THE FINISHING TOUCH

Puccini's Turandot, like Mozart's Requiem, was completed by a colleague who has since received more abuse than credit for his pains. It is easier for us to wonder who chose Franco Alfano, and why, than to remember him as a composer of renown.

The man's character helped little to defend him. Giuseppe Bamboschek, who worked with Alfano on the Paris production of his Resurrection, remembers him as "very charming, a very clever musician, but modest, saying little, at times almost afraid of his own shadow." Alfano chose to remain particularly reticent about his role in the completion of Turandot. Shortly before his death he told the conductor Robert Lawrence that Puccini deserved all the credit: "I never attended a production of Turandot, because I would not have wanted any attention or applause."

The man who inherited this thankless task first saw the light of day on March 8, 1876. The place was a suburb of Naples -Posillipo, best known to outsiders for lending its name to a clam recipe. He studied music in Naples but left before gaining a diploma; the fact that his destination was Leipzig shows young Alfano's determination to get the most solid academic training. Between the ages of twenty and thirty he traveled widely; this left as its trademark the catholicity of locale and subject in his operas. During those years, too, he penned his first two stage works - Miranda (produced in Leipzig, 1896) and La Fonte d’Enscir (Breslau, 1898). The second sported a libretto by the whimsical Luigi Illica, who, freed of the association with Giuseppe Giacosa that kept him in touch with reality, devised a desert scenario worthy of' a Rudolph Valentino movie. Alfano, typically temperate in his refusal to overrate or summarily condemn the youthful piece, later recalled as follows:

Ricordi wanted the opera performed; Puccini and Toscanini to whom he showed the score approved his decision. Included in the repertory of the Teatro dal Verme in Milan - and relegated to the end of the season, like the works of most young composers - La Fonte d'Enscir never reached the footlights. . . . I went back to Germany . . . There . . . the publisher Bock . . . made my score known to the director of the Breslau Stadttheater, who accepted it. . . . Despite the libretto's defects and my own (many errors in the instrumentation, discovered during rehearsals, taught me much for the future), the success delighted a young beginner.

Two years afterward, Alfano stopped over in Paris, where he composed two ballets called Napoli and Lorenza for the Folies-Bergere. By this time lie had heard the works of the up-and-coming Richard Strauss, had concertized as far afield as St. Petersburg and Warsaw (playing much of Schumann, whom he greatly admired) and had composed a " ponderous" Concerto in A for piano - which, with other youthful essays, got lost when a trunk went astray. In Paris he succumbed to the allure of Charpentier's Louise, one of several influences (the others being Puccini, Catalani and Giordano) that lent impulse to his most enduring success, Resurrezione. Though the story of this busy melodrama was drawn from Tolstoy and part of the last act composed in Moscow, censors forbade its production in Russia, and it was first given at the Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Turin on November 30, 1904. On the podium stood twenty-six-year-old Tullio Serafin, who was to guide several Alfano operas to future Success.

Resurrezione reached La Scala in 1906, and in 1911 its revised version enjoyed a simultaneous double premiere at Modena and Novara. The work owes international repute, however, to the French version popularized by Mary Garden and played by her in Chicago in 1925. The Scottish prima donna in her 1951 autobiography (Mary Garden's Story, with Louis Biancolli; Simon and Schuster) calls it "one of my favorite creations . . . one of the most satisfying experiences of my whole career." Miss Garden wheedled the reluctant Opera-Comique "management into mounting Resurrection in Paris, where it promptly brought down the house. The apotheosis, in which the once innocent heroine appears distractedly smoking and sopping up vodka amid a Siberian prisonful of prostitutes, greeting her repentant seducer with "Me trouvez-vous encore belle?," was apparently more than the staunchest could resist. Prior to this, Alfano had brought a railroad train onstage.

