Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini was born in 1858 in Lucca, a town in Tuscany in central Italy. For five generations his family had been the church musicians of the town. His father died when he was five, and the family was left poor. As a boy he earned money by playing the organ in churches and the piano in cafés. In 1876, at 18, he is said to have walked the 30 kilometres to Pisa to hear Verdi's Aida. According to his own story, he decided that night to write operas. A grant from the queen of Italy paid for his studies at the Milan Conservatory.

His first opera lost in a competition and won nothing. But his friends raised the money to stage it in Milan in 1884. It was a success, and Ricordi, the biggest music publisher in Italy, became his publisher for life. Verdi, then 70, heard about the young man. He wrote in a letter that Puccini followed the new fashions, "but he keeps to melody, which is neither old nor new." Puccini later said that Verdi was always kind to him when they met in Milan. Then came the operas the whole world knows. La bohème was first performed in 1896, Tosca in 1900, and Madama Butterfly in 1904. Butterfly was booed on its first night at La Scala in Milan. Puccini rewrote it, and three months later the new version was a great success. He lived in a house by a lake near Lucca. There he hunted ducks, and he loved fast cars and motor boats.

He died in Brussels in 1924, at 65. His last opera, Turandot, was left unfinished. At its first performance in 1926, the conductor Toscanini stopped the orchestra at the point where Puccini had stopped writing. He turned to the audience and is said to have told them, "Here the opera ends, because here the Maestro died." After Verdi, Puccini is the best-loved of all Italian opera composers. Some of his arias, the solo songs in his operas, are among the most famous melodies ever written. One of them, "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, became known to millions in 1990 as the theme of the football World Cup.