Giacomo Puccini was the last composer in a family that had produced professional composers (of church music, for the most part) for five generations in a row. More significantly, he was the last Italian composer to produce a substantial body of operas that have entered the standard international repertoire. Born in the Tuscan town of Lucca, not far from the Tyrrhenian coast, Puccini was trained in his home town and then, from 1880 to 1883, at the Milan Conservatory, where his teachers included Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda. Le Villi, Puccini's first opera, achieved considerable success at its premiere in 1884, at Milan's Teatro dal Verme, but its successor, Edgar (Milan, La Scala, 1889) was not so well received. With Manon Lescaut (Turin, 1893), Puccini showed his true mettle, and although not all of his subsequent works triumphed immediately, nearly all of them were quick to attain popularity. In chronological order, they are La Bohème (Turin, 1896), Tosca (Rome, 1900), Madama Butterfly (La Scala, 1904; this production was a disaster, and Puccini heavily revised the opera before he allowed it to be performed again), La fanciulla del West (New York, Metropolitan, 1910), La rondine (Monte Carlo, 1917), Il trittico (three one-act operas - Il tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi; Metropolitan, 1918) and Turandot (La Scala, 1926).
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