Cesare Pugni (1802 – 1870): The Pharoah’s Daughter
Cesare Pugni was a highly accomplished composer of ballet music who never quite mastered the rest of his life. Supremely talented as he was, he was prone to destructive habits and very good at blowing up his career from time to time.
Where he succeeded, he often did so in spite of himself. For half a century he maintained a busy working existence, living at various times in Milan, Paris, London and St Petersburg. But nor could he defy gravity forever, and his final years proved particularly miserable, bringing near continual penury thanks to his total incompetence with money. On his death he left behind a very large family who had to be rescued by friends and well-wishers from complete destitution.
Pugni’s final ballet, Les Deux Étoiles (The Two Stars), had been completed in his adopted city of St Petersburg just a few months before the end, at a time when Tchaikovsky was composing his famous Overture-Fantasie Romeo and Juliet, Bruckner had started writing his symphonies and Wagner was most of the way through his Ring Cycle. Pugni’s very first ballet Il Castello di Kenilworth (based upon Walter Scott’s historic romance) written forty-six years earlier, belonged to a very different musical era: Rossini was then at his youthful zenith, Schubert embarking on his late chamber music and Beethoven contemplating his Ninth Symphony.
Pugni’s talent had been evident from a young age. Born in Genoa in northern Italy, he spent much of his childhood in Milan, living close to the magnificent Duomo where his father owned a watchmaking shop. His first music teacher of note was the Austrian composer Peter Winter, then living in (Austrian-controlled) Lombardy. Winter was so impressed by young Cesare’s precocity that he arranged for him to enrol at the Milan Conservatory aged just twelve. Here Cesare continued his studies in violin, music theory and composition with a raft of distinguished tutors, including viola virtuoso Alessandro Rolla, famous for having (supposedly) taught a young Paganini. Rolla would remain a friend of Pugni, later conducting the first performance of Pugni’s opera, Il Disertore Svizzero, ovvero La Nostalgia (The Swiss Deserter, or Nostalgia) in 1831.
Pugni made such impressive progress at the conservatory that he was soon being invited to compose fill-in music for various ballet and opera productions given at the Milan’s famous Teatro alla Scala. Sensing that he had learned enough theory, he eventually arranged to leave the conservatory early so that he could take up full-time work at La Scala. His initial duties included playing the violin in the theatre orchestra as well as his in-house composing and arranging.
At the time, ballet music rarely employed original scores but rather tasked its musical creators with stitching together pieces from other composers or adapting existing popular melodies. By way of example, Pugni’s own first ballet, Kenilworth, was officially arranged from “various well-known composers” according to its programme note. But that would soon change as Pugni’s talent gradually made itself known and he was asked to start writing all the music himself. He would find himself, alongside contemporary composers such as Adolphe Adam, Ludwig Minkus and Léo Delibes, at the vanguard of a new and exciting way of creating ballet music, with original and much more unified scores, as well as the use of operatic lietmotifs to represent characters or dramatic ideas.
It was Pugni’s second full-scale ballet, Elerz e Zulmida, that cemented his reputation for writing attractively colourful, melodious music, and over the next seven years he would become one of Milan’s most celebrated musicians. But his real ambition was to write grand opera and between 1831 and 1834 he turned out no fewer than seven works in the genre, before circumstances brought about a permanent (and it must be said regrettable) silence. His brief operatic foray had shown promise, and such efforts as the aforementioned Il Disertore were well-received by both public and critics.
At the same time, Pugni branched out into other forms of music, including sinfonias, chamber music and masses. Although solidly grounded in the classical principles of Haydn and Beethoven, Pugni was not afraid to show off his artistic flair in other ways. His Sinfonia Por Una o Due Orchestre (from the early 1830s and dedicated to Rolla) was scored for two orchestras, both of them playing the same music but a few bars out from the other. When the German opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer heard the piece he was so impressed that he obtained a copy of the score, showing it to all his friends as a “supreme example of virtuosity in composition”.
Pugni also found time to teach, both violin and counterpoint, and even gave some instruction to a young Mikhail Glinka, who was passing through the city, and who revered Pugni. This first highly successful phase of Pugni’s career culminated with him being appointed as Maestro al Cembalo (master of harpsichord) at La Scala, a distinguished position for one still so young.
But underneath such accomplishment all was not well with Pugni’s personal life. He had got married too young and already had several children, while the pressures of his work had driven him increasingly towards alcoholism and gambling. The latter would have particularly disastrous consequences, as Pugni firstly managed to squander his healthy earnings before stealing funds from the theatre to pay his debts. His crime was discovered and the disgraced composer summarily dismissed. With creditors hot on his heels, he was forced to flee Italy soon after, his young family in tow. Where on earth could he go next?
