Puccini's Triptych ("Il Trittico")

Il Trittico (The Triptych) By Giacomo Puccini, (1918)
(San Francisco Opera, September 2009)

A triptych is a work of art divided into three parts (from the Greek τρίπτυχο, from tri- "three" + ptychē "fold").  In European-derived cultures it is traditionally associated with religious subjects, the centerpiece of which provides the focal point.  Many triptychs were constructed as tabernacles, or a set of paintings with hinged wings which could be closed to hide and protect the images inside.   Puccini's Il Trittico is just this sort of triptych, unfolding its lyrical wings to expose the hidden connection between its three seemingly disparate operas.

Il Trittico comprises three consecutively composed one-act operas: Il Tabarro (The Cape), a violent tale of romantic and social disappointment among the working poor; Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), the heart-wrenching centerpiece focused on a submissive birthmother who is sent to a convent; and the famous Gianni Schicchi, a social farce set in the medieval Florence of Dante Alighieri. 

Triptych by Bernardo Daddi (active c.1320-1348)

Giacomo Puccini is probably most famous for his exquisite romantic tragedies, La Boheme and Madame Butterfly.  Il Trittico gives us some very different works: violent, un-romantic, farcical in turn. Some have compared Il Trittico to the French theater of horror, Le Grand Guignol, which sometimes alternated its graphic horror programs with comedies. This has been done primarily because the great Italian maestro, Arturo Toscanini, rashly called the first opera, Il Tabarro (The Cloak), "un grand guignol di estremo cattivo gusto" (a horror show in extremely poor taste).  Thanks to this, others have wrongly expanded this analogy to the entire triptych.  This is wrongheaded on several counts.  The only part of The Triptych with any violence is Il Tabarro, which includes one crime of passion, and no gratuitous horror.  It is more in line with the naturalist or verismo movement which sought to expose the very real plight of the less fortunate in society.

Puccini's chosen framework, the triptych, suggests that the work should be viewed from a religious or spiritual perspective.   We know that Puccini composed each piece consecutively, and that he was adamantly opposed to their being performed separately.  The plays of the Grand Guignol, in contrast, were presented for the sole intent of viscerally appalling the audience using shock value even to the point that the success of an evening's fare was registered by how many people in the audience fainted. While Puccini is often accused of gratuitous sentimentalism (which might be compared to the gratuitous sensationalism of Le Grand Guignol), I would argue that the plays in Il Trittico are not at all gratuitous, but rather form a cohesive picture Puccini very deliberately wanted to draw.

The triptych's Cloak (or Cape), Il Tabarro, opens to reveal a slummy Paris embankment at dusk with dock workers, rag pickers and organ grinders all drinking and singing to keep their blues away.  The opera's female lead is Giorgetta, a disaffected young woman who is the wife of a much older barge owner, Michele.  Giorgetta is having an affair with Luigi, a dockworker her age.  The misery of the relatively wealthy Giorgetta and Michele is contrasted with the loving relationship of the destitute rag-picker Frugola and her husband, the dockworker Talpa.   Giorgetta sings a duet with her lover, Luigi, reminiscing about their carefree youth.  Michele sings to Giorgetta and bemoans the loss of their early love, and the death of their baby son.  He remembers holding them all close inside his cloak.  Giorgetta refuses to kiss him and he wonders if he is too old for her, whether she loves another.  They fight a lot. 

My impression was that Giorgetta married Michele, who is twice her age, to improve her social lot.  She was initially happy with her new station and her baby, but once the baby died, so did Giorgetta's enthusiasm for her marriage.  Young and lusty, bored with her old but loving husband, she bides her time from tryst to tryst with her dockworker.  Michele is hard-working, adoring and jealous.  This is a disaster waiting to happen. 

So what place does The Cloak play in this triptych?  It is the presentation of triptych as tabernacle, a narrative cloak that opens up to reveal its icons.  The cloak opens and we have the starting point, humanity at its animalistic core: scrounging survival on the primordial banks of a dirty, watery world.  The elder Michele once used to cloak to protect, to gather in the family.  By the end of the opera he uses it to hide and then disclose his dirty work, that of eliminating his competitor.  The curtain closes on his cloak's revelation: a silverback has defended his territory. 

