PUCCINI, GIACOMO ( ,1858-1924), Italian operatic com poser, was born at Lucca on June 22, 1858, of a family already distinguished in music : his great-great-grandfather Giacomo, great-grandfather Antonio, grandfather Domenico, and father Michele, having all been professional musicians. He was educated at the Milan Conservatoire where he studied under Ponchielli. In 1889, Edgar was performed at La Scala, and in 1893 his Manon Lescaut in Turin. The former, based on La Coupe et les levres of Alfred de Musset, was a failure, but the latter, founded on the well-known story of the Abbe Prevost (which had been previously treated by three other composers, Halevy, Auber and Massenet) was favourably received, and still holds the stage. Its success was as nothing compared with that of the work which followed it, the sparkling La' Boheme (Turin, Feb. 1, 1896). The libretto is based on Murger's novel from which four scenes are taken, and the skill and resource and effectiveness with which they are treated leave no room for doubt as to the merits of the work. In La Tosca (Rome: Jan. 14, 1900), based on Sardou's tragedy, Puccini had an altogether different task, of which, how ever, he acquitted himself no less successfully. The work con tains indeed some of the strongest and most genuinely dramatic music which he ever wrote, and like La Boheme has enjoyed unlimited popularity at the hands of the general public from the first.
Madame Butterfly, on its first performance at La Scala on Feb. 17, 1904, was pronounced an absolute failure. Probably
the libretto of the opera, with its unusual setting in Japan, had at least as much to do with this result as its music, but in any event the Milan public's unfavourable verdict was speedily re versed when the work was heard again at Brescia three months later, and since then its popularity has been prodigious and world-wide. If equal success did not attend its successor La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), this was easily accounted for, not only by the unsatisfactory character of its "book," but also by the undoubted inferiority of its music, so that the work, though favourably received when first per formed in New York (Dec. 1o, 1910), has never found general favour. Of the one-act operas Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi, which followed, all contain clever and charac teristic music, but only the third, based on a most amusing libretto, has kept its place in the general repertory. As regards Turandot, the composer's last work, which he had not quite finished at the time of his death, and which was completed by Alfano, and produced at La Scala on April 25, 1926, critical opinion has been sharply divided. While some condemn it severely, others reckon it the composer's finest achievement. Puccini died at Brussels on Nov. 29, See A. Weissmann, Giacomo Puccini (Munich, 1922) ; A. Fraccarroli. La vita di G. Puccini (Milan, 1925) ; and Wakeling Dry, Giacomo Puccini (Living Masters of Music) (London, 1906).