Antonio puccini
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Giacomo Puccini
b Lucca, December 22, 1858; d Brussels, November 29, 1924
Giacomo Puccini was born into a family of court composers and organists in the historic city of Lucca, Italy. With a strong feeling of tradition in the Puccini family, it was expected that Giacomo would assume his deceased father’s position as Maestro di Cappella when he came of age. By 14 he already was playing organ in a number of the town’s churches.
Albina Magi, the composer’s mother, also came from a family of musicians. Her brother, Fortunato, became her son’s first music teacher. His uncle was a strict instructor and was known to kick Puccini when he made mistakes. For his part, Puccini was unruly, easily bored and preferred to hunt for bird’s nests rather than study. Seeing little progress, Albina decided a new teacher was in order and sent the boy to Carlo Angeloni, a former pupil of her husband. Giacomo’s attitude and study habits quickly changed.
Money was scarce for the family, and to supplement his church earnings Puccini would play piano at the local bars
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Giacomo Puccini
Poetry, poetry, ardent affections, flesh, searching, almost surprising drama, fireworks finale.
Giacomo Puccini
This is how Giacomo Puccini described his "genre" in a letter written in July 1894. It is a remarkably accurate roadmap to his school of composition and one for which he struggled to find unexplored territory throughout his life. He was the Titan of Opera from the late 19th Century to the early 1920s. Even today, on the rare occasions when opera bursts into the mainstream, it is often one of his works that does so. Nessun Dorma, as popularised by Luciano Pavarotti at the 1990 World Cup, is ripped straight from Turandot, Puccini’s final masterpiece.
Across his 12 operas, an astonishing 7 of which are commonly performed works, he covered half the globe telling tales of Poor Parisian bohemians, Wild West cowboys and Chinese princesses amongst many others. Thrilling melodies, sumptuous orchestrations and gloriously melodramatic stories are a hallmark of his operas, making them fantastically engaging and endlessly moving bits of theatre.
Popul
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Giacomo Puccini
(1858-1924)
Who Was Giacomo Puccini?
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini started the operatic trend toward realism with his popular works, which are among the most often performed in opera history. But the fame and fortune that came with such successes as La Bohème, Madama Butterfly and Tosca were complicated by an often-troubled personal life. Puccini died of post-operative shock on November 29, 1924.
Early Life
Giacomo Puccini was born on December 22, 1858, in Lucca, Italy, where since the 1730s his family had been tightly interwoven with the musical life of the city, providing five generations of organists and composers to the Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca’s religious heart. It was therefore taken for granted that Puccini would carry on this legacy, succeeding his father, Michele, in the role first held by his great-great grandfather. However, in 1864 Michele passed away when Puccini was just 5 years old, and so the position was held for him by the church in anticipation of his eventual coming of age.
But the young Puccini was disinterested in
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