The centerpiece of the Triptych, Suor Angelica, takes place in an overtly religious setting, a convent, which invokes images of the Madonna, sacrifice, and the pain of a lost son, a symbol of Christ.  Sister  Angelica is a birthmother who has been banished from her upper class family to the convent after surrendering her child to adoption.  When the story opens it has been seven years since she gave birth and she has resigned herself to her convent life, becoming an adept gardener and herbalist.  Her aunt visits her to get her to sign away her inheritance rights, and while there, the aunt shames Angelica for dishonoring the family.  Angelica begs the aunt for news of her son and the aunt tells her that he is dead.  Angelica crumbles, signs the aunt's papers, and proceeds to poison herself.  Realizing that she is committing a sin by committing suicide, Angelica prays to the Virgin Mary to forgive her, to deliver her, and to show her a sign of her forgiveness.  The final scene is Sister Angelica's dying vision of a small boy inviting her to heaven.  Sinner and saint, the lost and the redeemed: these comprise the center panel of the triptych in Suor Angelica. 

 Il Tabarro/Suor Angelica/Gianni Schicchi, by Dru, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas

The final panel in the series is the most famous, Puccini's social comedy Gianni Schicchi.  The scene opens with the extended Donati family hovering over the dead body of wealthy family elder, Buoso.  Rinuccio, one of the sons, wants to marry the lower-class daughter of Gianni Schicchi, and he tries to bribe a relative into allowing this if the dead man's will is favorable to her.  As it turns out, his will leaves everything to a local monastery and all the relatives gnash their teeth in anger, curse the dead man, and refuse to let Rinuccio marry his lower-class beloved.  In their greedy desperation, they finally allow Rinuccio to talk them into allowing Gianni Schicchi to come over and figure out a way to change Buoso's will in their favor.  One of Puccini's most beautiful arias, "O mio babbino caro" is sung by Lauretta as she tries to cajole her father into helping Rinuccio's revolting relatives. Schicchi agrees and sends his daughter away so that she will be innocent of what he is about to do.  What follows is a comedy of errors in which the greedy relatives get their comeuppance and the young lovers prevail.  The triptych closes on an upbeat.  The unrepentant sinners have been punished, the repentant have been redeemed, and the innocent have their lives ahead of them.

Why would Puccini have so wanted these three operas to be performed together?  They do form a cohesive unit, not only as a triptych depicting different types of sinners, their punishments and penances, but also as a narrative of Puccini's attitude towards these things.  The first two operas feature "fallen women", both of whom have lost children, the last two feature ambivalent and controversial attitudes towards the Church.   In the course of the evening we are transported from the primitive to the sublime to the ridiculous. Ending the series with a comedic farce suggests that there is some sin so banal that it only worth ridicule. One could track the seven deadly sins or the ten commandments through Il Trittico to get a better idea of Puccini's vision in Il Trittico.  I've included links to the libretti below in case anyone is interested in doing a more in depth study of this matter.

Is the triptych a commentary on Catholicism's Madonna-whore complex?   The centerpiece, the only piece with an overtly religious theme, shows a birthmother as Madonna, with the promise of her lost Christ child returning at the end to redeem her.  The whore Giorgetta and the virgin Lauretta flank the centerpiece of this triptych, Suor Angelica, a true tragic figure who represents both. 

Libretti

Il Tabarro
Suor Angelica
Gianni Schicchi

Dreaming in Hindi

by Katherine Russell Rich (2009)

Recently my Mom heard the author of Dreaming in Hindi talking on NPR, and since my Mom knows that I like Bollywood movies and have been studying Hindi, she decided to buy me the book. The good news is that there is lots of material of genuine interest to those concerned with language learning and second language (and writing system) acquisition. The bad news is that there is something very bizarre about Ms. Rich's diction which begs the question of whether she is deliberately strangling English grammar to emulate a linguistically disoriented state, or whether she really does not have a very firm grasp of English grammar.

As a person, the author is very likable. She is a middle-aged, divorced, rather bourgeois New Yorker who survived breast cancer and then decided to run off to India and study Hindi for a year. That takes some nerve. She is also something of a naive, curious sweetie, and with very little background information on India or Hindi, she plunges head-first into a Rajasthani adventure. The book alternates between her memoir and her research into language learning. While she is not a very talented writer (and is arguably incompetent as an editor), I was touched by how earnest she was in trying to understand her adopted culture, and the processes by which we gradually assimilate another language.

Why she chose the state of Rajasthan as the place to study is unclear, since Hindi is not the standard register there. This complicates her language learning inasmuch as the Hindi she is learning in class is significantly different from the Mewari spoken on the streets and in her host family. We learn that Hindi is considered something of a colonial language in India since most people speak other languages or widely divergent dialects of Hindi. Several Rajasthani variants claim or are struggling for language status.¹

^{(Palace at Udaipur, Rajasthan --> )}

Alienation and the re-creation of one's sense of self play a large part in this book. Katherine arrived in India a few weeks before the events of 9/11/01. As an American, after 9/11 she is sequestered away, then brought out as a symbol of a fellow nation terrorized by radical Islam, and then shunned as the GW Bush administration does not respond aggressively enough against Pakistani-sponsored attacks within India. At this early point the author's language skills are paltry and her disassociation begins. She alternates between seeking solace among her fellow expatriates and delving head-first into various immersive situations such as working as a tutor for poor, deaf children. Working with deaf children doesn't do much for her Hindi, as most of the educated people with whom she makes contact speak English, but it does provide food for thought on the nature of language, multilingualism and second language learning.

