Giacomo Puccini

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini

(born Dec. 22, 1858, Lucca, Tuscany — died Nov. 29, 1924, Brussels, Belg.) Italian composer. Born into a family of organists and choirmasters, he was inspired to write operas after hearing Giuseppe Verdi's Aïda in 1876. At the Milan Conservatory he studied with Amilcare Ponchielli (1834 – 86). Puccini entered his first opera, Le villi (1883), in a competition; though it lost, a group of his friends subsidized its production, and its premiere took place with immense success. His second, Edgar (1889), was a failure, but Manon Lescaut (1893) brought him international recognition. His mature operas included La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madam Butterfly (1904), and The Girl of the Golden West (1910). All four are tragic love stories; his use of the orchestra was refined, and he established a dramatic structure that balanced action and conflict with moments of repose, contemplation, and lyricism. They remained exceedingly popular into the 21st century. He was the most popular opera composer in the world at the time of his death; his unfinished Turandot was completed by Franco Alfano (1875 – 1954).

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Music Encyclopedia: Giacomo (Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria) (ii) Puccini

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(b Lucca, 22 Dec 1858; d Brussels, 29 Nov 1924). Italian composer, son of Michele Puccini and fifth in a line of composers from Lucca. After studying music with his uncle, Fortunato Magi, and with the director of the Istituto Musicale Pacini, Carlo Angeloni, he started his career at the age of 14 as an organist at S Martino and S Michele, Lucca, and at other local churches. However, a performance of Verdi's Aida at Pisa in 1876 made such an impact on him that he decided to follow his instinct for operatic composition. With a scholarship and financial support from an uncle, he was able to enter the Milan Conservatory in 1880. During his three years there his chief teachers were Bazzini and Ponchielli.

While still a student, Puccini entered a competition for a one-act opera announced in 1882 by the publishing firm of Sonzogno.He and his librettist, Ferdinando Fontana, failed to win, but their opera Le villi came to the attention of the publisher Giulio Ricordi, who arranged a successful production at the Teatro del Verme in Milan and commissioned a second opera. Fontana's libretto, Edgar, was unsuited to Puccini's dramatic talent and the opera was coolly received at La Scala in April 1889. It did, however, set the seal on what was to be Puccini's lifelong association with the house of Ricordi.

The first opera for which Puccini himself chose the subject was Manon Lescaut. Produced at Turin in 1893, it achieved a success such as Puccini was never to repeat and made him known outside Italy. Among the writers who worked on its libretto were Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, who provided the librettos for Puccini's next three operas. The first of these, La bohème, widely considered Puccini's masterpiece, but with its mixture of lighthearted and sentimental scenes and its largely conversational style was not a success when produced at Turin in 1896. Tosca, Puccini's first excursion into verismo, was more enthusiastically received by the Roman audience at the Teatro Costanzi in 1900.

Later that year Puccini visited London and saw David Belasco's one-act play Madam Butterfly. This he took as the basis for his next collaboration with Illica and Giacosa; he considered it the best and technically most advanced opera he had written. He was unprepared for the fiasco attending its first performance in February 1904, when the La Scala audience was urged into hostility, even pandemonium, by the composer's jealous rivals; in a revised version it was given to great acclaim at Brescia the following May. By then Puccini had married Elvira Gemignani, the widow of a Lucca merchant, who had borne him a son as long ago as 1896. The family lived until 1921 in the house at Torre del Lago which Puccini had acquired in 1891. Scandal was unleashed in 1909 when a servant girl of the Puccinis, whom Elvira had accused of an intimate relationship with her husband, committed suicide. A court case established the girl's innocence, but the publicity affected Puccini deeply and was the main reason for the long period before his next opera.

This was La fanciulla del West, based on another Belasco drama; it was given its première at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in December 1910. In all technical respects, notably its Debussian harmony and Straussian orchestration, it was a masterly reply to the criticism that Puccini repeated himself in every new opera. What it lacks is the incandescent phrase, and this is probably why it has not entered the normal repertory outside Italy.

Differences with Tito Ricordi, head of the firm since 1912, led Puccini to accept a commission for an operetta from the directors of the Vienna Karltheater. The result, La rondine, though warmly received at Monte Carlo in 1917, is among Puccini's weakest works, hovering between opera and operetta and devoid of striking lyrical melody. While working on it Puccini began the composition of Il tabarro, the first of three one-act operas (Il trittico) which follow the scheme of the Parisian Grand Guignol - a horrific episode, a sentimental tragedy (Suor Angelica) and a comedy or farce (Gianni Schicchi). This last has proved to be the most enduring part of the triptych and is often done without the others, usually in a double bill.

