Giacomo Puccini (1858 - 1924)

Because Puccini was so theatrical, critics and academics have always tried to deny him his proper place among serious composers. The public, however, feels differently, and Puccini remains one of its favorites.

Born in Lucca, Italy, Puccini was descended from several generations of professional musicians. At first he was not interested in carrying on the family tradition, but his mother compelled him to study music. As a teenager he held down two jobs as church organist. Drawn to gadgets and machinery, he was intrigued by the organ and by the mechanics of music, doodling and improvising during services. Several factors combined to push him into a career as a composer: some church pieces and a cantata he wrote enjoyed a favorable reception; he heard Aida, the latest Verdi opera; and finally, scholarships from a great-uncle and Queen Margherita of Savoy enabled him to study at the Milan Conservatory from 1880-83.

Life in the big city never really agreed with Puccini, but it influenced his work. His bohemian existence as a poor student later found expression in La Bohème. Though loosely associated with the verismo movement, which strove to create more natural and believable opera theater, Puccini did not hesitate to write period pieces or to exploit exotic locales. In Tosca he wrote an intense melodrama set in Rome during Napoleonic times. For Madama Butterfly he chose an American story set in Japan.

Having enjoyed consistent acceptance up to that point in his career, Puccini was completely unprepared for the total failure of Madama Butterfly when it was first presented in 1904. But he had faith in the work and revised it until it was accepted. The complications with Butterfly undermined his confidence and temporarily prevented him from moving on to new projects. But later, during a visit to New York he agreed to write La Fanciulla del West, based on David Belasco's popular play The Girl of the Golden West. Though reluctant to embrace "modernisms"—Strauss' Elektra confused and repelled him—Puccini cautiously adapted to changing times in La Fanciulla, absorbing the influence of Debussy's Pelléas, which he admired.

World War I caused the next major break in Puccini's creative life. Hostilities complicated his negotiations to write an operetta for Vienna, now in enemy territory. The operetta became instead a light opera, La Rondine, produced at Monte Carlo and welcomed coolly at the Met as "the afternoon of a genius". Puccini never regained his youthful eminence and romantic spontaneity, but he continued to work seriously, broadening his horizons.

A chain-smoker, Puccini developed throat cancer and was taken to Brussels in 1924 for treatment by a specialist. Though the surgery was successful, Puccini's heart failed, and he died shortly afterward. At the time of his death, he had been working on the most ambitious of his operas, Turandot, based on Schiller's romantic adaptation of a fantasy by Carlo Gozzi, the 18th-century Venetian satirist. In Turandot for the first time Puccini wrote extensively for the chorus, and he provided an enlarged, enriched orchestral tapestry that showed an awareness of Stravinsky's Petrouchka and other contemporary scores.