In art, as in life, there can be no light without darkness, and it is often the way the two play off each other that fascinates. Shadowless sunlight can be stark; unrelenting gloom depressing. The success of a charcoal drawing hinges on its careful gradations of shading. And any symphony that presented four movements of unadulterated jauntiness would be declared a dud, for it is the changing moods, across movements, and also within them, that create interest. 

A key marker of an exceptional artist is his or her ability to handle contrasts of light and shade, and in the field of opera, few grasped this better than Giacomo Puccini, the centenary of whose death falls this November. Here was a composer who took such delight in the artistry of combining shades of darkness and light that he wrote an aria about it (‘Recondita armonia’, Tosca).

Tragedy was the mature Puccini’s stock in trade, but there is always, if you look hard enough, some sort of chink of light to be found. As a master of character psychology, Puccini understood that we feel characters’ sorrows more intensely if we have witnessed their earlier joys. Manon Lescaut’s desperate death from thirst is made all the more horrific by the knowledge that this is a woman who has really tasted life’s pleasures, as we glean from her viscerally passionate confrontation with Des Grieux in Act Two. In Madama Butterfly, Pinkerton’s deplorable character is abundantly apparent to us, the audience; yet to Cio-Cio-San this relationship is truly meaningful and she remains naively wedded to that belief to the end. The power and pain of the opera reside in the fact that where we can foresee darkness, she sees only light.

 In La bohème, Puccini manipulates the interplay of darkness and light particularly ingeniously, blending humour (the bohemians’ horseplay) and gaiety (festivities at the Café Momus) into an opera that is ultimately tragic. 

The opera begins with carefree jollity and the most blissful evocation of the feeling of falling in love. Act Two’s atmosphere is also celebratory, yet an element of doubt has crept in in Rodolfo’s irrational jealousy. By Act Three, the central relationship has floundered, and we all know what happens in Act Four. And yet, even as the opera becomes progressively darker, Puccini continues to throw in moments of light to devastating emotional effect. The bohemians’ pranks return in Act Four, but with a bittersweet note. Facing the ultimate darkness, the lovers take comfort in reminding each other – through both words and music – of the moment when Mimì’s candle went out and their spark of love first set ablaze. 

In later works we are presented with people whose circumstances seem unremittingly dismal. Il tabarro is a portrait of an unhappy marriage, ground down by gruelling work, the loss of a child, and contempt borne of claustrophobia. We find no prospect of optimism here. Instead, we must look for fleeting glimmers of light elsewhere – in the consolation Giorgetta takes from an affair with another man, and from fragments of jocular street music that remind her of lighter-hearted times past. 

In Suor Angelica, Il tabarro’s sister opera, Puccini tests our tolerance for suffering to its limits. Here the heroine’s pain seems unbearable: she is effectively incarcerated, any happy memories of her former lover go unmentioned, and she is presented with the devastating news of the death of her child. Surely we will not find any redeeming lightness here? Yet Puccini’s staging instructions indicate an extraordinarily precise, symbolic schema of stage lighting. The curtain rises on a ‘clear spring sunset’, and the nuns sing warmly of a ray of sunlight that has glanced off the water of a fountain, in which they imagine they see the face of the Virgin. The moment Angelica learns of her son’s death, ‘darkness begins to pervade the entire scene’ and as she sings ‘Senza mamma’, the lighting, Puccini instructs us, should be dimmed to near-total darkness, against which the white habits of the nuns float ghost-like. As Angelica brews the poisonous herbs, the cloister is to be ‘submerged in complete darkness’, save for moon- and starlight, and even these are obscured by clouds as she recoils in horror at what she has done. When the miracle is enacted at the end, a mystical light glows and Angelica’s child appears dressed all in white. 

In Puccini’s more violent works, meanwhile, we must look to secondary characters for light relief – the Sacristan and his excitable choristers in Tosca, a me lodrama daubed in grand-guignolesque blood and horror. And in Turandot lightness and humour are provided by the so-called ‘Masks’, Ping, Pang and Pong – 20th-century reworkings of three disruptive old men that audiences would have known from the commedia dell’arte tradition, Truffaldino, Pantalone and Tartaglia. Their buffoonish behaviour disconcerts in an opera of unspeakable sadism, far darker than anything Puccini had previously created, but here the composer’s intention was to juxtapose elements of darkness and light to create something deliberately grotesque.

La fanciulla del West and La rondine, meanwhile, both defy generic expectations and refuse to be pinned down as decisively ‘dark’ or ‘light’ works. The former is a serious opera, with moments that are deeply sad or even gruesome, and yet it has a happy ending. The latter, originally conceived as a Viennese operetta, is, on the surface, all froth and gaiety, but is wistful at times and ends in sorrow. And what of Gianni Schicchi, Puccini’s only comedy? Well, only a composer with a mischievous desire to go against the grain would look for humour in Dante’s Inferno. Gianni Schicchi terrifies the greedy relatives into complicity with the threat of having their hands chopped off if they expose him, rehearsing his cunning ruse in a slow, cabaret-influenced foxtrot (‘In testa la cappellina’) which is sultry and yet at the same time macabre. Yes, Puccini searches for darkness in light as well as the other way around.

As Puccini’s relatively small corpus of operas becomes ever more central to the international performing canon, directors are charged with finding innovative ways of reworking familiar ‘bestsellers’. In a recent production of Il trittico by Christof Loy for the Salzburg Festival (2022), the composer’s stated order of performance was changed, placing Gianni Schicchi first. This unusual decision altered the pacing of the triptych, making for an extraordinarily bleak (if effective) ending, somehow robbing Gianni Schicchi of its quality of life-affirming catharsis.

More drastically, Stefan Herheim’s harrowing La bohème for the Norwegian National Opera (2012), had Mimì dying of cancer in a hospital ward before the curtain rose, a sinister grim reaper figure playing the humorous characters Benoît, Alcindoro, and Parpignol, and ranks of bald-headed children. Critically acclaimed, the production nevertheless arguably stripped the opera of some of its emotional power: how can we feel nostalgia for ‘the good times’ when they were already mired in pain and distress? Though imaginative reinterpretations of well-known operas are to be welcomed, directors must be careful not to unsettle a composer’s careful balance of shading. For in Puccini’s works darkness and light exist in symbiotic relationship and we decouple them at our peril.