Giacomo Puccini

• 1. Introduction

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  Giacomo Puccini was a chain smoker of Toscano cigars who loved hunting and fast cars, and one of those cars nearly killed him. On the 25th of February 1903, his vehicle ran off the road from Lucca to Torre del Lago, fell several metres in the dark, and flipped over. His future wife and his son were thrown clear with minor injuries. Puccini was pinned beneath the wreck, his right leg badly fractured, part of the car pressing on his chest. A doctor living nearby pulled him out. The injury healed poorly, and the examinations that followed revealed he was also diabetic. This was the man who wrote La boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly, operas still among the most performed on earth. He came from a family that had held a single church music post for 124 years. How does a boy raised to play the cathedral organ in a small Tuscan city become the heir to Verdi? And why, for all his popularity, did critics never quite agree on his worth? Born in Lucca in 1858, Puccini lived a life as turbulent as any of his tragic heroines.

• 2. The Lucca Dynasty

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  For 124 years, from 1740 to 1864, the Puccini family held the post of maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca. The dynasty began with Giacomo's great-great-grandfather, also named Giacomo, who lived from 1712 to 1781 and was sometimes called Jacopo. The title passed from father to son: to Antonio, then Domenico, then Michele. Each studied music at Bologna, and each composed for the church. Domenico Puccini studied for a time under Giovanni Paisiello and wrote several operas. Michele, the composer's father, wrote one opera and earned a reputation across northern Italy. When Michele died in 1864, his funeral became an occasion of public mourning, and the famed composer Giovanni Pacini conducted a Requiem. It was assumed that Michele's son would one day inherit the family post. But the boy was only six years old when his father died, far too young to take the position. He served the cathedral instead as a member of the boys' choir and later as a substitute organist. The chain that had bound five generations of Puccinis to that one church would not reach a sixth.

• 3. From Seminary To Conservatory

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  Puccini received his general education at the San Michele seminary in Lucca and then at the seminary of the cathedral. His uncle Fortunato Magi supervised his musical training. In 1880, he earned a diploma from Lucca's Pacini School of Music, having studied under Magi and later under Carlo Angeloni, the same teacher who had instructed Alfredo Catalani. A grant from Queen Margherita, together with help from another uncle, Nicholas Ceru, paid for three further years at the Milan Conservatory. In Milan, Puccini studied composition under Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti, Amilcare Ponchielli, Amintore Galli, and Antonio Bazzini, and shared his dormitory with Pietro Mascagni. That same year he composed his Mass, the high point of his family's long bond with liturgical music. As his thesis piece he wrote the orchestral Capriccio sinfonico. Ponchielli and Bazzini were impressed, and the work was performed at a student concert on the 14th of July 1883, conducted by Franco Faccio. A favourable review in the Milanese publication La Perseveranza marked Puccini as a young composer of promise.

• 4. Survival By Patronage

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  Le Villi, meaning The Fairies, was Puccini's first opera, written with librettist Ferdinando Fontana after Ponchielli introduced the two at his villa. Puccini entered it into a competition advertised in April 1883, but his submission was disqualified because the manuscript was illegible. The opera survived anyway. It premiered at the Teatro Dal Verme on the 31st of May 1884, with Casa Ricordi printing the libretto free of charge and fellow conservatory students filling much of the orchestra. The success led Ricordi to purchase the work and commission a second opera, Edgar. Edgar premiered at La Scala on the 21st of April 1889 to a lukewarm response, and was withdrawn after its third performance. Giulio Ricordi defended Puccini's skill in a Milanese newspaper while blaming Fontana's libretto. Without Ricordi's loyalty, Edgar might have ended Puccini's career. Puccini had eloped with Elvira Gemignani, a married former piano student, and Ricordi's associates tolerated his life only while he succeeded. When Edgar failed, they urged Ricordi to drop him. Ricordi refused and kept paying his allowance until the next opera arrived.

