Walter Meyer writes:

>Toscanini also flirted w/ fascism in the early 20s before its horrors were
>fully appreciated.  Puccini may have died too soon to realize that or to be
>faulted for not realizing it.

Despite Jim Tobin's unearhting of the honorabilia that the fascists dumped
on Puccini, I don't think this clinches the case.  Early on, a great many
modern-minded, progressive intellectuals, especially in the worlds of
music and the arts, were interested by fascism and by Mussolini.  Giovanni
Gentile, Mussolini's tsar of education and culture collaborated with the
most intellectual anti-fascist of them all, Benedetto Croce, in a magazine
they jointly ran.  To be sure, that was before Mussolini's rise to power,
but it nonetheless demonstrates the subtlety of relationships within the
intelligentsia and in the politics of the time.  Gabriele D'Annunzio, the
poetasting adventurer who captured Italian imaginations with his florid,
showy ways, brought a bohemian following to Mussolini.  Ugo Ojetti one
of Italy's brainiest art critics openly openly approved of Mussolini's
showmanship in the thirties.  "I cannot help thinking when I see him,"
he wrote,"how much his face must ache when he retires at night."

As for Deryk Barker's contribution to the effect that Puccini had stood as
a "fascist" in some 1919 election, or other, a reminder is here in place
that fascism in that year was largely out of Mussolini's hands and, if
under anyone's thrall, then that of d'Annunzio.  In that year it was
basically an irredenta, a nationalist movement, as yet with scarcely
any of its later political or ideological superstructure.

Denis Fodor