Puccini’s Material Girls: Tensions of the Spiritual Body in Le Villi

Scene: The Black Forest, in the dead of night. A guilty man returns to his home to find that his betrothed, whom he abandoned, has suffered and died of a broken heart in his absence. He comes upon her cottage and knocks on the door. No one is home, but he starts to hear voices from beyond. His beloved then appears out of the forest as a ghost, dressed in gauzy garb, with haunting eyes. He begs for forgiveness. She denies him. She calls upon her cohort of spectral maidens, the Willis. “Traitor!”, they cry from the woods. Seeking revenge with agile limbs and disembodied, shrill voices, the jilted ghostly maidens appear in full form, repetitively dancing and singing around the disloyal man until he dies from exhaustion at their feet.

This second and final act from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Le Villi (1884) thwarts established conventions of treating invisible or uncanny forces in Italian opera. In her study of Donizetti and the Gothic mode, Melina Esse has argued that Italian composers had a longstanding, ambivalent approach to the unseen, one that relied on the body to represent both the material and immaterial for melodramatic effect.¹ Mary Ann Smart has shown while Bellini utilized similar expressive strategies in his earlier operas, in I puritani (1835), the composer adopted a more metaphysical approach through his use of offstage music. Smart compares Bellini’s late techniques to the visual innovations taking place on the French balletic stage, where infrastructures used for ghostly or mythically based plots—most famously Giselle (1841), which shares the same plot sources as Le Villi—gave spectators the illusion that the offstage space was a realm of the supernatural.² In sheer contrast to Donizetti’s Maria de Rudenz (1838) or I puritani, where phantom-like or elusive characters turn out to be living and breathing women, Le Villi presents operatic ghosts as dynamic, material beings. And unlike the silent, ethereal movements of Giselle’s dancers, Puccini deemphasizes the phantom nature of the opera’s wily nymphs—through increasing uses of voice, formal repetition, and dance—to render the spiritual element not only palpable, but deliberately materialized.

Contemporary practices of spiritualism in Italy provide a useful framework of how we might better understand Puccini’s particular attitude toward ghostly forces in his first opera. The popularity of spiritualism in the latter half of the nineteenth century gave way to a newfound synthesis between theatrical performance, emerging media practices, and scientific inquiry, fostering a multitude of sensational ways to conceptualize spiritual bodies.³ Figures including the positivist criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918), and psychologist Enrico Morselli (1852–1929) collaborated in the 1880s and 1890s to undertake decades of spiritualist research. Their goal, most manifest in Lombroso’s posthumous After Death—What? (1909), was to provide concrete evidence of the spiritual world and also to justify spiritualism as a positivistic discipline rather than mere pseudoscience. A paradox emerges: by the end of the nineteenth century, explorations of the illusory and the unseen were predicated on material and sensory empiricism. In Italy during the 1880s a broad-ranging problem arose in the arts and sciences concerning how to represent ghostly bodies given the prominence of discourses, practices, and new technologies that foregrounded palpable representations of the otherworldly.

Whereas scholars have explored rich connections between Puccini’s operas and technological innovations, studies of Puccini’s music in the particular context of spiritualism or broader nineteenth-century European discourses about the supernatural have been comparatively sparse.⁴ In his study of the final apparitional scene of Suor Angelica, Arman Schwartz considers the popularity of spiritualism in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century as a frame of reference through which early spectators may have understood the concluding moment of the opera.⁵ He characterizes Puccini’s outlook on the spectral in the 1910s as complementary to the innovations of the modern era, including wireless and invisible technological transmissions, suggesting an immaterial type of spectral representation, one that I believe starkly contrasts with the composer’s odd approaches in Le Villi nearly thirty years earlier.⁶

The present study examines Le Villi and the Italian spiritualist movement not only to reveal the ruptures between Puccini’s early approach to ghostly forces and that of his Italian predecessors, but also to unveil the ways that Le Villi counters nineteenth-century operatic tendencies to sublimate supernatural bodies to music. Briefly comparing the treatment of ghostly forces in Le Villi with Giselle, I first tease out the ways that Puccini conveys spectral bodies in a corporeal manner. I then briefly discuss the scientific and theatrical cultures of Italian spiritualism preceding and during Puccini’s time in order to contextualize the strangely material presentations of the supernatural within a late nineteenth-century Italianate context. Devoting my attention to three of the composer’s key strategies, including the use of chorus, inclusion of a lively ballet, and heavy use of repetition throughout the opera, I show that the intense materiality of Puccini’s first opera not only complements the pseudoscientific trends of Italian positivism but also the sensory techniques soon to emerge within operatic verismo. Ultimately, Le Villi stands on a threshold between established operatic convention and the giovane scuola’s novel means of evoking bodily sensation, providing us with a different way to theorize the intersection between opera and emerging ideals of the expressive and sensational body at the cusp of verismo.

Morbid Maidens: Le Villi and Giselle

Puccini found some of his earliest supporters and benefactors for his first opera among the Scapigliatura, a group of iconoclastic artists, composers, writers, and painters who championed musical and intellectual reform throughout the 1860s in Milan. They critiqued anti-academicism and institutionalized morality, particularly the Catholic church. Interested in the ghostly and the macabre, these experimental artists, as Robert Dombroski has noted, often explored themes of “sacrilegious morbidity” in their work to express “the secret of life, uncontaminated by human reason,” manifested in, among other things, “the transformation of matter.”⁷ It was not uncommon for the literary works of the scapigliatura to verge on horror or the Gothic. Women, for example, often suffered in the misogynistic plots of the scapigliatura’s stories and poetry. They were represented as corpses, drowned and reincarnated as ghostly nymphs, or presented as seductive skeletons, haunting a male protagonist in his nightmares.⁸ Musically, the scapigliati were understood, if somewhat incorrectly, as Wagnerian imitators for their deviation from the melodic style of Verdi and their expanded use of orchestral forces. Like the scapigliati, Puccini showed an early predilection for heavier, more colorful symphonic writing in comparison to his Italian predecessors. Puccini’s earliest critics—including Filippo Filippi, for instance—cautioned against the composer’s seemingly Wagnerian orchestral bent. But Arrigo Boito, the musical leader of the scapigliatura and one of the few Italian Wagnerian supporters at the time, was impressed by Puccini’s talent for robust, evocative orchestration.⁹ Ferdinando Fontana, who considered himself Boito’s literary protégé and was a late disciple of the scapigliatura, composed a libretto for Puccini based on Alphonse Karr’s macabre Les Willis (1852).¹⁰ This story, like the ballet Giselle, was inspired by Hugo’s poem “Fantômes” and Heine’s story, De l’Allemagne, all of which were based on the Slavic and Germanic folk tales of the vila nymph.¹¹

