Born: December 22, 1858. Lucca, Italy
Died: November 29, 1924. Brussels, Belgium
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Giacomo Puccini
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In his own words....
". . . the Almighty touched me with his little finger and said ‘Write for the theater—mind, only for the theater!' And I have obeyed the supreme command."
Italian opera composer. The greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi, and one of the most popular composers in the modern operatic repertoire.
This simple statement sums up Giacomo Puccini the composer. He was, in all ways, a man of the theater and a true successor to Giuseppe Verdi. His music, perhaps more than any other composer's, has come to represent opera both for the opera lover and for the general public.
Puccini's early training in Lucca reflected the expectations of a family
that had an established tradition of musical service to the church. His first
serious study was with his uncle, Fortunato Magi. By age fourteen, he had been
engaged as an organist at various churches in the city, and he began composing
seriously three years later. It was a performance of Verdi's Aida in Pisa
when he was eighteen that confirmed his desire to write for the theater, and
he immediately set his sights on Milan, where he began his studies at the conservatory
in 1880. His first opera, La villi, was premiered in Milan and greeted with
great enthusiasm. His next work, Edgar, was commissioned by the publishing firm
of Giulio Ricordi, a relationship that would last the rest of his life. Edgar
was soon followed by a string of successful works that secured Puccini's
place as the predominant composer in Italy: Manon Lescaut, La bohème,
Tosca, and Madame Butterfly. His later works, La Fanciulla del West, La rondine,
Il trittico, and Turandot, while less often staged, have nonetheless maintained
a place in the theater.
The quality of Puccini's melodic gift is the common element through all
these works. His point of departure is the kind of poignant, affective melodies
found in Verdi's later works. While in Verdi's operas these melodies
occur at the height of emotional development, they are the very stuff of Puccini's
music. His style is often hyper-emotional—a constant turning up of the
emotional thermostat. This is intensified by the use of many of these themes
as leitmotivs. But Puccini used these melodies differently than either Wagner
or Verdi. Verdi used such melodic ideas to snap our memory back into focus,
and Wagner used them to create a complex musical subtext that tells us more
than the action on the stage. Puccini, on the other hand, uses them to guide
our emotions—foreshadowing action, hinting at motive, and overwhelming
us with pathos. It is musical technique that, as one writer noted, diminishes
the aesthetic distance between ourselves and the action at hand. The intimacy
helps to explain the extraordinary success of his operas.
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