Not Entirely Nice 
Jerry Fodor
- Puccini: His International Art by Michele Girardi, translated by Laura Basini
I have a friend who has a friend who is a composer of international stature, heavily invested in the aesthetics of difficulty. He’s also opera-addicted and likes to get to the Met whenever he comes through town. My friend remembers a phone call from his friend that went about like this: ‘Listen, they’re doing Bohème tonight. Let’s go; but please don’t tell anybody.’
Perhaps you’ll recognise the sentiment. Half a dozen of Puccini’s operas have held their audience for going on a hundred years. Bohème continues to run neck and neck with Carmen as the opera most frequently performed. Tosca and Butterfly are cash-cows in every company’s barn. If you’re fond of operas at all, you are quite likely fond of Puccini’s. But probably you think that you shouldn’t be. Puccini is a taste one disapproves of in proportion as one shares it. Since preference and judgment are supposed to run together in a well-ordered sensibility, his operas pose a small but genuine critical conundrum.
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Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
Look! · Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
A Science of Tuesdays · Jerry Fodor writes about the Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World by Hilary Putnam
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
Who ate the salted peanuts? · Michael Frayn
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
Water’s water everywhere · Kripke
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