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Giacomo Puccini
(1858 - 1924)
Descended from a family of musicians, Puccini was the most
important Italian composer after Verdi. He was born and educated
in Lucca, later studying under Ponchielli at the Milan Conservatory.
He began his career as a composer of opera with Le Villi,
premiered in 1884, based on the story from Adam’s ballet
Giselle, but won his first significant success in 1893 with
Manon Lescaut.
Other successful operas followed: La
Bohème which was first staged in 1896, Tosca, premiered
in 1900, Madama Butterfly premiered in 1904, La Fanciulla
del West (The Girl of the Golden West) in 1910, La Rondine
in 1917, Il Trittico in 1918 and Turandot, featuring the famous
tenor aria, Nessun Dorma, in 1926.
Puccini emerged into the twentieth
century music world as the ‘King of Verismo’ -
a master of theatre. Puccini wrote solely for the operatic
stage and he understood the dramatic intensity and melodic
poignancy of real life subject matter. Puccini chose to concentrate
on life’s familiar bittersweet passions and intense
emotional storms. As Puccini acquired substantial wealth he
took on the persona as the ‘grand seigneur’, building
a reputation as a dedicated game hunter, collector of cars
and motorboats and a great romantic figure. His appreciation
and compassion abounds in the substance of his operatic heroines,
their valiant struggles and, most often, melancholy demise.
Puccini died of throat cancer in 1924,
leaving his final opera, Turandot, to be finished by Franco
Alfano. Shortly before his death Puccini predicted ‘the
end of opera’, writing that the music audience had lost
its taste for melody and tolerated music devoid of logic and
sensibility. In fact Turandot was the last opera to rank as
an internationally accepted standard repertory piece. Puccini
is considered by many to be the last great composer of opera,
certainly no other composer to follow Puccini has enjoyed
such a following.
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