He chose Paris, arguably the centre for European music in the 1830s. But still entirely unknown outside Italy, he struggled to find work in his new surroundings. For a while he lived in a state of abject poverty before eventually landing a position as a musical copyist for the Théâtre-Italien. This must have felt like humiliatingly low-grade work for a man who had once been the toast of Milan, and while in the post he would further blot his copybook with one of the more egregious acts of his professional career.
At the time he had become friends with his compatriot, the up and coming opera composer, Vincenzo Bellini, then also stationed in Paris. Bellini not only gave Pugni financial support during his difficult early days in the French capital, at one point donating clothes to both Pugni and his wife, but he also paid him to make a copy of his opera, I Puritani, for a forthcoming production in Naples. Pugni fulfilled his task and then, unbeknown to Bellini, made a second copy which he flogged to the same Naples theatre for a high price, taking money that should have gone to Bellini. The latter was aghast when he found out and cut off all ties with his old friend. “It will be a lesson to me”, Bellini raged in his diary. “Were it not for his six innocent children, I should like to ruin him.” According to Bellini, Pugni’s “infamous conduct shattered my faith in human nature.” Pugni might well have made a powerful enemy for life had Bellini not died tragically young the following year.
After several more years of eking out a living in the French capital, Pugni finally found work at the Paris Opéra, taking on the role of editing, correcting and orchestrating the music composed for various ballet productions for the theatre. At the time, it was quite common for ballet composers to leave the orchestration of their music to a well-trained copyist or conductor, while the latter would often supply additional musical numbers where required.
Although his career was still not back to where it had been, Pugni found his talents ideally suited to being a musical “ghost”. He would often improve the material that came his way: rumours have always abounded, though never been proven, that he had a considerable creative hand in Adolphe Adam’s famous score for Giselle. He was later involved with another Adam masterpiece, his Le Corsaire, as Pugni supplied much additional music for the ballet’s first performance in Russia. It is Pugni’s version of this latter score that is still widely performed today.
Pugni’s decade long penance, post his Milan disgrace, finally came to an end in 1843 when he was offered the prestigious position of Composer of the Ballet Music to Her Majesty’s Theatre in London. This would mark not only the high point of his career but also the most prolific as once again he found himself in high demand as a composer in his own right.
Over the next seven years, Pugni would produce up to five major new productions a year, while working with some of the greatest ballet choreographers of the day. The latter included the celebrated Jules Perrot, now acclaimed as the creator of the Romantic dance drama, a pioneering force who expanded and developed many of the traditional structures of classical ballet. Along with Pugni, he created ballets that combined dance with elements of pantomime, while often portraying his characters in rich, humane colours.
Pugni duly celebrated the revival of his career by marrying for a second time and producing such masterworks as Ondine (1843), the Victor Hugo inspired La Esmeralda (1844), Éoline (1845) and Catarina ou la Fille du bandit (Catarina or The Bandit’s Daughter, 1846).
Just when it seemed that the re-established composer would see out his career in the British capital, he was spirited away to St Petersburg by Perrot. The choreographer had just been offered a lucrative post as master to the Imperial Ballet, and he was so keen to continue his partnership with Pugni that he persuaded the Russian authorities to create a new position for his collaborator, as Ballet Composer to the Saint Petersburg Imperial Theatres.
In the event, Pugni and Perrot would prove somewhat less prolific in Petersburg and often content to re-package their greatest hits from London. But they were still able to develop and extended their previous collaborations, with Pugni taking full advantage of the Bolshoi theatre’s lavish orchestral forces.
When Perrot eventually left Petersburg in 1858, Pugni stayed on, with two of Perrot’s successors, Arthur Saint-Léon and Marius Petipa, becoming his new collaborators. His partnership with Petipa (who would later go on to choreograph the premieres of such iconic classics as Minkus’ La Bayadère, as well as Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutracker) would prove particularly fruitful over the last decade of his life. Ekaterina Ottovna Vazem, first ballerina of the Bolshoi Theatre, later recalled the solid but free-speaking relationship between the two artists, with both men seeming to understand the unspoken intricacies of their respective roles:
Usually Pugni composed the music for the various choreographies directly during rehearsals, where his presence was compulsory. He would just write a variation and the violinist – repetiteur would play it. If Petipa did not like it, he would write another one. Sometimes the composer did not agree with the choreographer and they would fight. The passionate Italian was not afraid to shout at Petipa – “Don’t busy yourself with things that are not your responsibility if you don’t understand music!” and the choreographer had to give up. Overall, Pugni worked with uncommon ease and the conditions under which he wrote some of the great ballets are just unbelievable.
But even as Pugni remained as creatively fertile as ever, his somewhat dissipated lifestyle was catching up with him. Aside from his own large family in St Petersburg, he had started an affair with a Russian woman which would produce a further eight children. Retirement was out of the question as he had to go on supporting his two families, but his drinking and gambling were as bad as ever, and his financial skills remained dire.
