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.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
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
Water’s water everywhere · Kripke
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
Headaches have themselves · Panpsychism
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
print layout
tell a friend