While Giselle and Le Villi share comparable plot sources, a two-act layout, and the central element of dance, Puccini’s and Fontana’s collective work on the libretto, dramaturgy, and music for the opera conveys the “sacrilegious morbidity” of the scapigliatura more than the ethereal and redemptive nature of its balletic antecedent. This distinction emerges most plainly in act 2 of each work, which features the realm of the afterlife, dominated by the Willis. Characterized as ghostly virgins who were abandoned by their lovers and died of broken hearts, the Willis seek revenge in their afterlives as they haunt forests at night, preying on men they encounter by dancing them to death in hysterical fits of frenzy. In Giselle, this trope takes the form of the traditional “white act,” in which a corps de ballet appears. While their deeds are narratively sinister and hateful—they drown Hilarion and attempt to kill Albrecht—the music and movement that conveys these actions are by contrast delicate. Furthermore, the plot of act 2 resolves gracefully: Giselle defies the cohort of Willis in order to forgive and save Albrecht from a horrifying fate. As was traditional in balletic production at the time, Adam’s scoring for the ballet complemented the already-composed choreography created by Coralli and Perrot. The predominantly gentle quality of the scoring highlights the floating footwork, sensitive lifts, and precise leaps of the dancers.

Whereas Giselle features seemingly effortless balletic technique and delicately scored orchestration in order to convey the ethereal quality of the Willis, Le Villi presents a brutal and visceral conception of the supernatural. In “La Tregenda,” the second of the two intermezzi following act 1, a thunderous tarantella erupts from the orchestra, foreshadowing the savage movements of the spectral maidens in act 2. Unlike Giselle, Anna seeks revenge on her past lover. While Anna reappears early on in the act in her revitalized form to torment Roberto, the Willis, for the majority of their act 2, maintain their allure as phantoms, as signified by repeated offstage vocal interjections and symphonic reprises of their barbaric tarantella. As the Willis finally manifest through their explosive dance and macabre song in the opera’s act 2 finale, they surround Roberto and feverishly command him to dance until he falls at their feet and perishes. As the curtain falls, the ghosts’ profane cries of “Hosanna!” resound in frenzied repetition, ending the opera with a tinge of blasphemy.

What emerges most prominently from these distinctions is perhaps an obvious, yet important, point: the two works ultimately differ in their modalities of expression. Whereas ballet lacks vocality, opera—and specifically, Italian opera—celebrates the voice above all else. Unlike the French operatic tradition, which in many instances blended the two genres with its abundant use of the corps de ballet before and throughout the nineteenth century, the synthesis of narrative dance and opera was a largely new phenomenon within Italian operatic practice. Additionally, in Le Villi, we can perceive a novel, expansive use of orchestral sound throughout the opera that further distinguishes the work’s treatment of the spectral from its balletic predecessor. Unlike Giselle’s ethereal dancers, Le Villi’s strange ghosts articulate an overdetermined mode of expression with their amalgamation of voice, dance, and robust orchestral sounds. Why at this point in the Italian tradition did an emerging composer decide to integrate such a combination of expressive forces into an operatic work to such strange effect? In what follows, I discuss elements of late nineteenth-century spiritualist practices in order to provide a contextual framework for how we can understand Puccini’s strategies for representing his spectral maidens in such a materialized fashion, including his unusual application of vocal and balletic choruses and his bold use of repetition throughout the opera.

Setting the Séance: The Theatrics of Spiritualism

Documented Italian practices of spiritualism date back to 1853 in northern Italy. Séances featuring table levitations became a fad throughout Milan, Turin, and Venice. Recounted in booklets and newspaper articles about “rotating” or “dancing” tables, the trend was quickly regarded as an issue by the Church.¹² The popular Catholic periodical, Civiltà cattolica, for example, published a number of articles warning readers of the dangers of participating in séances. They considered spiritualism the devil’s work, and a danger to one’s psychological health.¹³ In the 1860s, a number of Spiritist groups emerged both within and outside of the aforementioned northern cities. Societies were established in Parma and Naples from 1863 through 1864, in the town of Mondovì, outside of Turin, in 1867, and another in Florence in 1869. The most enduring of the societies was Turin’s Società Torinese di Studi Spiritici established in 1856. Its members, many of whom were members of the Savoy nobility, published a monthly journal, Annali dello spiritismo in Italia, through the early decades of the twentieth century.¹⁴ Simone Natale has shown that the rise of spiritualism throughout Western Europe and the United States occurred simultaneously with the development of new forms of visual media. Photography, in particular, was a critical medium to articulate shifting attitudes toward material and spiritual bodies throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Achieved through techniques such as double exposure, superimposition, and staging scenes with levitating props and mysterious figures, spirit photography rendered the invisible world visible to the naked eye of mass consumers and intellectuals alike.¹⁵ Many consumers in the nineteenth century understood photography as a transparent form of media, as lawful, objective evidence of events unfolding in front of the camera.¹⁶ Because of its assumed credibility, photography became a powerful tool to allow spiritualism to cross over from the entertainment industry into scientific discourse.¹⁷ As Jennifer Tucker has observed, what was once a “technical and commercial novelty” prior to the 1860s “evolved into a practice that invited serious scientific and philosophical interest” by the last decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁸ In England, for example, the Society for Psychical Research was founded by Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore in 1882. Together with the contributions of international members including Cesare Lombroso, they collected photographic and documentary accounts describing visual, material, telepathic, and sonic spirit manifestations to create a spiritualist archive.

