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).
Like Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Giordano, the other important Italian opera composers of his generation, Puccini was heavily influenced not only by Verdi, whose last opera, Falstaff, was first performed eight days after the premiere of Manon Lescaut, but also by Wagner, who died when Puccini was 24, and by the Frenchmen Gounod, Bizet and Massenet, whose works were in vogue during the 1880s and '90s. Later, he was influenced by Debussy and Richard Strauss, and he maintained a lively interest in even the most avant-garde musical developments. In the last year of his life, for instance, he went to Florence to attend a performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire under the composer's direction, and he demonstrated his appreciation of his younger colleague's work.
Although Puccini wrote for the voice with a skill that few other composers have matched, and although all of his significant compositions are operas, it is wrong to think of him as a purely vocal composer. The apparently natural beauty of his melodies is equalled by his sophisticated harmonic textures and his masterly orchestration. Above all, Puccini was a complete man of the theatre, skilled in gauging his musical-dramatic effects and coups de théâtre. He wrote only one comic opera - Gianni Schicchi - and in choosing texts for most of the others he favoured plots in which the female protagonists, weak or strong, suffer atrociously and often violently.
Despite his provincial background, Puccini developed into a cosmopolite who was at home all over Europe and in North and South America. He enjoyed hunting, boating and motoring. In 1886 he had a son by Elvira Gemignani, the wife of a Luccan merchant. Their relationship was turbulent - she was his intellectual inferior and was pathologically jealous, and there were many other women in Puccini's life - but he married Elvira after her husband's death in 1904. From 1891 they lived at Torre del Lago, on Lake Massaciuccoli and not far from Lucca (from 1898 in an opulent villa that Puccini had had built to his own specifications), but in 1922 he moved to nearby Viareggio, by the sea. Puccini, a heavy smoker, died of throat cancer at a clinic in Brussels before he was able to complete the final scene of Turandot. The completion was done by Franco Alfano, but at the premiere, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, stopped the performance at the end of the last scene that Puccini had finished and said, "The opera ends, left incomplete by the death of the Maestro."
