Puccini, Giacomo

(1858–1924)

   Second only to Giuseppe Verdi in the annals of Italian opera, Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca (Tuscany) to a family of musicians. He studied at the conservatory in Milan between 1880 and 1883, but his first publicly performed works did not achieve any great critical or popular success. His third and fourth scores, Manon Lescaut (1893) and La Boheme (1896), by contrast, won international acclaim and remain today two of the most frequently performed classical operas. His two subsequent works, Tosca (1900) and Madame Butterfly (1904), were initially greeted with skepticism by musical critics, but met with overwhelming enthusiasm from audiences. After 1904, Puccini collaborated with some of the finest orchestras in the world, producing a series of comparatively minor works. At the time of his death in 1924 in Brussels, he was working on what is arguably his masterpiece, Turandot, which was finished by the composer Franco Alfano and presented at the Scala Theater in Milan in 1926. During the performance, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, famously halted the music in the middle of the third act to tell an emotional audience “at this point, the maestro died.” Less musically innovative than Verdi, Puccini’s operas are nevertheless characterized by rich orchestration, a wonderful gift of melody, great dramatic intensity, and pervasive eroticism.