Lombroso is arguably the most well-documented Italian intellectual who investigated spiritualism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. His resulting two-volume spiritualist manifesto, After Death—What?, was published posthumously in 1909 to Italian, English, French, and American readerships.¹⁹ Much of this text is devoted to his experimental studies with Eusapia Palladino [Paladino], a Neapolitan medium known for her feats of object levitation and necromancy. Observing Lombroso’s scholarly investment in spiritualism, Alessandra Violi notes that his studies were “not a matter of a slippage on the part of the scientist toward the fantastic dimension of the spectral, but of the emergence of an imaginary already inscribed in the project of the positivist sciences.”²⁰ Violi suggests the positivists did not make a great distinction between the unseen and the visible; they were already inherently concerned with these pseudoscientific concepts. Scientists like Lombroso were not necessarily oriented around the idea of exposing the “imaginary” that Violi describes. Rather, they devoted their efforts to expressing the unseen in tangible ways.

Spiritualist practitioners also relied on performance strategies from theater to represent the unseen.²¹ Shared dramatic techniques included using draped cloths, curtains, and dim lighting to obscure concrete images or sounds, percussive tapping and rapping to suggest an unseen presence, and employing vocal or instrumental effects from a distance to give the illusion that supernatural forces played of their own accord.²² The influence of theater on spiritualist practice in late ottocento Italy is exemplified in the work of Palladino, who, unlike her Italian mediumistic predecessors who mostly functioned as itinerant healers or trance writers, achieved fame on an international scale. She profited from the theatrical developments of the discipline, and ironically garnered the attention of numerous scientists like Lombroso and Enrico Morselli, who not only attended séances as part of their observational studies, but collaborated with her to craft experimental set-ups as a way to document spiritual activity under controlled conditions.²³

In séance meetings, Lombroso placed instruments of measurement, including dynamometers, cardiographs, and recording cylinders around Palladino in an effort to harness or document spiritual activity.²⁴ Climactic moments of Palladino’s séances allegedly featured an obvious sonic and visual manifestation of a spiritual presence. In the most dramatic of accounts, ectoplasm emanated from her bodily orifices, a phenomenon described vividly in Lombroso’s accounts of the medium.²⁵ He observed that sound and music often accompanied a visual manifestation of a spirit’s presence during the climax of a séance. In an anecdote about a particularly lively meeting, Lombroso, accompanied by Morselli and the journalist Luigi Barzini, Sr., describes the musical aftermath of a “moulage” or “mold” of a spirit appearing to the attendees:

Barzini touches with his right hand, which is free, the swelling of the curtain on the outside face, and positively encounters under the stuff the resistance of a living head. He identifies the forehead, feeling the cheeks and the nose with the palm of his hand; and, when he touches the lips, the mouth of the thing opens and seizes his hand under the thumb. He feels distinctly the pressure of a sound set of teeth.

The carillon (or music-box), intended to make a little diversion, comes upon the table as if it had fallen from above, and, resting there entirely isolated, plays for several seconds, while we look curiously on… . Being so simple and so slightly musical, this instrument requires, in order to be played, the co-operation of the two hands,—one to hold it firm, and the other to turn the crank. Its gluglu has scarcely ceased when we hear the mandolin sliding along over the floor. M. Bozzano sees it come out from the cabinet and stop behind Professor Morselli, where it strums two or three times. Thence it climbs up on the table, turns upside down, and ends by depositing itself in the arms of Barzini like a baby! As we placed our hands on the strings, we felt them vibrating under the touch of the unknown force, and thus also acquired the proof of touch as to the reality of the phenomena.²⁶

In this account, the repeated sounds (“gluglu”) of an instrument not only accompanied but enhanced the effect of a spirit’s climactic materialization. Comparable animated accounts abound in Lombroso’s spiritualist studies.²⁷

One image from Lombroso’s Lo spiritismo collection depicts the culmination of a séance through reference to a musical instrument: a staged violin levitates above a table of attendees who sit in deep concentration. Observing Palladino alongside Lombroso throughout the late 1880s and 1890s, Morselli later remarked in his 1908 study on spiritualism that Palladino’s séances took on a dramaturgical arc similar to that of a play or opera. “The program of every evening seems prearranged,” he summarizes, “as is also the case of the program of a series of sittings, when Palladino proceeds carefully from simple to more complex phenomena.”²⁸ From this, we can gather that Palladino used visual and sonic techniques to gradually build anticipation toward a dramatic representation of the spiritual realm. Her approach serves as an exemplary foundation from which to compare Puccini’s own techniques of representing the spectral in Le Villi. Through his dynamic use of both vocal and balletic choruses, Puccini gradually introduces uncanny sonic forces into his operas, creating a clear distinction between the ordinary world of the living and the realm of the spiritual before setting in motion his materialized manifestations of ghostly forces.Manifesting Ghostly Forces: The Transformations of Le Villi’s Choruses

I. The Vocal Chorus

In act 1 of Le Villi, Puccini features the chorus in a conventional manner, both stylistically and dramatically. The chorus’s presence in the opening “Evviva! Evviva! Evviva!” functions in two ways, offering a narrative set-up to act 1 and also supporting the uplifting, celebratory nature of Anna's and Roberto’s springtime betrothal scene. Following act 1, however, the chorus’s role dramatically shifts. No longer set within the world of the living, “L’Abbandono,” the first of two intermezzi following act 1, is the first of many moments where Puccini positions the spectral as an authoritative, palpable force within this opera. Anna has died of a broken heart, and her funeral procession takes place behind a gauzy scrim.²⁹ Her mid-opera death—an unusual occurrence in the Italian tradition—is marked only by an unaccompanied stanza of ottava rima that precedes the beginning of the intermezzo.³⁰ A death aria never materializes, nor is her demise visually aestheticized as spectacle. Instead, her immediate afterlife is featured as the focal visual point within this nebulosa scene. The actors on stage move solemnly and silently through the now wintery scene, transporting Anna’s casket throughout the interlude, as mourners silently watch. The only vocal music of the scene comes from a distant chorus of women’s voices. As suggested by the direction Interno that precedes the chorus’s first entrance, the female voices are meant to be heard but not seen. The choral voices enhance the funereal qualities of this scene with references to wilted flowers, her coffin, and pale moonlight.

As shown in ex. 1, the women’s melody is set in a chant-like, preghiera style, characterized by triplet, legato figures moving in stepwise motion. The chorus’s line culminates in a sigh that descends a seventh on the line “O pura virgo, requiesce in pace!” (“O pure virgin, rest in peace!”), suggesting not only “feminine” pathos, but a form of vocality that differs greatly from the precedent of act 1.

