Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini was an Italian opera composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose 12 operas are among the most-performed in the international operatic repertoire. He was born Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini on December 22, 1858, in Lucca, Tuscany, into a family that had supplied church musicians to the cathedral of Lucca for five generations. His father died when he was five.

He attended a 1876 performance of Verdi's Aida in Pisa, walking from Lucca with his brother to do so, and decided then to compose for the theatre. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1880, where he studied composition under Antonio Bazzini and Amilcare Ponchielli. His first opera, Le Villi (1884), was followed by Edgar (1889) and the breakthrough Manon Lescaut (1893), which brought him a contract with the publisher Giulio Ricordi.

His three best-known operas — La Bohème (Turin, 1896), Tosca (Rome, 1900) and Madama Butterfly (Milan, 1904) — were composed in close collaboration with the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. La Fanciulla del West, set in California during the Gold Rush, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1910 under Arturo Toscanini. The one-act trilogy Il Trittico followed in 1918. He purchased a villa at Torre del Lago, on Lake Massaciuccoli, in 1891 and composed there for most of the rest of his life.

He died of complications following surgery for throat cancer in Brussels on November 29, 1924, leaving his last opera, Turandot, unfinished at the death of the slave girl Liù in Act III. The opera was completed by Franco Alfano and premiered at La Scala in Milan on April 25, 1926, under Toscanini, who set down his baton at the point where Puccini had stopped.

His name Giacomo is the Italian form of James, from the Late Latin Iacomus, a variant of Iacobus, from the Greek Iakōbos and the Hebrew Ya'aqov ("holder of the heel," the Old Testament patriarch Jacob). It is a masculine name long current in Italy.