Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is one of the most popular opera composers of all time. His operas are famed worldwide for the drama and pathos of their plots, for their wonderful melodies and for the wealth of great roles they provide singers.

Puccini was born in Lucca to a family of church musicians. In 1880 he moved to Milan to study at the Milan Conservatory. The city proved a defining influence on his career, and he attended many opera performances at La Scala. Puccini wrote his first opera, the one-act Le villi, for the Sonzogno Competition. The judges rejected the work, but its successful first performance in 1884 led Italy’s top music publisher, Giulio Ricordi, to take Puccini on. During this period Puccini became deeply involved with the married Elvira Bonturi, with whom he had a son in 1886. The couple were only able to marry after the death of Elvira’s husband in 1904.

Puccini’s second opera, Edgar (1889) was a failure, but he scored a major triumph with Manon Lescaut (1893), his first mature work. While completing Manon Lescaut, Puccini began a fruitful collaboration with librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, with whom he wrote arguably his three greatest operas: La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900) and Madama Butterfly (1904). All three are now among the most performed operas in the repertory. Following the death of Giacosa in 1906 Puccini struggled to find new subjects and collaborators. However, he continued to create impressive works, including the dramatic ‘Wild West’ opera La fanciulla del West (1910), the tender ‘lyric comedy’ La rondine (1917) and his most ambitious project, the three one-act operas that make up Il trittico (1918). Il trittico marked Puccini’s only large-scale foray into comedy, with the hilarious Gianni Schicchi closing the triptych.

Puccini’s last years were spent working on his final opera Turandot, set in ancient China. The score, laced with traditional Chinese melodies, is one of Puccini’s most skilful and brilliant. Sadly, Puccini never completed the final act – he died of throat cancer while working on the final love duet in 1924. Turandot had its premiere two years later, in a version completed by Franco Alfano.