This scene also marks the first instance of offstage singing in the opera. The use of distant voices in Italian opera has historically been used to either evoke the uncanny or expand the action’s space beyond the visual confines of the stage. Smart shows that in I puritani Bellini repeatedly eliminated the physical presence of Elvira’s body on stage to portray her ethereal, not-all-there nature. I puritani is, according to Smart, “very much about the body without objectifying the body visually.”³¹ Though Puccini’s attitude to the spectral in “L’Abbandono” initially bears resemblance to Bellini’s late approach, his own style defies these pre-established expectations. Whereas Bellini also alludes to the physical space and real events occurring beyond the visual field with an offstage military reveille, Puritan prayer, and a wedding song, Puccini only makes us privy to the fact that there is any sort of alternative plane of existence nearly halfway through Le Villi, and that presence is uncanny. The position of hearing “the beyond” in “L’Abbandono” does not originate from the point of reference of central character(s) on stage who experience emotional pain or mental strife, as is often the case in I puritani and certainly in Donizetti’s Gothic operas; rather, the distant choral voices sing for a deceased character, an individual whose physical body is literally absent. Her symbolic representation, staged in a coffin, behind a scrim, creates distance from—instead of ambivalence about—the body. In “L’Abbandono,” the other characters in the scene do not react to the presence of these voices either, suggesting that this chorus takes on a life of its own, and functions as a voice-over effect. The scene’s evocation of unseen bodies does not evoke suffering or emotional pain in the same way as its precedents, but instead agency and power, prophetic knowledge and omniscience.

Albeit not as complex as the radiophonic or cinematic sonic worlds found in Puccini’s later works, “L’Abbandono” stands as a novice attempt to sound out larger, elusive means of presence that are visually obscured but fully heard. This scene’s ghostly voices can be understood as an early predecessor to the quasi-cinematic “giant ear” soundscapes of his later works. As Emanuele Senici describes in his study of La fanciulla del West, “in the impossibility of moving the ear to follow the sources of sound as a way of substituting for a moveable eye, Puccini tries to create a particularly powerful ear, a giant one, capable of hearing the action beyond the fixed field of visibility.”³² In La fanciulla, Puccini continually distinguishes the expanded parameters of space beyond the visual field with markings of distance such as lontano. Senici describes in his analysis of the act 3 manhunt scene how this “giant ear” results from the score’s detailed specifications to place the choir members and soloists at different and changing locations in the wings of the stage, which creates a sense of movement that is heard but not seen. Though the veiled scenery of the “L’Abbandono” creates a literal screen with a form of “surround sound” that we might anachronistically envision as cinematic, similar to what Senici suggests about Puccini’s manhunt scene, “L’Abbandono” more clearly alludes to the photographic with the scene’s tableau-like qualities. The voices do not sound with any effect of shifting direction; nor do they suggest movement in changing, distant places.

The effect of the choral voices in “L’Abbandono” is of a singular framing presence that superimposes over an image, narrating it from the outside in. If we consider, for instance, the technique of double exposure, one of the most common methods used to create the spectral auras of spirit photography, we can better envision the impact of Puccini's particular effect. An image from Lombroso’s Lo spiritismo collection, shown as fig. 1, displays the subtle, semitransparent overlay of a woman’s face looming over a sleeping couple, presenting the illusion of an omniscient presence.

The ghostly woman, overlaid above the primary photograph, appears much closer to viewers than to the subjects in the frame, functioning as both an interactive and overshadowing force within its pictorial context. In Puccini’s scenic superimposition, we can discern an attempt to enliven the senses beyond their normal objective capacity, rendering invisible bodies, sensations, and narratives perceptible to the spectator. By staging a calculated, expansive evocation of voice in space, Puccini not only creates in “L’Abbandono” a sonically and spatially amplified frame, but arguably prompts us to envision a “giant” omniscient presence residing over the scene. Only after the completion of the opera does the spectator fully realize the almost apparitional quality of these vocal lines: in a work otherwise characterized by a deliberate use of repetition, these incantatory melodies never again appear. In this introductory paranormal landscape, we not only hear beyond the actual frame, but we are introduced to a kind of desire to know further what is beyond the physical, and implicitly living, world of the stage.

In act 2, the realm of the unseen that was introduced in “L’Abbandono” continues to unveil itself through the development of the chorus. In “No, possibil non è… ” Guglielmo sits outside of his house amid the wintery forest scene, mourning the loss of his daughter. Though skeptical of the legend of the Willis, he calls on them to take vengeance on Roberto for breaking her heart. After Guglielmo returns inside his home, an offstage chorus of women again sing a tutti, answering his call. In accented, dotted rhythms, they cry for Anna to “come” and “make haste,” for Roberto will soon return. Roberto then enters the scene and nervously observes: “Weird voices pursue me. The Willis: away with them! They are imaginings!” Here, the chorus’s role transforms yet again. The women’s chorus now functions in an explicitly diegetic manner, shifting from their role as omniscient narrators in “L’Abbandono.” Through Roberto’s remorseful aria, “Torna ai felici dì,” the chorus continues to interject boldly with accented lines, summoning Anna. While Puccini’s choice to have the chorus repeatedly interact with Roberto appears derivative of the precedent of many Gothic operas—where offstage, uncanny voices represent the sort of affective world of the characters on stage, haunting anguished characters with their distant voices—the composer eventually reveals the source of such tormenting vocalizations, as the Willis surround Roberto not only with their voices, but with their dancing bodies.

II. The Dancing Chorus

As the nymphal maidens enter the scene and encircle Roberto in their dance, an offstage chorus of male spirits sings in octaves with the chorus of female Willis, amplifying the onstage dancers from beyond the frame. Yet, no male spirits materialize. Only the dancing women of the corps de ballet control the action of this final scene, achieving a gestural language of corporeal freedom unattainable to the male spirits. As a result, the Willis possess the power of disembodied voice, which is unusual in comparison to more common presentations of corps de ballet in French grand opera. A conventional corps de ballet, by contrast, typically features female dancers in silent rather than vocal roles.³³ Within the traditional, though still infrequent, incorporation of ballet in the Italian repertoire, such as in act 2 of Verdi’s Aida (1871) and act 3 of Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1875), dance is presented as a form of diegetic entertainment rather than as a central (and vocal) part of the drama.

