. The dates simply do not
> match up.
> Recently, fresh light has been shed on what went on in Villa Puccini
> 100 years ago. Giacomo Puccini had made his home in a fishing
> village called Torre del Lago. Here, surrounded by his common-law
> wife, his stepdaughter and son, he wrote music, went out in fast
> cars, or took his speedboat out on the lake. Or as he himself put
> it: "I am a mighty hunter of wild fowl, operatic librettos and
> attractive women."
> It was Puccini's pursuit of women that created the great crisis in
> his life. This is a tale of infidelity, jealousy, vengeance and
> despair. It goes a long way towards explaining the composer's fallow
> period. Its repercussions are still being felt on the lakeside
> today.
> The story begins not with Doria's suicide, but eight years earlier
> when Puccini was working on Madama Butterfly. It was not uncommon
> for the maestro to fall in love with other women when composing. He
> called these amourettes his "little gardens". In 1900, while working
> on Butterfly, Puccini fell for a young girl he met in Turin. He
> nicknamed her "Corinna" and was so obsessed with her that Elvira, in
> despair, contemplated leaving him .
> Puccini and Elvira Bonturi were not married at the time. She was the
> wife of an old schoolfriend of his. The couple had met in 1884 when
> Puccini was hired to give Elvira piano lessons. They soon began an
> affair. In 1886, amid much scandal, Elvira had left her husband for
> Puccini, bringing her six-year-old daughter Fosca with her to Torre
> del Lago. In due course Elvira bore Puccini a son, Antonio, but the
> couple were unable to marry and legitimise the boy because divorce
> was not possible in Italy at that time. The situation may well have
> suited the composer, who claimed he enjoyed falling in love and
> certainly enjoyed teasing Elvira about his "little gardens". This
> time, however, the infatuation got out of control. There are
> suggestions that Puccini had proposed marriage to his Corinna.
> However, on 25 February 1903, fate took a strange turn. On that
> night Puccini suffered the first-ever motorcar accident to receive
> widespread press coverage in Italy. Near Lucca, his chauffeur
> plunged off the road. The composer was found pinned underneath the
> car, almost asphyxiated by petrol fumes and with his right leg
> broken. He needed someone at home to care for him. And the very next
> day, by another strange act of fate, Elvira became a widow. Her
> husband Narciso died, leaving no obstacle to Puccini marrying his
> companion of 17 years.
> Puccini's publisher and mentor, Giulio Ricordi, tried to convince
> the bedridden composer to give up Corinna and do the decent thing by
> Elvira. Goaded by Ricordi and pressed by his ever-attentive sisters,
> Puccini hired a private detective, who discovered that the Turinese
> girl had duped him. She was not the innocent she pretended to be.
> Not only was she having relationships with other men, there was ' a
> strong possibility money was changing hands. Puccini broke
> definitively with her in a note burning with shame and anger: "What
> an abyss of depravity and prostitution! You are a shit, and with
> this I leave you to your future."
> Stung, Corinna wrote to him threatening legal action and to go
> public over the affair. Puccini panicked. We know this from a note
> that Elvira subsequently wrote to him.
> "For that business [the alleged breach of promise] you could have
> gone to gaol... I still remember well how, when the famous letter
> [from Corinna] arrived, you became pusillanimous at the thought of a
> sentence and talked about fleeing to Switzerland."
> According to recent research by musicologist Dieter Schickling and
> novelist Helmut Krausser, the situation was rescued when Corinna's
> father was convicted for importuning and exposing himself to an
> underage girl. Any accusations made by the daughter of such a family
> would have enjoyed little credibility in the Italian legal system.
> Puccini was saved but humiliated. Among Schickling and Krausser's
> discoveries was the fact that the Corinna correspondence was not in
> any Puccini archive but in the possession of the family of Elvira
> Bonturi's sister.
> "Perhaps Elvira passed the documents to her sister for
> safe-keeping," says Puccini producer and scholar Vivien Hewitt, "so
> that she would always be able to remind him about them if he strayed
> in the future."
> The following year, on 3 January 1904, a week after finishing
> Butterfly and as soon as the legal 10 months of widowhood were up,
> Puccini married his Elvira. It could hardly be called a good start
> to a marriage.
> "Puccini's personal life and his creativity were always
> intertwined," says Hewitt. "His heartbreak over Corinna was probably
> instrumental in generating his most powerfully tragic music in the
> form of the last act of Madama Butterfly."
> After 'Butterfly', the humiliated composer did not produce another
> opera for six years. When that opera was finally completed, it
> depicted a new kind of Puccini heroine: not a victim like Mimi or
> Butterfly, nor a jealous, destructive creature like Tosca, but a
> tough, capable woman, Minnie, who runs a saloon in a California
> mining camp.
