Word: puccini
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...obeyed so successfully that he became one of the four alltime opera masters, alongside Verdi, Wagner and Mozart. Though some critics dismiss him as sugary and sentimental, no opera house can hope to stay in business long without including in its repertory the three major monuments to Puccini's career-La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly. Puccini himself once made a list of the houses where his operas were playing; Tosca alone was then being given in 73 cities. His works steadily draw both dedicated opera buffs and occasional fans who might not recognize another note of opera...
Musical Millionaire. Surprisingly, every one of his biographies in English is out of print, including the best recent one, the 1951 Puccini, by George R. Marek (which draws much of its material from previously unused letters). The reason perhaps is that Puccini's life seemed to sound a few simple themes, uncomplicated by the frailty of a Mozart or the herculean sufferings of a Beethoven. He looked less the popular image of an artist than of a successful banker, and he probably made more money from his music ($4,000,000 at the time of his death) than...
...public Puccini was not the whole man, as Marek and others have shown. As a child, he lived with his widowed mother and seven brothers and sisters in harsh poverty. His father, one of a long line of musicians, had been a church organist, but Giacomo started studying organ with little enthusiasm ("Your son," said an early teacher to his mother, "is meat which does not wish to be salted"). In time he showed a talent for composition, was shipped off on a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory. He was a good but not brilliant student. After graduation he stayed...
Frenzy of Remorse. Away from his public, Puccini was a painfully shy man, given to periods of black depression accentuated by a stormy family life. He had met Elvira Gemignani when he was 26, lured her away from her husband (and Puccini's old school chum), had a child by her. He married her 19 years later when her husband died. Their affair fluctuated between periods of passionate affection ("little mouse," he called her) and her storms of insane jealousy. Once he was famous, Puccini had a string of affairs with his more shapely Mimis, Musettas and Butterflys...
...Puccini once showed a friend a French lithograph of a nude girl pressed against a grated window in Venice. "This," he said, "is the kind of libretto I want for my next opera." Failing in his lifelong search for a girl who combined frailness with sensuality, he built those qualities into a procession of operatic heroines - Manon Lescaut, Mimi in Bohème, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly, Liù in Turandot. His obsession with swift love followed by swifter death gave his work a narrow emotional range, a failing of which he was conscious. He envied Wagner his heroic...