Giacomo Puccini, whose centenary of death is in recent days, is celebrated by Biographical Dictionary of Italians from Trecca as “the greatest Italian composer of the early twentieth century”, after Verdi’s death and one of the most performed in the world.
Born in Lucca on 22 December 1858, son of an artist, he had abandoned his provincial career to complete his training as a musician in an important conservatory such as that of Milan; a choice that allowed him to learn, as a spectator, what a melodrama is, to achieve his true purpose: “to write modern works, preferably in the wake of Richard Wagner, not of Italian bel canto or Giuseppe Verdi”, as Dieter Schickling recalls in the entry written for Treccani.
Among the works cited by Treccani, ‘Manon Lescaut’ – which also became a success in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Budapest and London, where George Bernard Shaw, in an extensive review in ‘The World’, celebrated Puccini as ‘the greatest promise for the future of opera Italian’ -, ‘La bohéme’ – which was an immediate success with the public and whose economic success definitively made Puccini a rich man -, ‘Tosca’ – which immediately triumphed in the greatest theaters of Italy, Europe and the two Americas and which consecrated him, after Verdi’s death, as the most acclaimed composer in Italy -, ‘Madama Butterfly’ – which at the premiere turned out to be one of the most infamous theatrical ‘fiascos’, achieving overwhelming success at the second première – and ‘Turandot’, a project started in March 1920 and not yet completed when Puccini set off for Brussels, to operated on for cancer of the larynx, where he died a few days after the operation, on November 29, 1924.
Puccini, buried in an internal chapel of the villa of Lake Towerfor Treccani he remains the “most popular composer of his day” and, today, the “greatest Italian composer of the early twentieth century”, to whom the Teatro alla Scala will pay homage on November 29th with an extraordinary concert.