While this split of female voice and body is largely a result of practical conventions of separating the roles of choral dancers and singers in opera, the division functions meaningfully to signify the Willis’ continued difference as supernatural beings. Throughout the number, they mock the celebratory exclamations of the living. In the opening scene of act 1, a mixed onstage chorus sings “Gira! Balza!” repeatedly as a way to invite the community to dance during Roberto and Anna's engagement celebrations. In act 2, the haunted chorus subverts these invitations to “jump” and “dance,” their jagged, frenzied cries accompanied by a vigorous tarantella: a Southern Italian folk dance, traditionally performed by women in a fast-paced round. In the late ottocento, folkloric dances such as the tarantella prompted an exoticized cultural fascination with an “archaic” Italian south. As Nelson Moe describes, Italian elites in the north crafted idyllic images of the south—often by accentuating folkloric customs and traditions of the Mezzogiorno—as a way to market the region as “exotic” or uncivilized to urban northern Italian and northern European consumers.³⁴ Puccini’s use of the tarantella throughout the opera, but particularly in the Willis frenetic dance scene, is telling, as it not only portrays the Willis as exotic or unusual within the context of the opera’s plot, but suggests their wild, barbaric nature in a way that would likely have resonated with contemporary northern Italian audiences. By the end of the nineteenth century, the tarantella was also associated with seduction and bacchanalia in visual art.³⁵ In such imagery, diaphanously dressed nymphs, often with tambourines in hand, surround their male prey through their dance or revolve with sexual delight, as seen in Bartolomeo Giuliano’s painting Le Villi.

Giuliano’s painting (fig. 2) depicts the Willis in their full, bacchanalian round, emerging from their obscure sylvan surroundings to take men as their prey. As gossamer cloth drapes from their bodies, they appear erotic, teetering on the edge of control in their dancing frenzy.

The tarantella was furthermore associated with hysteria at the fin-de-siècle, as women’s dance—and more broadly, their expressive movement—already had deep-rooted associations with madness and deviance.³⁶ At the end of the nineteenth century, hysteria was considered a common malady for women displaying symptoms or behaviors that were considered nervous, unruly, or simply unusual. Its conception at this time was largely rooted in cultural misogyny, evidenced by its wide-ranging and ill-defined symptoms, as well as the problematic methods by which doctors and scientists approached and spoke of it.³⁷ By 1880, hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical (rather than psychological) disorder in women, largely due to the exploitative work of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris.³⁸ Symptoms of hysteria ranged widely, including general emotional distress, so-called atypical expressions of sexuality, anxiety, convulsive fits, erratic movement, muteness, hallucinations, pain, fainting, insomnia, and so forth. Some scientists considered dancing as a readable symptom of hysteria. One physician, Harry Campbell, remarked that “It is possible that the love of dancing, so peculiarly strong among women, is the outcome of a nervous organization affording a suitable soil for hysteria.”³⁹ Discussing such attitudes toward dance and hysteria in regard to the nineteenth-century corps de ballet, Felicia McCarren explains that historically “hysterias have been understood to imitate dance, and dance has presented madness” and from this argues that the “chorus is feminine, simultaneously idealized and closely connected to practices of prostitution and conceptions of hysteria.”⁴⁰ At the Paris Opéra, one of the central historical sites in McCarren’s study, choral dancers were understood as embodiments of sex and venereal disease offstage because of the Opéra’s foyer de la danse, a backstage, unregulated prostitution ring.⁴¹ And as Sally Banes, Marian Smith, and Helena Kopchick Spencer have all noted, the onstage, dramatic roles of the midcentury chorus dancer were largely erotic as well. In grand opera and Romantic ballet, choruses of women dancers often acted as scenic landscapes within deviant scenes, including, as Spencer has noted, “clandestine encounters,” “sexual transgressions,” and “homosocial intimacy.”⁴² Represented as ghostly and mythological figures like undines, nixies, and Willis, choral dancers supported the central actions of either a prima ballerina, or of operatic singers—depending on the production in question.⁴³ Even in the strikingly perverse or politically charged presentations of the corps de ballet in opera, such as that of the act 3 Ballet of the Nuns in Meyerbeer's Robert le diable (1831), the voices of these supernatural characters remain silent.⁴⁴ In sum, while these forms of presentation created evocative and distinctly feminine communities in some operas and ballets, they mostly served as bacchanalian backdrops, a conspicuous factor of mid-nineteenth-century balletic production.⁴⁵

Puccini’s allusions to hysteria in the opera’s dance finale not only augment the portrayals of midcentury corps de ballet, but also resonate with contemporary beliefs about the hysterical body and its heightened susceptibility to deviant behavior. Charles Darwin, Karl Vogt, and Lombroso all claimed that a woman’s insatiable need for rhythmic motion was a bodily reflection of her irritable, sensitive emotional temperament, a disposition that was often compared to an irritable child. Dancing or erratic movement drew her closer to her innate, childlike nature, and paradoxically relayed her true identity as a social deviant through her corporeal, rather than intellectual, motivations.⁴⁶ This triangular relationship between movement, hysteria, and deviance held particular significance within the discourses of spiritualism as well. In one of his accounts describing Palladino’s heightened senses as she summoned spiritual energies, Lombroso compared her erratic movements and restless, dramatic energy to that of an impetuous child.⁴⁷

Taking these ideas further, a number of French scientists and intellectuals, including Antoine Baréty and Albert de Rochas, believed that the female hysteric was particularly susceptible to mediumistic powers. In his studies of women in asylum throughout the 1880s, Baréty observed that the irregular, repeated movements of hysterical women were aroused by supernatural energy, or a “radiant neural force” resulting in a visible, glowing aura that releases from the body in a similar manner to spiritual ectoplasm.⁴⁸ Rochas viewed this ectoplasmic release as a manifestation of the moving subject’s rightful “sensibilities,” a metaphorically materialized or stronger sense of self that escapes the body.⁴⁹ In short, the physical and mental senses of these female subjects created a kind of spectral aura. Through hysterical movement, female bodies served as nexus between sheer physicality and immaterial vitalism.