In his early 60s Puccini was determined to ‘strike out on new paths’ and started work on Turandot, based on a Gozzi play which satisfied his desire for a subject with a fantastic, fairy-tale atmosphere, but flesh-and-blood characters. During its composition he moved to Viareggio and in 1923 developed cancer of the throat. Treatment at a Brussels clinic seemed successful, but his heart could not stand the strain and he died, leaving Turandot unfinished. (It is usually played today with Franco Alfano's ending.) All Italy went into mourning and two years later his remains were interred at his house at Torre del Lago which, after his wife's death in 1930, was turned into a museum.

Puccini's choral, orchestral and instrumental works, dating mainly from his early years, are unimportant, though the Mass in A♭ (1880) is still performed occasionally. His operas may not engage us on as many different levels as do those of Mozart, Wagner, Verdi or Strauss, but on his own most characteristic level, where erotic passion, sensuality, tenderness, pathos and despair meet and fuse, he was an unrivalled master. His melodic gift and harmonic sensibility, his consummate skill in orchestration and unerring sense of theatre combined to create a style that was wholly original, homogeneous and compelling. He was fully aware of his limitations and rarely ventured beyond them. He represents Verdi's only true successor, and his greatest masterpiece and swansong, Turandot, belongs among the last 20th-century stage works to remain in the regular repertory of the world's opera houses.

works:
Operas

Le villi (1884)
Edgar (1889)
Manon Lescaut (1893)
La bohème (1896)
Tosca (1900)
Madama Butterfly (1904)
La fanciulla del West (1910)
La rondine (1917)
Il trittico [Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi] (1918)
Turandot (1926), inc.

Vocal music

Mass, A♭ (1880)
motets, cantatas, songs

Instrumental music

orch pieces, chamber music, pf pieces

Biography: Giacomo Puccini

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The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was the most successful follower of Verdi, continuing the line of Italian operatic composers into the 20th century.

Born in Lucca on Dec. 22, 1858, into a family whose members had composed operas of local success for several generations, Giacomo Puccini learned the rudiments of music from the best local teachers, served as a church organist, and composed sacred choral works while still in his teens. A pension in 1880 from Queen Margherita made it possible for him to go to Milan for study at the conservatory. His most important teacher was the composer Amilcare Ponchielli, who encouraged him to write his first opera, Le Villi, in 1884. The work was entered in a competition sponsored by the Teatro Illustrato but received no recognition there; it was performed with such success at one of the smaller Milanese theaters that it was put on the stage at the famous La Scala opera house in 1885.

Edgar, done at La Scala in 1889, was a failure, but Manon Lescaut, performed in Turin in 1893, was favorably received and soon became a popular work throughout Italy and abroad. Puccini's first spectacular triumph came in 1896 with La Bohème, to a libretto by Giacosa and Illica, premiered in Turin. Its touching portrayal of episodes in the lives and loves of students in Paris and the simplicity and accessibility of the music in gay, romantic, and pathetic scenes excited and moved audiences from the first performance on, and its popularity has continued to the present day in all countries that enjoy opera.

Tosca, again to a libretto by Giacosa and Illica, which was given in Rome in 1900, was a more serious and melodramatic work, with relatively few moments of lyricism, but it was almost as successful and has also become a mainstay of the standard repertory. Madama Butterfly, set in Japan, was the first work in which Puccini used scales and melodies of non-Western music. It was poorly received at the first performance at La Scala in 1904 but has since become every bit as popular as La Bohème and probably for the same reasons: there are long passages of lush and sentimental music, tunes that are easy to remember, effective scenes of pathos, and well-calculated bits of stage business. Madama Butterfly was also his last completely successful work.

Welcoming the opportunity to visit America, Puccini wrote a new work for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City: The Girl of the Golden West (La fanciulla del West). The first performance, in 1910, was received with the expected enthusiasm, but the opera was not so well received later and is rarely performed today. He endeavored to capture the local color of the American West; there are scenes of gambling and saloons and an attempted lynching, and some of the tunes try to sound like American songs. But in the end the music sounds just like Puccini, and not Puccini at his best.

