Cambridge Opera Journal

Table of Contents - 1995 - Volume 7, Issue 02  

Research Article

One halfstep at a time: Tonal transposition and ‘split association’ in Italian opera

Harold Powers

In a recent number of 19th-Century Music, Allan Atlas offered a complex analytical reading of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, hinging on a pair of keys forming what he called ‘crossed tonal areas’. The tonality G flat major in the second-act trio ‘Io so che alle sue pene’ plays a crucial role in Atlas's reading, and he had to account for the fact that the trio was originally conceived a halfstep higher, in G major, and was so performed at the première in Milan. He asked:

can we assign a significant role to the Gb of the trio when it represents not Puccini's original – and presumably well-reasoned – intention, but what might be little more than a compositional accident necessitated by the practicalities of performance, and a specific one – Brescia, May 1904 – at that?

And in his footnote 13 to the foregoing, Atlas listed six studies discussing halfstep transpositions, three in Verdi and three more in Puccini.