Despite his illustrious standing, not only as the finest ballet composer working in Russia, but also as a newly appointed professor at the St Petersburg conservatory, Pugni suffered real poverty during his final years. He once wrote in a particularly pathetic letter to Petipa, “I tearfully ask you to send some money; I am without a sou.” Petipa had to put up with his colleague’s increasingly erratic habits in other ways, and not least his manner of sending his latest scores in increasingly chaotic, piecemeal fashion as well as his growing propensity to miss deadlines.
With a touch of tragicomedy, Pugni would invent schoolboy excuses for not delivering assignments on time. He once claimed he had been unable to compose because his cat had scratched his hand and left him unable to hold a pen. On another occasion, he turned up to a rehearsal without the necessary music, explaining that he had had no candles the previous night by which to write. After Petipa had helpfully sent a large box of candles to the composer’s home, Pugni still turned up empty-handed the following day. He explained he had been forced to sell the candles in order to afford food for his family.
Alongside this was the constant stress of dodging creditors and the sometimes dramatic situations that could arise from this, as recalled by his other collaborator, Arthur Saint-Léon, in 1865:
Pugni has nearly died. He was found in the woods 16 versts from St Petersburg owing 300 roubles to tradesmen. The Court Minister paid the sum, and a collection from the dancers of the company, who produced 200 roubles, is serving to feed him, his wife, and his eight children, five of whom are very young. He owes 5,800 roubles in all, while for the past twenty years he has been receiving 1,200 francs a month [for Royalties for scores performed in Paris] plus a benefit!
Eventually Saint-Léon and Pepita would begin to commission music from the next most talented ballet composer living in Petersburg, the Austrian Ludwig Minkus. But while Minkus was less of a wild man and more reliable, he also lacked Pugni’s gift for composing rapidly and he was less flexible about attending rehearsals and making last-minute changes. One contemporary, the prima ballerina Yekaterina Vazem noted that “dancers and audiences were satisfied with Minkus’ music, but in my view, despite its danceability it was inferior to that of Pugni for lightness and spontaneity.”
For all his considerable personal problems, it’s impressive that Pugni never gave up, composing to the very end and indeed continuing to compose so well. He would produce some of his very finest music in the 1860s, including the Little Humpbacked Horse (1864)*, and Le Roi Candaule (1868). Some musicologists judge his final ballet, Les Deux Étoiles, to be the best of them all.
*Sometimes called the first Russian Ballet, the Little Humpbacked Horse was based on a Russian fairy tale and included Russian folk music and Russian folk dances.
The Pharoah’s Daughter also belongs to this chaotic yet fruitful late period. Loosely inspired by Le Roman de La Momie (Romance of a Mummy, 1858) by French writer Théophile Gautier, it tells the story of an English explorer on a north African safari, taking shelter in a pyramid containing the tomb of a Pharaoh’s daughter named Aspicia. Lord Wilson, the explorer, takes opium to pass the time and is startled to see the beautiful Aspicia rising up from her tomb in front of him: she touches his heart and transports them back to Ancient Egypt.
The two immediately fall in love but face various perils – a balletic lion (whom Lord Wilson, now known as Ta-Hor, is forced to subdue), a vengeful Nubian king (to whom Aspicia is already betrothed) and Aspicia’s own somewhat possessive father. The old civilisation of the Pharaohs is brought vividly back to life, the narrative variously spread across country villages, the bottom of the Nile (with some dance numbers involving an underwater god) to the Pharoah’s magnificent palace. But just as Ta-Hor and Aspicia are finally allowed to be together and are celebrating, the former wakes up from his opium dream and finds himself Lord Wilson once more, poignantly surrounded by the darkness and silence of the pyramid.
As an early developer, Pugni’s musical technique had been constructed in pre-Romantic times, and there is still much evidence of that in Pharoah, and not least in the classical grandeur of the ballet’s main set-pieces. But he is usually at his best, and most original, in the quieter numbers where he has more opportunity to show off his sensitive and innovative ear not only for orchestral colour, but for lush and sensual melodies.
The Pharaoh’s Daughter was also one of the most ambitious works yet staged by Pugni and Petipa, and it became an instant hint, quickly finding its place in the repertoire of the Bolshoi, where it has enjoyed regular performances to this day. For a complete recording of the ballet, I would look no further than this recent and sumptuously staged performance from the great St Petersburg theatre.
It’s all the more regrettable that Pugni’s tumultuous existence prevented him from properly enjoying the fruits of his labours during this final creative phase. But had he looked back over his life, he would surely have agreed it had been nothing if not interesting. A near child prodigy, violinist, conductor, copyist, serial gambler, fraudster and philanderer; an editor, musical ghost-writer, a man who wanted to write grand operas but ended up writing grand ballets instead, over one hundred of them, and becoming one of the nineteenth century’s finest in the genre. That was Cesare Pugni: one of the more maverick talents of his day, but a man who somehow prevailed against many self-inflicted odds.