Giacomo Antonio Domenico Secondo Michele Maria Puccini (Lucca 22nd December 1858 - Brussels, 29th November 1924) is considered one of the best composers of opera music between the XIXth and the XXth century.
Born in a family of musicians (from many generations the Puccinis were chapel masters of the Dome of Lucca), after the death of his father when he was five years old, was sent to study to his uncle Fortunato Magi, who considered him a student not too much talented and with poor discipline, but he however became an organist.
The tradition tells that the decision to devote himself to the musical theatre grew after having attended a performance of Verdi's Aida in Pisa, where he arrived on mule back. To this period dates back the first known compositions, among them a mass, a mottetto and a cantata ("The sons of beautiful Italy").
Left Lucca, from 1880 to 1883 Puccini studied at the conservatory in Milan, where he was student of Amilcare Ponchielli and Antonio Bazzini. In 1883 he participated to the competition for operas in single act organized from Sonzogno publisher. Le Villi, on Ferdinando Fontana's booklet, did not win the competition, but in 1884 it was performed at Teatro dal Verme in Milan under the sponsorship of Giulio Ricordi publisher, Sonzogno's rival.
Encouraged from the success of Le Villi, Ricordi commissioned one new opera to the duo Puccini-Fontana, destined this time to La Scala theatre, but Edgar (1889), written in nearly five years, gathered nothing but esteem and in the following decades underwent to drastic rearrangements without however never entering in the repertoire.
In 1891 Puccini moved to Torre del Lago (nowadays Torre del Lago Puccini): he loved its rural world and he considered it the ideal place to cultivate his passion for hunting and the noisy parties between artists. In Torre del Lago the music-master made his shelter, at the beginning in an old rented house, then building the villa where he lived since 1900. Here he composed his most important works.
After the half failure of Edgar, the third opera - Manon Lescaut - was an extraordinary success, perhaps the most authentic of his career. It marked moreover the beginning of one fruitful collaboration with the librettisti Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, the first one replaced Mark Praga and Domenico Olive in the final phase of the genesis, the second in a minor role. Illica and Giacosa wrote the booklets of the following the three works, the most famous and performed than all other Puccinian theatre. The first one, Bohème (based on the plot of Henry Murger), is perhaps his most celebrated opera.
Between the masterpieces of the late romatinc opera panorama, Bohème is an example of drammatic synthesis, structured in 4 pictures of sudden rapidity. The next one, Tosca represents Puccini's raid in the historical melodrama. The subject, drawn from Victorien Sardou, can recall some stereotypes of the realist opera, but the musical solutions anticipate the newborn musical espressionism. Madama Butterfly (based on a David Belasco's drama) is the first exotic work of Puccini. Its first performance at La Scala in 1904 was a total failure (probably organized from the competitors); however, after some rearrangement, the opera received a new and long-lasting success.
In the meantime it began the more difficult years in his life. In 1903 he was seriously wounded in a car accident and had to stand one long and painful convalescence. In 1906 Giacosa's death put an end to the collaboration that had given life to the previous masterpieces.
In 1909 it was time for a tragedy and a scandal that hit deeply the musician: the twenty-three year old servant Doria Manfredi, persecuted from Elvira's obsessive jealousy, committed suicide with poison. This drama aggravated further the relationships with his wifee and had heavy legal aftermath. In 1912 also Giulio Ricordi died, the publisher Puccini considered as a father.
In the artistic sphere, the passion for the exotism (from which Butterfly was conceived) pushed the musician more and more to face with the language and contemporary international musil styles: in 1910 "The child of the West", a western ante-litteram, and in 1917 "The swallow", intended as operetta and become later a single hybrid between melodrama and operetta. But the crisis manifested in the enormous amount of aborted projects, sometimes abandoned at an advanced stage of development. He tried many times since the last years of the XIXth century to collaborate with Gabriel d' Annunzio, but the spiritual distance between them was too great.
Puccini's eclectism was manifested totally in the so-called Triptych, three short works performed for the first time in New York in 1918. The three movements, everyone lasting an act, introduce various characters completely different between each other: "The coat" tragic and realistic, elegiac and lyric "Nun Angelica", comic "Gianni Schicchi". Of the three, the last one became the most popular, while "The coat", initially judged inferior, earned with the time the full favor of the criticism. Nun Angelica was instead the author's beloved one. Conceived to be performed together, the three works composing Triptych are nowadays mostly performed individually, bound together to works of other composers.
The last work, Turandot, remained unfinished: Puccini died in Brussels in 1924, for complications during throat cancer cares. His grave is in the chapel of his villa in Torre del Lago.
The last two scenes of Turandot were completed by Franco Alfano, under Arturo Toscanini's supervision, but the very evening of the debut Toscanini suspended the performance where Puccini had interrupted it, with Liù's death. In 2001 a new end, composed by Luciano Berio and based on the same booklet and on Puccini's first draft, saw the light.