• 5. The First Triumph

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  On commencing Manon Lescaut, Puccini declared he would write his own libretto so that no fool of a librettist could spoil it. Ricordi instead steered him toward Ruggero Leoncavallo, whom Puccini soon dismissed. Four other librettists cycled through the project as Puccini kept changing his mind. By near accident, the final pair, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, came together to finish it. Manon Lescaut premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin on the 2nd of February 1893, within a week of the premiere of Verdi's last opera, Falstaff. Before the opening, La Stampa called Puccini a young man for whom great hopes had a real basis. Casa Ricordi's board had been weighing whether to cut off his support, and after Edgar another failure could have ended everything. Instead Manon Lescaut became his first and only uncontested triumph, acclaimed by critics and public alike. After the London premiere in 1894, George Bernard Shaw declared that Puccini looked more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.

• 6. Living The Bohemian Life

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  La boheme drew directly from Puccini's own hunger. As a conservatory student and in the years before Manon Lescaut, he knew a poverty close to that of his characters, short of food, clothing, and rent money. Though the Congregation of Charity in Rome gave him a small monthly stipend, he often pawned his possessions to survive. The biographer Eugenio Checchi cited a student diary in which a single herring served as dinner for four people, an episode that echoes Act 4 of the opera. Puccini said of it: I lived that Boheme, when there wasn't yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera. The opera, based on Henri Murger's novel from 1851, premiered in Turin in 1896 under Arturo Toscanini. In early 1893, Puccini and Leoncavallo had each discovered the other was writing an opera on the same source. Leoncavallo claimed priority. Puccini answered: Let him compose. I will compose. The audience will decide. Puccini's version arrived a year before Leoncavallo's and became a perennial favourite, while his rival's faded into obscurity.

• 7. Realism And Far Places

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  Tosca, from 1900, was arguably Puccini's first true step into verismo, the realistic depiction of life including its violence. He had wanted the subject since seeing Victorien Sardou's play in 1889, writing to Ricordi that he saw in it the opera he needed, with no overblown proportions and no elaborate spectacle. The score uses musical signatures for characters and emotions, which some compared to leitmotivs and read as a Wagnerian turn. A critic at the Turin premiere of the 20th of February 1900 rejected that idea, writing that one could not find a more Puccinian score. Puccini also reached far beyond Italy for atmosphere. Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala on the 17th of February 1904 with Rosina Storchio in the title role, and was met with such hostility that some shouted that the butterfly was pregnant. He withdrew it, revised it for Brescia in May 1904, and reworked it again in 1907 into the standard version performed today. For Turandot he leaned on pentatonic motifs to give an Asiatic flavour, and for La fanciulla del West, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on the 10th of December 1910 with Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn, he studied American folk music to get the atmosphere.

• 8. Scandal, Politics, And A Final Cigar

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  In 1909, Elvira publicly accused the family maid, Doria Manfredi, of an affair with Puccini, and after the accusation Manfredi took her own life. An autopsy found she had died a virgin. Elvira was convicted of slander and sentenced to more than five months in prison, spared only by a payment Puccini made to the Manfredi family. Critics have speculated the episode shadowed his later work, perhaps shaping the slave girl Liu in Turandot. In 2007, documents surfaced suggesting Puccini had in fact been involved with Giulia Manfredi, Doria's cousin. In politics Puccini was nearly absent. His biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz wrote that his interest in politics was close to zero. His friendship with Toscanini broke for nearly a decade after he remarked in 1914 that Italy could benefit from German organization. He met Mussolini twice in late 1923 seeking support for a national theatre in Viareggio, and was named senatore a vita a few months before his death. A chain smoker, he developed throat cancer and sought experimental radiation in Brussels, where he died on the 29th of November 1924, aged 65. As news reached Rome during a performance of La boheme, the opera stopped and the orchestra played Chopin's Funeral March. Turandot, left unfinished, was completed by Franco Alfano and premiered at La Scala on the 25th of April 1926.