A comic opera, La Rondine, given in Monte Carlo in 1917, has not held the stage. The following year Puccini wrote three one-act operas, Il trittico, designed to be done together as an evening's entertainment, and premiered in New York. The first, Il tabarro, is melodramatic, much in the style of parts of Tosca; Suor Angelica, set in a convent and written for women's voices, is lyric and subdued; and Gianni Schicchi, the most successful and often done separately, is his best comic work, rapid-paced with some fine moments of contrasting lyricism.

Death took Puccini before he could complete his last work, Turandot. He was nearing the end of the work when he was stricken by throat cancer and taken for an operation to Brussels, where he died on Nov. 29, 1924. The opera was completed by Alfano and first performed at La Scala, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, in 1926. It has some fine lyric moments and unusually effective dramatic ones, and in some places it makes more effective use of such pseudo-Oriental devices as pentatonic scales than did Madama Butterfly, but the work as a whole lacks some cohesion and has not been as perennially popular as some of his earlier operas.

Puccini's strengths are his delicate and sensitive handling of both voices and orchestra in lyric and pathetic scenes and occasionally in lively scenes as well and his ability to write melodies that audiences learn quickly and apparently never tire of hearing. His best scenes are those for one or two characters; ensemble writing in his operas rarely approaches the excitement common in the works of such predecessors as Gioacchino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi.

Music was undergoing dramatic stylistic changes in the last decades of Puccini's life with the works of such men as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók. Puccini clung to the harmonic and melodic language of the late 19th century. The problem of reconciliation between radical changes of musical language and the venerable form of opera has been a thorny one, and it should be noted that the last operas to be truly successful in terms of wide acceptance by audiences and retention in the repertory are those of Puccini and Richard Strauss, two men who remained on the periphery of the widespread innovation so characteristic of the first decades of the 20th century.

Biography

Giacomo Puccini was the most important composer of Italian opera after Verdi. He wrote in the verismo style, a counterpart to the movement of Realism in literature and a trend that favored subjects and characters from everyday life for opera. On his often commonplace settings Puccini lavished memorable melodies and lush orchestration. It was around the turn of the twentieth century that he reached his artistic zenith, composing in succession his three most popular and effective operas, La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly.

Young Giacomo took organ lessons early on from his uncle, Fortunato Magi, and later from Carlo Angeloni. At ten, he sang in local church choirs and by age 14 was freelancing as an organist at religious services. His first compositions were for organ, often incorporating operatic and folk elements. By age 18, under the spell of Verdi's Aida, he decided he would study composition with a view to writing opera. At around this time, he composed his first large-scale work, a cantata, Preludio Sinfonico, for an 1877 competition. Other pieces came in the next few years, but none of significance.

In 1880, Puccini entered the Milan Conservatory, where he studied for three years under Ponchielli and Bazzini. While there, he wrote his first opera, Le villi, which he once more entered in a competition. Though he lost, Arrigo Boito and, more importantly, publisher Giulio Ricordi helped arrange a premiere in Milan on May 31, 1884. The work was enthusiastically received, and Puccini was on his way.

Around this time the composer met Elvira Gemignani, wife of a merchant in Lucca. They carried on an illicit affair, and she gave birth to his son in 1886. When her husband died in 1904, the two were married. Puccini's next opera, Edgar, was poorly received at its 1889 premiere. Subsequent revisions failed to rescue it from its encumbering libretto. His next effort, however, Manon Lescaut, was a sensational success at its 1893 Turin premiere. Subsequent performances in Italy and abroad bolstered the composer's growing reputation.

Puccini's next three operas confirmed his preeminence in Italian opera. La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904) were not immediately as successful as Manon Lescaut, but in time achieved greater acclaim. By the middle of the twentieth century, they had become -- and remain today -- his most often performed and recorded works.

Puccini suffered a creative dry spell for a time and was unable to finish another opera until the moderately successful La fanciulla del West (1910), which premiered in New York with Toscanini conducting and Caruso singing the role of Johnson. His sluggishness of inspiration owed much to charges by his wife he was having an affair with a servant girl, charges that drove the hapless, and as it turned out, innocent young girl to suicide in 1909.

In 1913, Puccini accepted a lucrative commission from Vienna interests, which resulted in La rondine. Received warmly at its 1917 Monte Carlo premiere, it faded under the judgment it was the least of his operatic efforts. Puccini followed this disappointment with his trilogy of one-act operas, Il trittico -- comprised of Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi -- all premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1918. Only the latter work, a comedy, was well received.

