Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini: The Last Man Everyone Agreed On

On the night of 29 November 1924 a performance of *La bohème* was under way in Rome when word arrived from Brussels that its composer had died. The performance was stopped where it stood and the orchestra played Chopin's Funeral March instead. No opera composer since has commanded that reflex. Puccini was the last figure in the art form whose death could halt a theatre mid-act, and he remains the last whose works are performed everywhere, constantly, by companies that agree on almost nothing else.

A Family Monopoly

He was born in Lucca on 22 December 1858, the last of a dynasty of composers who for more than a century had held what amounts to a monopoly on the musical life of their city. His father Michele gave him his first lessons and died in 1864; an uncle took over the teaching. From 1868 he studied violin at the G. Pacini Institute of Music, then composition with Carlo Angeloni, graduating in 1880 with a Mass for four voices — a thoroughly conventional preparation for a church career that had been laid out for him before birth.

What broke it was a journey. In 1876 he travelled to Pisa to see Verdi's *Aida*, and the ambition to write operas dates from that night. The trajectory of his life turns on a single evening in someone else's theatre.

Milan, and a Publisher's Bet

Funding was found to send him to the Milan Conservatoire, where he studied composition for three years under Antonio Bazzini and Amilcare Ponchielli, the composer of *La Gioconda*, and shared a dormitory with Pietro Mascagni. His first opera, *Le villi*, lost the Sonzogno Competition in 1883 but, in performance the following year, caught the ear of the publisher Giulio Ricordi. Ricordi commissioned *Edgar*, which underperformed at La Scala in 1889 and might reasonably have ended the relationship. It did not. Ricordi's patience through two failures is one of the more consequential acts of judgement in publishing history.

It paid in 1893 with *Manon Lescaut*, an international success that brought financial security and established him ahead of Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo among the verismo composers. From then he worked with the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, a pairing that came together almost by accident after Puccini had rejected a series of others. Together the three made *La bohème* (1896), drawn in part from his own student poverty in Milan; *Tosca* (1900), a political thriller sustained by harmonic devices more modernist than its reputation suggests; and *Madama Butterfly* (1904).

The Fiasco, and the Method Behind It

*Madama Butterfly* was booed off the stage of La Scala on 17 February 1904. Puccini withdrew it, revised it, and had it staged at the Teatro Grande in Brescia on 25 May, where it triumphed. That three-month reversal is the clearest window onto how he worked. He was extremely selective and at times paralysingly indecisive about subjects, rejecting dozens before committing; he demanded iterative rewrite after iterative rewrite from his librettists, involving himself so deeply in the words that Ricordi was regularly required to mediate the resulting quarrels. The apparent effortlessness of his melodies is the residue of an obsessive editorial process.

Cars, Scandal, and the Long Middle

He was among the first Italians of his standing to fall for the automobile, buying roughly a dozen from 1902 onwards. On 25 February 1903 one of them crashed near Torre del Lago, leaving him with a severe fracture of the right leg and chest injuries; the medical examination that followed also revealed diabetes. The convalescence delayed his work.

The worse damage came in 1909, when Elvira Bonturi — the married woman who had left her husband for him in 1886, and whom he was finally able to marry in 1904 after her first husband's death, their son Antonio then seventeen — publicly accused their maid Doria Manfredi of an affair with the composer. Manfredi killed herself. The autopsy established that she had been a virgin. Elvira was prosecuted for slander and sentenced to prison, avoided only by a payment to the Manfredi family. Scholars have argued the episode marked his later work.

The operas kept coming, spread wider apart: *La fanciulla del West*, commissioned and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in 1910; *La rondine* in 1917; and *Il trittico* in 1918, three one-act operas — *Il tabarro*, *Suor Angelica*, *Gianni Schicchi* — premiered together in New York and designed to display a range his critics denied he had. He bought and rebuilt villas at Torre del Lago and Chiatri, and from late 1921 lived mainly in a new house at Viareggio.

The Unfinished Duet

Renato Simoni proposed *Turandot* at a meeting in Milan in March 1920; by August he and Giuseppe Adami had a complete plan, presented at Bagni di Lucca, where Puccini heard the Chinese themes that found their way into the score. He stopped work in the spring of 1924, having orchestrated the first two acts and the third as far as Liù's aria. A lifelong smoker, he had been diagnosed with laryngeal cancer in 1923 and went to Brussels for pioneering radiation therapy, carrying the sketches for the final duet with him. He died there on 29 November 1924, of heart failure days after the treatment, aged sixty-five.

Franco Alfano completed the opera. It opened at La Scala on 26 April 1926 under Toscanini, who reportedly stopped at the point where Puccini had stopped and did not play Alfano's ending at all. Many scholars now hold that the final duet — Turandot's conversion into a woman in love — is a dramaturgical problem that Puccini himself could not have solved. Luciano Berio later wrote an alternative completion. The most popular opera composer in the world left his last work with a hole in it that no one has convincingly filled.

Why Giacomo Is Called a Genius

The faculty is theatrical rather than abstract: an almost infallible sense of what an audience will feel, at which bar, and what note will make them feel it. George Bernard Shaw put the succession plainly — "Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals" — and the scholar Julian Budden spent a career arguing that real innovation lies underneath the popular surface. Deutsche Grammophon's summary is the modern consensus: one of the most sophisticated as well as the most popular of all opera composers. The arias sell the tickets; the harmony, orchestration and structural control are what keep the works standing after a century of repetition.

The case against is old and was made in his lifetime by Italians. One contemporary critic wrote that Puccini "willingly stops himself at minor genius" while shunning too-daring innovation — that he had the equipment for greatness and elected, deliberately, to please. It is a fair charge in one respect: while Schoenberg and Stravinsky were dismantling the language, Puccini was refining a nineteenth-century one. His detractors add the recurring cruelty of his plots, in which small women suffer beautifully and die on cue, and call it sentimentality with a business model.

Both things are true at once. His genius is that of a supreme practical dramatist working inside inherited forms, not a theorist who changed what music could be — and the unfinished duet of *Turandot* is the honest limit case, the one dramatic problem his instincts could not carry him through.

Legacy

He was buried first in Milan, then moved in 1926 to a chapel inside his own villa at Torre del Lago. *La bohème*, *Tosca*, *Madama Butterfly* and *Turandot* have never left the international repertory since they entered it. Whatever the argument about his stature, no composer of the last century has been heard by more people.

Achievements

• Notable work: La bohème
• Notable work: Tosca
• Notable work: Madama Butterfly
• Notable work: Turandot
• Instruments: organ
• Genres: classical music, opera and verismo