> Many people have asked where Puccini found his new muse. One of
> those intrigued by this question was Italian film director Paolo
> Benvenuti, whose film La Ragazza di Lago (The Girl of the Lake),
> premieres at the Venice Film Festival this August.
> "Six years ago I started an in-depth research project centred on the
> suicide of Doria Manfredi. I soon noticed that while writing an
> opera, Puccini tended to fall in love with a real-life person
> similar to his protagonist. I could see no similarity between Doria
> and the heroine of La Fanciulla del West, but my research team
> revealed there was another woman in Torre del Lago who bore a
> striking similarity to the independent, gun-toting saloon owner
> Minnie. That woman was Doria's cousin, Giulia Manfredi."
> Like Minnie, Giulia worked in a hostelry frequented by hunters and
> local farmers. This was the Chalet Emilio, named after her father,
> Emilio Manfredi. It still sits on the edge of Lake Massaciuccoli
> today, opposite Villa Puccini.
> "She was independent and commanding but at the same time humble and
> affectionate with locals and strangers alike," says Benvenuti.
> Gossip in Torre del Lago suggested that the composer had had an
> affair with Giulia, but Benvenuti had no evidence. "Then in October
> 2006 my research co-ordinator overheard a seaside pizza-parlour
> owner in Lido Di Camaiore saying that the illegitimate son of
> Giacomo Puccini and Giulia Manfredi always used to eat in his
> restaurant."
> Believing that he was on to something remarkable, Benvenuti followed
> up the lead, tracing the Manfredi family to a modest house in
> Cisanello near Pisa. "The woman who answered the door was Nadia, a
> simple housewife who had always worked as a hairdresser. She was the
> daughter of Antonio Manfredi, a hotel night porter who had lived in
> Pisa almost all his life."
> One thing Benvenuti noticed immediately: Nadia Manfredi has Giacomo
> Puccini's hooded eyelids.
> "Nadia is a sweet, rather shy person," says Benvenuti. "She has
> suffered a lot from her father's sense of abandonment and his
> appalling doubts about his identity."
> In January 2007, Nadia showed Benvenuti a dusty suitcase of her
> father's that had been kept in the cellar for years. Inside, the
> director found approximately 40 letters and various documents that
> revealed the truth behind the suicide of her great-aunt Doria. Most
> important among these was a handwritten, undated memorandum Puccini
> had written on two sheets of headed notepaper from a Milan hotel
> where he was staying. These notes reconstructed the sequence of
> events that led up to Doria's death.
> The story that was revealed is much more complex than Elvira
> Bonturi's jealous persecution of an innocent domestic servant. The
> tragedy begins around the end of September 1908, when Puccini sent
> word that he was returning to Torre del Lago. By this time he had
> found his new "little garden" in the feisty Giulia Manfredi and was
> already working on Fanciulla. Puccini asked that Doria open up the
> house ahead of his return. "By accident," says Benvenuti, "Doria
> discovered Puccini's stepdaughter, Fosca, in flagrante with the
> librettist of Fanciulla, Guelfo Civinini, in Villa Puccini." Fosca
> was 28 at the time and married to the impresario Salvatore Leonardi.
> "Fosca was afraid that Doria would tell all so she decided to
> discredit Doria and accused the girl of having an affair with her
> stepfather. Puccini's wife Elvira sacked Doria."
> Distressed, Doria wrote to Puccini, saying that Fosca had plotted
> against her to cover her own immoral behaviour. Puccini secretly met
> with Doria and reassured the girl that he would try to sort matters.
> We do not know if he did anything at all, but we do know that when
> news of Doria's accusation reached Elvira, she was furious. "She was
> convinced Doria was adding insult to injury," says Benvenuti.
> "Elvira was certainly spying on her husband at the time and one
> night she saw him in a compromising situation with another woman
> whom she now assumed to be Doria.
> On 1 January 1909, Elvira accosted Doria and her cousin Giulia and
> called Doria a "gossip and a filthy creature". On 19 January she
> insulted Doria in front of the Villa Puccini before witnesses,
> calling her a "whore" and a "tart" and subsequently told the
> onlookers that Doria was a "tramp who ran after my husband" and that
> "sooner or later I will drown her in the lake". On 23 January she
> accused Giulia Manfredi of being a go-between for Puccini and Doria,
> and told her that Doria would never set foot in Torre del Lago
> again.
> "Doria was entirely innocent," says Benvenuti. "But she could not
> defend herself without betraying both her cousin and the maestro,
> whom she revered and adored."