Some Indians may be uncomfortable with a number of the cultural and political issues discussed in the book. Much has been written about the Indian dowry system which requires a daughter's family to pay sometimes exorbitant, debilitating sums to a prospective groom for marriage. This has been linked in some cases to female infanticide and instances of repeat dowry abuse by the groom's family. In a side-note Ms. Rich reveals that it costs twice as much for a family to procure an engineer husband as it does to procure one who is a physician. It wasn't specified, but I wonder whether engineers in India make twice as much as doctors do. In the United States the situation is the reverse, with physicians generally making twice as much as engineers or more.

The terrorism storyline includes India as both victim and as perpetrator, and a controversial parallel is made with America's experience during 9/11 vs. its subsequent military forays into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the case of India, it too suffered terrorist bombings at the hands of Islamist-sponsored terrorists. On December 13, 2001, while the author was in India, there was a high-profile terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament². India expected at least strong condemnation from the GW Bush administration, which Rich's Indian contacts claimed was not sufficiently forthcoming. Little information is provided on the organizations responsible for this and other, similar attacks inside India, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. A good deal is revealed however, about Hindu fundamentalist organizations inside of India.

This brings us to India as perpetrator of terrorism. Hindu fundamentalist-supported massacres occurred in Gujarat in early 2002 in response to a local train fire in which Hindus were killed. Mention of the train fire was omitted from Rich's book, but is the accepted instigation on both sides, although each claims a different source of the fire. Those who justify the massacres are certain that the train fire was set by local Muslims. Others claim that the fire was an accident which was blamed on the Muslims. Rich gives some in-depth and damning reportage on the Bajrang Dal and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), both groups part of the Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, movement. She provides an incendiary quote from the founder of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar, who admired Hitler and who is quoted across the Internet as being an exemplar of Hindu fascism.

While these less than laudable fringe views of Indian society may besmirch the rosy-hued lenses through which many yoga and biryani-loving Americans see India, it's important to remember that India is a secular, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and Zoroastrians all hold political positions and people of many faiths hold high federal office. In choosing which country in South Asia is most like America, one would have to choose India. Ms. Rich's many exotic experiences tend to drown out any commonalities our nations may have, and the common humanity is all too often blurred by a culturally bewildered, exoticising eye. Nonetheless, we do meet some charming and distinguished characters such as selected local teachers, poets and expatriates.

The on-going acculturation story is intertwined with Rich's post-facto deconstruction of her language-learning experience. Her thesis is that learning a new language creates a new identity. You cannot be the same person speaking a different language. This is a bit overstated, but along the way we are regaled with fascinating forays into neurolinguistics and applied language learning research. Ms. Rich is not someone who easily picks up languages and she wants to find out all she can about those who do, and what might make it easier to do so.

One approach to this is to evaluate motivation. The impact of competition is discussed and it is noted that, like novelty, it can be motivational or demotivational. The Stimulus Appraisal Theory proposed by Austrian scholar Klaus Scherer, outlines five ways in which one appraises an experience, and depending on the responses, one can come up with a good picture of a person's attitude towards anything. Ms. Rich talks with linguist John Schumann about his research into second-language acquisition which builds on the motivational model. Schumann notes that many language learners never get beyond a pidgin-state, while others go on to various levels of fluency. The markers for success in Schumann's view are highly subjective and vary widely from person to person. This doesn't tell us much about natural linguistic aptitude, only strength of motivation.

The standard claims of the existence of a childhood "language-learning window" are made. In my opinion this is a somewhat tenuous marker for long-term second-language ability.  I have known many people exposed to multiple languages as children who did not gain or retain fluency as adults because the language was not consistently used or did not continue to be used. On the other hand I have known many adults who were not exposed to multiple languages as children who subsequently became fluent in foreign languages.  Genuine immersion, motivation and natural ability are much more reliable indicators of language acquisition success. 

What it takes to excel at language learning depends on what type of learning you are doing. Ms. Rich notes that people with lower inhibitions learn to speak more readily since they are not afraid to make mistakes. This doesn't mean that their grammar will be perfect, nor that they will develop advanced listening comprehension skills, but it does mean that they will learn to communicate more quickly. I have seen this in action and can confirm that this is indeed the case. When dealing with reading, writing and listening comprehension, other proclivities come in to play such as aural and visual pattern recognition.

