Deryk Barker and John Wiser demonstrate that Fascism is still a hot button
issue.  Please don't kill the messenger, folks, but it is a regrettable
historical fact that Puccini was made an honorary member of the Fascist
Party, which came to power in 1922 and, in 1924, the year he died, he was
made Senatore del Regno.  He may not have sought these dubious distinctions
but he did not refuse them either.  (See _Puccini, A Critical Biography_
by Mosco Carner, 2nd ed.  1974, p.  219.) If this spoils some people's
appreciation for his music, I may regret bringing this up.  Sometimes
mental compartmentalization can be a salutary thing.  Anyway, I certainly
was not endorsing the article I read; it represents the same kind of music
criticism that reads rape into Beethoven's Ninth symphony or homosexuality
into Schubert's Unfinished Symphony but, for anyone interested, the
author's argument was based on Puccini's harmony, particularly in Tosca,
Act II.  (To lighten things a bit, there was a New Yorker cartoon once of
a man, about to be put on hold on the telephone, asking to listen to that
music while waiting--a real insider's joke.) I suppose now I'll have to
dig up that article.  BTW, going back about three centuries to Gozzi with
a characteristically 20th Century label is a real stretch, though not
unprecidented, I suppose.  (Existentialism was pushed back to Shakespeare,
wasn't it?)

Jim Tobin