While Puccini was working on his last opera, Turandot, he was diagnosed with throat cancer (1923). During radiation treatment in Brussels, he suffered a heart attack and died on November 29, 1924. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide

Actor: Giacomo Puccini

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Born: Dec 22, 1858 in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy
Died: Nov 29, 1924 in Brussels, Belgium
Active: '50s-'60s, '80s-2000s
Major Genres: Music, Theater
Career Highlights: Cadillac Man, Aria, The Great Ziegfeld
First Major Screen Credit: Madame Butterfly (1932)

Biography

The exquisitely lyrical vocal melodies and rich impressionist orchestrations and harmonies of this late Romantic Italian composer are balanced by his "verismo" sense of life's realities creating an operatic experience of compelling intensity. His music appears in approximately 130 feature-length productions. In Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), Lauretta's exquisite, gently rolling aria "O mio babbino caro" from Puccini's one-act opera Gianni Schicchi (1918) is heard very much in the background as the villain John Geiger (played by Willem Dafoe) applies (real) leeches from a glass bottle to his chest. He says to them, "You take care of me and I'll take care of this ship." This very popular aria is also quoted at tender moments in Mystery Men (1999), A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998), G.I. Jane (1997), A Room With a View (1986), Escalier C (Staircase C, 1985), Les Bons débarras (1980) (aka Good Riddance), and Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The Death of Maria Malibran, 1971). In The Witches of Eastwick (1987), the passionate "Nessun Dorma" from the opera Turandot accompanies a comical movement fantasy as the demon (played by Jack Nicholson) frolics with three women (Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer) among a mass of pink balloons filling the splendid marble entranceway of his country mansion. They glide in different combinations on tables with rollers, as the music is projected from a boom box. The Puccini score segues seamlessly into original orchestral music by John Williams as the three women float above an exotic swimming pool in a nearby room. This wonderful aria and other excerpts from Turandot are also heard in No One Sleeps (2000), The Turandot Project (2000), the television production Turandot -- At the Forbidden City of Beijing (1999), Visions of Italy, Northern Style (TV, 1998), Love Etc. (1996), The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), Aria (1987), Castaway (1987), The Killing Fields (1984), and Serenade (1956). The complete opera received two television productions in 1983 and 1987.

Another popular Puccini aria is "Un bel di vedremo" (usually simply referred to as "Un bel di...") from the richly romantic and dramatic opera Madama Butterfly. This aria appears in the thriller Second Skin (2000), Das Geschriebene Gesicht (The Written Face, 1995), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Household Saints (1993), Hsi yen (The Wedding Banquet, 1993), Jennifer Eight (1992), Peter's Friends (1992), Il Maestro (1989), Opera (1987) (aka Terror at the Opera), Fatal Attraction (1987), the charming English gay romance and drama of cultural clashes My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), the thriller Hopscotch (1980), My Geisha (1962), Mitchell Leisen's Tonight We Sing (1953), I'll Take Romance (1937) (uncredited), and One Night of Love (1934). The complete opera received a film and TV production in 1995, TV productions in 1986, 1982, and 1974, and a film version in 1955. Puccini's Tosca was first realized in film in 1922, and has since had many film and television productions (2001, 1990, 1985, 1984, 1982, 1978, 1976, 1956, 1941). An interesting and musically excellent Italian television production by Brian Large placed Tosca: In the Settings and at the Times of Tosca (1992). The well-known aria "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca occurred in Nostradamus (2000) and The Man Who Cried (2000). Puccini's La Bohéme and Manon Lescaut have likewise received many varied productions. Aspects of the composer's life have been covered in the 1984's Puccini (TV) and the 1952 film Puccini (aka Two Loves Have I). ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

Filmography: Giacomo Puccini

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Persondata
NAME	Puccini, Giacomo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Puccini, Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Italian composer
DATE OF BIRTH	December 22, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH	Lucca in Tuscany, Italy
DATE OF DEATH	November 29, 1924
PLACE OF DEATH	Brussels

	Le Villi (Music Film)
	Madama Butterfly (1956 Music Film)
	Gianni Schicci (2004 Romance Film)

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Giacomo Puccini

Biography

Biography

Contents

Early life

Puccini at Torre del Lago

Operas written at Torre del Lago

The final years

Politics

Style

Music

Puccini's operas

Puccini's other works and versions

Centres for Puccini Studies

Samples

See also

Notes

References

External links