Ms. Rich had some difficulty learning the devanagari alphabet, which is used to write Hindi. Alphabets rely on sequential visual pattern recognition and the ability to quickly associate a visual sequence with a series of sounds and a group of meanings. There is a fascinating description of how different areas of the brain are stimulated when presented with a written word (in which the Russian word for "fleece" is misspelled, but never mind). Ms. Rich quotes a study that suggests there is a "Chinese region" in the brain which recognizes Chinese writing. My guess is that people with photographic memories, people who easily imprint icons, are better at learning Chinese. Since the Chinese have no other writing system, you either have a situation in which the writing system fits the neurologic predisposition of he population, or the population gradually selects for people with superior photographic memories. As with the tendency for the Chinese, who speak a tonal language, to have superior musical pitch, those who can memorize the most characters generally have better photographic memories.

The Chinese associate their characters first with ideas, rather than sounds, whereas users of phonetic writing systems associate the writing first with sound, then meaning. Once you can read an alphabetic script, you can sound out virtually any word in the language but not necessarily know its meaning.  In Chinese you learn the picture with its meaning, but the character may sound completely different depending on the dialect or language (Japanese and Korean also use Chinese characters), and will also encounter numerous homophones for a given character (cf. Japanese on and kun pronunciations).  This might suggest a trade-off in memory efficiency and I'm sure some Ph.D. somewhere is studying the effect of so much picture memorization on various areas of cognition and creativity. 

Speaking of creativity, my favorite study in the book is one from the Nijmegen Institute of Cognition and Information in the Netherlands. This study shows that multilingualism spurs greater linguistic association, suggesting that the associative imagination may be especially sensitive among multilinguals.  Apparently when bilinguals sits down to read, every word they encounter stimulates other words they know in other languages. This is like the mind of a poet, whose imagination is constantly stimulated to branch any given word or image into a web of associated words and images.  As someone who has studied many languages, I can vouch for this being partly the case.  The more words we know in any language, the more we naturally  compare sounds and meanings.  The more languages one learns, the easier it becomes to learn more languages as one explores, navigates and imprints phonetic and lexical inventories, grammars, idioms, and patterns of intonation. 

Do we really become other people when speaking another language though?  I don't think so.  Yes, we express ourselves using different nuances and conceptual frameworks when speaking different languages and this can alter our experience of time, space and interconnectedness.  The realization that there are many more ways to show emphasis or respect or desire than our native language offers probably increases linguistic intelligence.  Do we become something other than ourselves when this happens though, or is it simply that the map of ourselves is expanded?  Studies in stroke victims have showed that language information can be very compartmentalized, with victims recalling only one language and not another, or even one category of speech over another.  Yet, as the Dutch study above suggests, the healthy brain is able to reach across these compartments to find a word's mirror-sibling in another language, to launch the ship of associations that allows us to synthesize seemingly disparate,  random sounds and ideas.

Studies on mirror neurons, neurons which fire when we do something and when we watch it done, have shown that these neurons also fire when people read about something being done³.  It has been suggested by V.S. Ramachandran that mirror neurons, and the mimicking behavior they control, were instrumental in the evolution of human language, and possibly in language acquisition today.⁴  If we are wired to mimic that which is around us, and then to assign meaning to our mimicry, we must favor a neurological composition that imprints these patterns and their associated meanings.  What renders one's makeup flexible enough to easily switch one meaning pattern for another?  Is the ability to add vocabulary in one language similar to that of adding vocabulary in others?  If we are repeatedly exposed to new syntactic structures as adults, we can indeed assimilate them, which would suggest that repeated exposure and true immersion really is the key to learning a new language.  The number of repetitions one person versus another needs to remember a given word or syntactic structure varies.  So does the ability to easily recognize audio-visual patterns associated with meaning.  These innate aptitudes, given the same amount of exposure, will determine whether someone more or less easily learns a new language. 

Getting back to Katherine Rich and her adventure in learning Hindi, it is fair to say that her ability to integrate into her surroundings was indeed limited by her inability to penetrate the language, but I would add that it was further hindered by her lack of cultural preparation and her questionable choice of locale for studying Hindi.  Her squeamish revulsion at some of the cultural and political circumstances could have been avoided had she not had to waste so much emotional capital on bring shocked and then paralyzed by her shock.  I still admire that she was brave enough to throw herself into a foreign culture, to attempt to learn the language, and to try and understand the linguistic processes helping or hindering the process.  Had she taken more time to try and understand the anthropology and political history before embarking, she would have come away more successful on all counts. 

Hindi Language-Learning Links

Writing System (Devanagari):
* Hindi Script Tutor

Language:
* UniLang Hindi Lessons Online
* Hindi Bolo Blog