Puccini Was Dying Of Cancer—Hiding His Diagnosis Was A Grave Mistake

It would have been a difficult ending under the best of circumstances. Composing what would be his last opera, Giacomo Puccini was struggling to humanize Turandot, daughter of the Emperor and a woman of mesmerizing beauty. Early in the opera, she had cruelly disposed of a series of want-to-be suitors, beheading some and torturing others, with the casual cruelty of a sociopath. In the final act of the opera, Puccini was hoping to compose a compelling, yet plausible, aria that would thaw her icy cold heart without asking the audience to forget, or even forgive, her sadistic past.

Puccini’s struggle was made all the more difficult because he was suffering from persistent pain in his throat. Swallowing was difficult and his neck was so swollen he couldn’t button the top of his shirt. He saw a throat specialist, who reassured him that he simply had swelling near his epiglottis that should improve with radiation. It was 1924, and radiation therapy was seen by many as a miracle cure. But, the throat specialist didn’t anticipate a miracle; in fact, later that day, he reached out to the composer’s son, Antonio, and told him a different story. The composer was suffering from inoperable pharyngeal cancer. He didn’t have long to live.

Antonio chose not to pass on this information to his father. His silence robbed the world of one last duet from the brilliant artist, and more importantly, prevented his father from choosing how to live out his last days.

Antonio should have known better. An earlier opera, his father’s most famous composition, had already revealed the harms of lying to someone about their impeding demise. La Bohème tells the story of a group of starving artists, one of whom, Rodolfo, falls in love with a woman, Mimi, who is suffering from consumption (aka: tuberculosis). As the severity of Mimì’s condition becomes apparent, Rodolfo realizes that he is too poor to take care of her, even blaming himself for being “the cause of the fatal illness that’s killing her.”

Rodolfo faced a dilemma: stay with Mimì and hasten her death, or tell her she needs to find a man of greater means. He chose the latter, and did so by pretending to be jealous of Mimì: “a step, a phrase—a glance, a flower—everything makes him suspicious,” Mimì tells one of Rodolfo’s friends. “He shouts at me: ‘you’re not for me, take another lover.’”

They break up, but Mimì cannot shake her love for Rodolfo. As her illness progresses, she seeks him out. She encounters one of Rodolfo’s friends who, knowing how much heartbreak Rodolfo has already experienced, convinces Mimì to leave well enough alone (the Italian sounds much more eloquent). However, just before she departs, she hears Rodolfo approaching and hides out of sight. From this vantage point, she overhears him saying/singing words she never thought she’d hear again (“I love her above everything in the world”) and, a moment later, words that leave her astonished, as Rdolfo explains the reason he left her (“the poor little thing is doomed.”)

He wasn’t jealous! He loved her, and thought she’d be better off without him! Overcome with emotion, she comes out of hiding.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself: if you had a terminal illness, would you want to know? Like Puccini’s son Antonio, Rodolfo believed that delivering such news to someone stricken by a fatal illness would be cruel, merely adding pain to an already painful situation. Indeed, Mimì, upon discovering her poor prognosis, sinks into despair: “Alas, alas,” she cries out. “It’s finished.” But, reunited with her lover, she won’t have to die alone: “Solitude in winter,” they sing, “is like dying.” And in those final days together, Mimì gets a chance to tell Rodolfo “you’re my love and all my life.” Not much later. she takes her last breath. It is now finished.

La Bohème contains a lesson about the importance of communicating honestly with people who are terminally ill. But, Puccini’s son didn’t learn that lesson. Instead, after being told about his father’s cancer, Antonio brought the composer to Brussels for an experimental treatment.

Puccini started the journey with high hopes, saying that, as much as he already loved Brussels, he would love it even more if he could “find my health here again.” He brought a briefcase full of notes to work on the final Turandot duet, a scene he expected to be a “triumph of love over cruelty and death.”

Puccini’s physician strapped a collar around the composer’s neck, and filled it with radium pellets. With this treatment, his symptoms improved for a while. Here was the time—ameliorate his problem for a while, and the master would have time to complete his masterpiece.

But instead, still unaware that he had cancer, Puccini allowed himself to undergo a futile bout of surgery, in which physicians tried to remove his tumor. He survived the operation, but was never able to speak again much less finish the opera. Less than a week after the procedure, he suffered a heart attack, likely due to the stress of the arduous treatment. Now his life was finished. Puccini was never given a choice about how to spend his final days.

Mimì and Rodolfo are fictional characters. But that doesn’t diminish the lessons their story teaches us about the importance of helping people come to terms with terminal illness. No one deserves to die unaware of how quickly fate is lowering the curtain on their lives.