Manifesting Bodies: Repeating to Revitalize

Similarly in Le Villi, spiritual or hyper-sensory emanation cannot exist without a material foundation. In a manner that complements the materializing transformations of the choruses, Puccini also utilizes repetition in his orchestral writing throughout the second act as a means to further represent these palpable qualities of his ghostly girls. Through reiteration rather than organic evolution, Puccini amplifies the Willis’ power and physicality within the physical world. Despite the excessive use of repetition, however, critics observed in Le Villi a particularly Wagnerian influence. By the time Puccini emerged on the operatic scene, Wagner's heavy use of orchestral forces had for decades expanded the palette in which composers could invoke supernatural forces through and beyond the body. However, Italian critics of Puccini—many of whom were not Wagner enthusiasts—took issue with his bold symphonic writing. Though otherwise excited about Puccini’s potential, Milan’s leading critic of the time, Filippo Filippi, wrote in his review of the opera, “Puccini has an essentially symphonic nature, and, … often abuses it, overloading the pedestal to the detriment of the statue.”⁵⁰ Filippi, an Italian advocate of Wagner’s musical innovations, appeared cautious toward the composer’s Germanic sonic leanings, particularly as his orchestration overwhelmed the “statue” of vocal melody that held primacy in the Italian operatic tradition. Complementary to Filippi, others found that Puccini’s bold writing was misguidedly heavy-handed, as his symphonic writing not only swallowed the protagonists’ vocal melodies, but called too much attention to the opera’s auxiliary, supernatural dancers. “The Willis in general dominated the instrumental parts, sometimes even to the detriment of the voices, and of the performance of the aria,” remarked one journalist from Il teatro illustrato, “but, the instrumental elements are so rich in colors; the effects make me forgive these defects of the young maestro.”⁵¹ Some like-minded critics were more explicit about perceiving Wagner’s influence on the young composer. Though he later defended Puccini’s Italianness in the opera, a critic from Lucca specifically poked fun at “La Tregenda,” the second of the two intermezzi set between acts 1 and 2, for evoking the wrong kind of ghost: not the nymph-like specters soon to emerge in act 2, but instead the phantom of the (recently dead) German composer. The writer remarked in Il progresso: “the Wagnerian ghost sometimes peeks out, and there is a point in which, rather than [envisioning] the Willis turning furiously, one would believe they had seen the furious ‘Ride of the Valkyrie.’”⁵²

Rather than mysterious or metaphysical, Puccini’s evocation of the Willis in “La Tregenda” is clearly representational. Although, as commentators observed, Puccini’s symphonic writing in Le Villi often had the bold trappings of Wagnerian orchestration, its dramatic function challenges the German composer’s precedent. This is first apparent in “La Tregenda,” the orchestral intermezzo referenced by the critic from Il progresso. This intermezzo presents the first iteration of the tarantella motif that then reoccurs throughout act 2. Characterized by its cyclic qualities, “La Tregenda” emulates the “whirling” dance of the dangerous, ghostly Willis, as described in Fontana’s scenic poetry.

Following these two stanzas of ottava rima in the score, the stage directions further indicate the intermezzo’s purpose to support dance: “During Part Two the forest landscape of act I becomes visible, but it is winter: it is night. The leafless trees are laden with snow. The sky is serene and starry: the moon illuminates the gaunt surroundings. The Willis come to dance, preceded by wills-o'-the-wisp, which emerge from all sides and float above the scene.”⁵⁴ The directions describe a phantasmagoric scene.⁵⁵ Set to a brisk Allegro, the music of “La Tregenda,” though dance-like with its triplet motifs, lacks the delicacy or harmonic calmness of Adam’s music that accompanied the Willis a generation prior. In roughly fifty measures, the brass- and percussion-propelled intermezzo travels from its home key of G minor to areas of C minor (iv), F minor (vii), D-flat minor (a borrowed vi of F minor), transitioned to B major, E major, and then back to G minor.⁵⁶ While Puccini’s colorful harmonic vocabulary, in addition to the sheer robustness of the orchestra, may have been inspired by German precedent, the composer’s music definitively lacks the undulating or unending qualities of Wagner’s orchestral material. Instead, Puccini firmly tonicizes these various areas as a way to create distinct, sectional parameters, while simultaneously adding aural interest to otherwise repetitive musical material. “La Tregenda” continues in such a manner: between reprises of the tarantella's ABAB section, extended episodes embed further reiterations of themes in sequence before traveling back to the intermezzo’s original material in G minor. Taken in full, the intermezzo resembles a dizzying, bacchanal rondo, an unruly round that, in between a neatly established beginning and end, does not play by preexistent rules of balance, structure, or key. The repetitive nature of the thematic material presented in each section of the intermezzo adds to this overall effect. Dizzying yet insistent, “La Tregenda” alludes to wild, pivoting movement, rather than organic musical evolution that avoids harmonic resolution.

In light of the changing status of the body within late nineteenth-century operatic traditions, this intermezzo is quite the anomaly. As Mary Ann Smart has observed,

As the habit of synchronizing stage movement with music slowly went out of style after midcentury, the spectacle created by the visible body and the music that surrounded it altered fundamentally. Under this new aesthetic order, music might encircle the exhibited body, supplying a sensuous haze of sound to suggest erotic power; but its rhythms rarely traced or echoed the actual movements of a performer or duplicated the meaning of his or her words.⁵⁷

Smart’s discussion of this “sensuous haze” points to the influence of Wagner’s orchestral and staging innovations in the latter half of the century. “L’Abbandono,” the intermezzo preceding “La Tregenda,” certainly nods to this aesthetic with its use of a scrim, offstage narrative voices, and avoidance of the customary death scene.⁵⁸ Puccini’s intermezzo, however, complicates this aesthetic trajectory: “La Tregenda” does not merely encircle bodies with its music, but it amplifies their presence in a way that seemingly defies their illusory nature.