> After Doria's drawn-out and painful suicide, the local court stepped
> in and ordered an autopsy, which revealed the girl to be a virgin;
> Doria's family took Elvira to court. She was convicted of
> defamation, slander and menaces towards Doria Manfredi on three
> separate occasions.
> The impact on the Puccini family was huge. "Not only was there was a
> separation between Puccini and his wife," says Benvenuti, "but
> Fosca's husband, the impresario Leonardi, got wind of the truth and
> blackmailed her. Eventually Fosca appealed to her mother for
> financial help and confessed the truth [about her relationship with
> Guelfo Civinini and Doria's discovery that day in autumn 1908]. By
> this time, Elvira's finances were drained too and in the end she had
> to admit the truth to Giacomo and beg for help. He took her back,
> paying the Manfredi family to drop their legal action and Leonardi
> for his silence." Elvira avoided prison and as the repercussions
> died down, Puccini recovered something of his creativity.
> But in researching his film on the two Manfredi girls, Benvenuti
> found he had uncovered much more than he expected. "Puccini's
> relationship with Giulia lasted until his own demise. Many years
> later, in June 1923, Giulia had a son and christened him with
> Puccini's grandfather's name, Antonio. The boy was farmed out to a
> nurse in Pisa and a contract was drawn up with her for the
> then-massive sum of 1,000 lire a month. Significantly for those who
> are sceptical that Puccini was the father of Antonio Manfredi,
> Benvenuti points out that the maintenance money stopped abruptly in
> December 1924, just days after the composer's death in Brussels.
> Young Antonio was brought up away from Torre del Lago in the city of
> Pisa. Says Benvenuti: "Antonio Manfredi died in poverty, aged 65, in
> 1988. Like Giacomo and Elvira's son (also called Antonio Puccini),
> he died of a tumour. He bore a very striking resemblance to Puccini,
> as you can see from his photograph. In fact there is a resemblance
> that descends through the generations in the photographs of his
> daughter, Nadia Manfredi, his granddaughter, Giada, and his
> great-grandson, Giacomo Manfredi. Giacomo, now 10, is the spitting
> image of the young Puccini."
> Emboldened by her conversations with Paolo Benvenuti, on 20 February
> this year Nadia Manfredi went before a court in Milan requesting a
> comparison between the composer's DNA and that of Antonio Manfredi.
> "I wish to establish whether my father was Puccini's son," she
> explained. "I am interested in the moral satisfaction of knowing the
> truth, one way or the other, so that I can put my ghosts to rest."
> This move has been opposed by Simonetta Puccini, who owns Villa
> Puccini. In 1980, as Simonetta Giurumello, she went before Italy's
> highest civil tribunal, the Court of Cassation, to prove she was an
> illegitimate daughter of the composer's legitimate son, Antonio.
> Antonio Puccini had died without an heir in 1946. Thirty-four years
> later, Simonetta Giurumello was able to get herself legally
> recognised as his daughter. At that point she changed her name to
> Puccini, obtained a decree from Milan freezing all existing Puccini
> assets, and took possession of the villa in Torre del Lago.
> Nadia claims she is not motivated by the Puccini fortune. "I want
> justice for my father because he died in complete poverty, like a
> beggar. My father spent his entire life not knowing who his father
> was. I hope to give a name to the father of my father."
> Lawyers for Simonetta argue that in Italy, while the first
> generation have forever to prove paternity, a statute of limitation
> of just two years applies to subsequent descendants, such as
> grandchildren. Nadia's lawyers are requesting that the limitation
> should run for two years after finding evidence, not after the death
> of Giacomo Puccini.
> It is significant that while Puccini's creative recovery began with
> La Fanciulla del West, he only regained the form that he had
> displayed in Bohème, Tosca and Butterfly with Turandot, the opera he
> was still writing at the time of his death. Interestingly, the
> composer hit a new musical wall in 1922 while telling the story of
> the vengeful, man-hating Chinese empress. It was only when he
> instructed his librettists to create the character of a poor
> servant-girl, Liu, who commits suicide rather than betray the
> opera's hero, that he was able to continue. Puccini died with the
> last act of Turandot incomplete, haemorrhaging in the aftermath of
> drastic throat surgery. According to the conductor Arturo Toscanini,
> the maestro laid down his pen after the suicide of Liu. Doria
> Manfredi was to haunt Puccini for the rest of his life, while her
> cousin was left holding the baby.
> The 54th Annual Puccini Festival runs from Friday to 5 September in
> the village of Torre del Lago Puccini, Italy.
> Adrian Mourby is the recipient of the 2007 Puccini Award for
> Journalism. An extended version of this piece was first published in
> 'Opera Now' magazine