Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini, born in Lucca in 1858, was the last of a long dynasty of church musicians and the composer who carried Italian opera triumphantly into the twentieth century. After studies at the Milan Conservatory, he found his footing with Manon Lescaut (1893), the work that made him famous and effectively anointed him heir to Verdi. There followed the three operas on which his global popularity still rests, La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904), and later the more adventurous La fanciulla del West, Il trittico, and the unfinished Turandot, left incomplete at his death in Brussels in 1924. Puccini’s gift was for melody that goes straight to the heart, for orchestration of cinematic warmth and precision, and for an unerring instinct for the theatre: he chose subjects about ordinary people caught in love and loss, and gave them tunes that the whole world came to know. More than any composer of his era, he understood how music could make an audience weep on cue.