The composer, who had known mostly poverty, could now afford to build a cottage at San Remo. In gratitude he and his wife - who, like his mother, was a Frenchwoman - invited Mary Garden as their first dinner guest. There Signora Alfano declined the diva's exhortation to see Resurrection in Paris; simple and devout, she had always prayed for her own home, vowing that if she achieved it she would never leave.

With his usual candor, Alfano admitted that Illica's fantastic libretto led him astray in his next opera, Il Principe Zilah (1909). At La Scala in 1914, however, lie had reason to be pleased with L'Ombra di Don Giovanni and with the "extremely intelligent" interpretation of tenor Edward Johnson. His next subject took him farther afield; having set three poems by Rabindranath Tagore, he delved into the Indian legend by Kalidasa to produce La Leggenda di Sakuntala, which enjoyed reclame throughout Italy and in South America after its Bologna Comunale premiere in 1921.

The orchestral score and parts of Sakuntala being destroyed during bombardment in World War II, he later had to do them all over again.
His next two operas were comedies: Madonna Imperia after Balzac (Turin, 1927), and L'Ultimo Lord (Naples, 1930, with Mafalda Favero). The first of these was his only score to reach the Metropolitan stage, which it shared with Le Coq d'Or for five performances in early 1928, Serafin conducting, Maria Muller and newcomer Frederick Jagel singing. W. J. Henderson in The Sun dubbed it "a melancholy waste of drab dullness," while Lawrence Gilman found the Novak sets "a parlormaid's dream of the haunts of opulent debauchery." Maestro Bamboschek, who conducted the other half of the program remembers Madonna Imperia more kindly as "an interesting short work, but too modern for the audience."

En route to these lighter operas, Alfano had earned inadvertent immortality by composing the final scene for Turandot. The House of Ricordi and Puccini's son Tonio were strong for the choice; Alfano and the late master had been friends, and there was no comparable melodist in the Italian theater of that day to whom the job might fall. Arturo Toscanini looked askance; had not Puccini asked him to stop after Liu's death and turn with a word of explanation to the audience? (This is how it was done at the first performance.) Toscanini did at length conduct Alfano's finale, but after a struggle. A first version and revision lie vetoed point-blank; they were too much Alfano. The composer then took in hand Puccini's sketches and created a third version, which was published. As it appears in current editions, this finale has been further cut, particularly in choral passages of the now brief final tableau on the palace steps.

Pending inspection of the "exactly thirty-six pages" of sketches left by Puccini, which his estate will not release, it remains a matter of conjecture how much of the duet and finale is authentic, how much added and padded by Alfano. The latter's hand may be detected in un-Puccinian chords and vocal appoggiaturas, sequences, short or meandering phrases and striving for high notes. Alfano claimed to have used all the sketches, supplementing them with melodies from earlier in the opera. However much his inability to imitate the Puccini style may credit Alfano's integrity, his service to Turandot will continue to be questioned.

This work and the turmoil surrounding it took a heavy toll on the gentle, introspective composer. A story more touching and dramatic than many a libretto is recounted by Mary Garden:
. . . When Alfano had placed the last note on paper, all the Puccini's and all the Ricordis came down to hear him play it on the piano. And while he was playing the last act of Turandot . . . the poor man had a hemorrhage of the eyes and went totally blind. [Hearing of this, Miss Garden sent for Alfano and took him to an eye specialist of her acquaintance.] I waited outside while the examination went on. When they came out again, Alfano was clapping his hands like a little boy and shouting, "Mary, Mary, where are you? I'm going to see!"

He lived not only to see but to see another success: Cyrano di Bergerac (1935), which gave him special pleasure in a Scala revival after the war, with Ramon Vinay in the title role. Writing a valedictory opera, Il Dottor Antonio (1949), he retired into the obscurity that has claimed Zandonai, Mascagni, Cilea, Leoncavallo, Montemezzi and the entire late-verismo movement, On October 27, 1954, at San Remo- - where he and his wife built their Resurrection cottage -Franco Alfano quietly joined Puccini and their muse in eternity.