Puccini’s seemingly unsubtle musical representation of the spiritual realm in “La Tregenda” avoids the more abstract qualities of his contemporaries and also defies older Italianate conventions of representing the uncanny through the use of ephemeral, offstage music. This distinction becomes even more apparent in act 2, where both Anna and the Willis are imbued with power and strength in their revitalized, embodied forms through various layers of instrumental and vocal repetition. Anna’s reappearance early on in the second act marks not a mere ghostly echo of presence in the living world, but an empowered form of resurrection. Preceding her entrance, the orchestra reiterates fragments from “La Tregenda,” signaling the Willis’ spectral assembly. Offstage, the chorus of Willis make themselves explicitly known through voice for the first time; they repeatedly cry to Anna, “Come now damned soul, make haste!” as Roberto enters the scene. In between sections of his remorseful aria, “Torna ai felici dì,” the Willis continue to reveal their particular propensity for repetition, as they once again prompt Anna to reveal herself to Roberto in her phantasmic, yet embodied capacity. Similar to her spectral sisters, Anna displays a new inclination for repetition, recurrently crying Roberto’s name with great intensity. He perceives revitalized life in her voice even before she appears to him. Astonished, he exclaims, “Her voice! She is not dead!” Anna then appears out of the forest, dressed in gauzy garb, with darkened, haunting eyes. In life, Anna was a chaste, delicate woman: in her act 1 cavatina, “Se come voi piccina,” she wishes to be a tiny forget-me-not flower for Roberto. Shown as ex. 2a, Anna’s vocal style in this number is largely characterized by long phrases that move in stepwise motion. As she faces Roberto in her revitalized form in act 2, she confidently sings, “I am no longer love—I am revenge,” establishing her newfound freedom and self-assertive nature. Here, she sings with greater melodic floridity as well as bold, accented declamatory phrases. Anna’s heightened characterization is further suggested by her expanded vocal range. Whereas in act 1 her melodies never travel higher than an A5, in act 2 she surpasses her previous powers of eloquence by assertively singing high B-flats as she reenters in act 2, as shown in ex. 2b.

While Anna’s exaggerated modes of vocality seem to counteract her deadness, as she does not echo her thematic material or style from act 1, her ghostly revitalization complements contemporary tropes of the spectral. Describing the empowered nature of the ghost in late-nineteenth-century Gothic literature, Jennifer Bann observes that resurrected spirits were regarded “as varied and as psychologically complex as they had been in life,” with “their ability to act within a physical sphere evidence of both their individuality and their liberation from the restrictions of morality.”⁵⁹ In her state of liberation, Anna no longer echoes her past self, nor the words of others, but has the power to prompt reiterative expression that intensifies her own voice, as evident in her final duet with Roberto, “Ricordi quel che dice.” This duet differs melodically and formally from the pair’s act 1 number. Their love duet in act 1 began in lyric form, with Anna mirroring Roberto’s melodies in clear, four-measure phrases, showing both their intwined, loving connection but also her submissive nature. The form breaks as Anna modestly questions his devotion in the middle of her range, and Roberto sweeps in to soothe her worries and profess (if artificially) his love. In “Ricordi quel che dice,” however, Anna dominates as she voices her grievances. Roberto enters to atone for his sins and accept his fate, and in so doing, he fails to gain a truly independent melodic voice in this scene. After failing to gain ground under Anna’s vocal interjections, he eventually falls into her melodic line and closely mimics her words, as shown in ex. 3.

Eagerly awaiting their materialized vengeance, the Willis propel Roberto toward Anna at the end of their duet; the stage directions read: “Roberto approaches Anna as though urged by an unknown force. He is about to conquer the fascination, but fails and throws himself toward her.”⁶⁰ In contrast to her characterization as a clichéd virginal protagonist in act 1, Anna is resurrected in act 2 as a more complex character through her enhanced vocal expression and ability to prompt Roberto to amplify her own voice.

Following the duet, the orchestra immediately drops out, and the choruses of Willis and Spiriti enter quietly from a distance. The orchestra joins as both vocal and instrumental forces swell in speed and energy—marked by an extended stringendo e molto crescendo—until a reprise of “La Tregenda” breaks out in full force, initiating the Willis’ dance of death in the finale number. Supported by the relentless orchestral tarantella, the Willis appear in this scene brutal and physical, rather than ethereal. The Lucchese journalist who critiqued the Wagnerian tendencies of the initial iteration of this tarantella in “La Tregenda” then defended Puccini for his Italianate treatment of the music with dance in this scene, claiming its “eurythmics” distanced the composer from Wagner’s treatment of the body.⁶¹ This reference to eurythmics likely suggests this more general conception of dance or bodily movements matched to the music.⁶² The libretto and music support the mimetic qualities of this feverish dance scene. In a resounding uproar, the singing chorus continually commands Roberto to join in their deadly dance during the reprise of “La Tregenda.” The chorus of “Villi” insistently order him to “Turn! Jump! Turn! Jump!” in order to render him powerless. Amplified with frenetic vocal cries, the bacchanal, pictorial qualities of “La Tregenda” are fully realized in the finale. As the Willis repeat their kinetic commands to Roberto in quickening rhythm and crescendoing volume, they assert their power over the doomed man through their dance.

Completing their deed of vengeance, the chorus of Willis roar “Osanna!” in continual frenzy as Roberto finally falls dead at their feet. Subverting this Christian shout of praise, Fontana’s libretto and Puccini’s setting undermine this joyful exclamation by presenting it within an occult vision of the spiritual afterlife. As Michele Girardi has observed, this moment of repetition in Fontana’s libretto pays zealous “tribute” to the scapigliatura and their unconventional, celebratory attitude toward death and the macabre.⁶³ Yet, this moment of excess—carrying forth the precedence of the insistent tarantella—calls attention to Puccini’s tendency toward reiteration throughout the opera. By 1884, as Senici has suggested, the use of such blatant vocal repetition was simply outdated within Italian operatic practice. One needs only to fast-forward just short of ten years to hear in the fugal finale of Verdi’s Falstaff a satirical use of repetition—as a punchline to assert that “everything in the world is a joke.”⁶⁴ Though the Willis’ tireless cries verge on the horrific rather than the comedic, as in Falstaff, this macabre finale scene similarly works in an obvious manner. Puccini’s multifaceted use of repetition productively reinforces the conspicuously material nature of the Willis’ bodies and enlivened authority.

