"Nessun dorma" from Turandot

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (b. 1858- d. 1924) was born in Lucca, Italy, in 1858. His parents, Michele Puccini and Albina Magi, had nine children, of which Giacomo was the sixth. His great great grandfather – also named Giacomo – began the family’s musical line in Lucca as the maestro di cappella of the Cattedrale di San Martino. He was succeeded by Giacomo’s great grandfather, grandfather and eventually his father Michele; they each studied music at Bologna, composed for the church, and some of them composed operas. Due to his position, Puccini’s father was famous in northern Italy and, when he died, his funeral was an occasion of public mourning.

The first notable operas by Puccini are widley considered to be Le Vili, Manon Lescaut, Edgar – all written and performed within about thirteen years after he finished at the Milan Conservatory. Next – came his four-act opera, La bohème, which to this day is one of the world’s most popular operas. Puccini drew influence from his own poverty prior to success of Manon Lescaut in his creation of the bohemians; there were parallels between events in his own period of poverty and events in the opera. 

Puccini’s exposure to a wide range of dramatic literature from an early age gave him a flair for being able to spot the operatic potentials of plays and his career was carefully managed by the publisher Giulio Ricordi. Ricordi advised him on possible subjects, found librettists and smoothed over any creative differences. When Puccini first saw Tosca (the play by Victorien Sardou), he wrote to his publisher asking him to gain permission from the author to create an opera and Sardou obliged. Some of his contemporaries saw the music of Tosca as being influenced by Richard Wagner, whereas others argued he had a definitive style of his own. Tosca is considered to be Puccini’s first foray into verismo.

Puccini was the leading exponent of the genre of opera known as ‘verismo’ – Italian for ‘realism’. Verismo is characterised by a story rooted in real life (rather than that of the gods or mythology), where the music and drama are seamlessly matched and often describe a story of passion and romance. The style was made popular by the success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892). 

Big, beautiful and unabashedly romantic, Puccini’s effortless lyricism is the hallmark of his style. His writing was influenced by two nineteenth-century operatic giants – Verdi and Wagner. Like Wagner, Puccini often uses musical ideas – leitmotifs – to denote characters or ideas. He also responded to the music of his contemporaries, and some of the newer ideas of Debussy, Richard Strauss and even Stravinsky can be found in his music.  

All Puccini’s operas are noted for their superb stagecraft. He claimed that he could compose only when he was able to visualise his characters in his mind’s eye, considering their position on stage and their motivation. His operas often showcase his wonderful ability to unite music, words and drama into a single moment. 

Although most of his famous operas focused on tragedy (the heroine dies in La bohème and  Madam Butterfly, and in Tosca both the hero and heroine, as well as their nemesis, die), he also produced a popular comedy, Gianni Schicci. 

Excerpts from https://www.eno.org/composers/giacomo-puccini/