Considering this finale in light of Smart’s observations about late nineteenth-century representations of the operatic body, Puccini’s concluding scene seems puzzlingly anachronistic. The moments leading up to the finale largely fit Smart’s observation that the body had become more of an “idea or aura” rather than a “physical sequence of gestures” in its relationship to music.⁶⁵ For the majority of the opera, their voices sound from a distance, completely divorced from their bodies, and are represented through the orchestral melody of the tarantella. The final scene, however, seems unavoidably synchronized to the rhythmic pull of the dance. At first glance, Puccini’s treatment of the Willis in this act 2 finale verges on an embarrassingly naive throwback: their corporeality points to an antiquated tradition of representing the body through gestural mimesis, or at the very least it appears to be a conventional response to what Esse has observed—the longstanding ambivalence toward representing the spectral in the Italian operatic tradition. Yet, the Willis’ overwhelmingly physical dance, asserted through layer upon layer of reiteration, complicates their status as ghostly beings and challenges this trajectory toward the auratic operatic body in the late nineteenth century.⁶⁶

***

The tirelessly articulated bodies of the Willis may be seen as representative of a powerful force of haunted vitality, possessing liminal powers to travel between the living world and the dead in material form. Original playbills for the 1884 version of the opera point to the relationship between the Willis’ transformative nature and acts of reiteration. Published in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, the original advertisement for the opera features the Willis with ethereal bodies; their folds of wispy garb and sensuous limbs gain distinct form as they swirl into the center of the image. Shown as fig. 3, Ricordi’s version, also used as the cover for the libretti during its first season as a two-act work in 1884–85, is even more intriguing.

Featuring a wintery void in the forest, the Willis enter, transform, and invade space with their increasingly incarnated, precise bodies. Their journey from formlessness to embodiment—expressed in the opera as a transition from sonic to visual, materialized presentation—also complements the trajectory of spectral forces popularized within spiritualist performances and meetings. Just as the spirit becomes incarnate in the body of the medium, so, too, do the ethereal Willis move from an offstage sounding chorus to onstage embodiment as dancers and singers.

We might go so far as to entertain a metaphor between the multifaceted materiality of Le Villi’s ghosts and that of the climax of the séance, specifically concerning the phenomenon of ectoplasmic release. Ectoplasm, a supernatural substance, was believed to have taken on the form of a spirit as it emanated from the body of the medium during the pinnacle of a séance. Lombroso described it as a kind of “etheric” or “radiant body” which is “able temporarily to utilize the terrestrial molecules that surround them for the purpose of building up a kind of material body capable of manifesting itself to our senses.”⁶⁷ Lombroso describes the materialized presence of this radiant double as a “binding link” between the physical, living world and that of the spirit of the dead.⁶⁸ The resulting spirit not only becomes a repeated mold of itself, of the individual who once lived, but becomes a hyper-sensory Doppelgänger, projecting a form of uncanny vitality unattainable to the living body. Anna’s transformation—from meek virgin in act 1 to a supernatural femme fatale in act 2—may be understood as a manifestation of this ectoplasmic sensitive double.⁶⁹ She not only embodies an intensified character archetype, but her vocal and spiritual powers are strengthened as well, as suggested by her increased range and expanded modes of vocal delivery in act 2. Anna’s heightened metamorphosis, augmented by the Willis’ unremitting physicality at the end of act 2 (fig. 4), may be understood as the opera’s own ectoplasmic climax, projecting an operatic celebration of paranormal materialities rather than an embarrassing failure of dramatic effect.

Taken in full, Le Villi evades Wagnerian sublimation of the body and moves past ambivalent Italianate attitudes toward ghostly beings to instead embrace the material aspect of the supernatural more than ever before. Though prior works like Donizetti’s Maria de Rudenz embrace the material aspects of the supernatural, we have in Le Villi a near inversion of the relationship of the physical and the spiritual. Whereas Donizetti’s eerie Maria is not a specter at all, Puccini’s Willis are ghosts who have heightened presence and power in the real world. Unlike prior operas in the Italian repertoire that feature protagonists’ death scenes as the culminating moment of drama, Le Villi defies precedent by presenting the heroine’s death at the midpoint of the work. Even so, Anna’s death takes place only in the libretto, and her veiled funeral procession in “L’Abbandono” serves as the point to signal to spectators—through the use of distant choral voices—that palpable presences reside beyond the frame of the stage, or the confines of the living. The subtle foreshadowing of “L’Abbandono” is carried forth more boldly in the following “La Tregenda,” which presents the opera’s wild tarantella. Anna’s ghostly resurrection and the Willis’ gradual manifestation in act 2 only confirm what is introduced within the intermezzi: the world of the living leaves much to be seen and experienced. Le Villi’s own strange ending is not a climactic death scene in the traditional sense (not least because it is a man who dies) but it is the spiritual aftermath, the interaction of physical life and a vital, realized afterlife, that finally serves as the focal spectacle of the opera’s denouement.

Puccini’s material girls appear not as a careless manifestation of a generation-old approach to gestural mimesis, but as a revitalized presentation of tradition which eschews passive mysticism, serving as a representation of a broadened space-time continuum that speaks to both the past and the future of the Italian operatic tradition. The juxtaposition of Puccini’s contemporary symphonic sensibilities with an antiquated treatment of the body works to create temporal dissonance. By alluding to old Italian conventions of representing the body in opera, we gain a stronger sense of the “pastness” of the Willis, whose bodies literally move like ghosts. Nevertheless, we can see these exceptional maidens as a product of their time, enlivening a heightened materialist approach to the spectral shared by modern scientists, spiritualist performers, and practitioners. In Puccini’s first opera, we perceive glimpses of the novel sensations and soundscapes that reach maturity in the composer’s later realist works. Le Villi’s take on the ghostly body points toward the goals of operatic verismo, manifest in experimental attempts to achieve a material, rather than metaphysical or mystical, form of sonic, sensory, and corporeal experience, achieved here through beings that were once only evanescent wisps in theatrical space and time.

Jane Sylvester is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her ongoing research centers on studies of embodiment, material culture, and sensory history in Italian opera from the late nineteenth century onwards. Jane’s current book project explores the intersections between verismo opera and histories of science in post-Unification Italy, and her newest work examines contemporary Italian operatic revivals through production collaboration and haute couture fashion design. Her recent writings are published or forthcoming in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Puccini in Context (Cambridge University Press), and in Embodied Musicology: Ways that Embodiment Shapes Performance and Reception (Brepols Press). Her research has been externally supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, and the Presser Foundation. Jane received her PhD in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music in 2021.

Footnotes