"Almighty God touched me with His little finger," wrote Giacomo Puccini, "and said: 'Write for the theater . . .' I have obeyed the supreme command."
He obeyed so successfully that he became one of the four alltime opera masters, alongside Verdi, Wagner and Mozart. Though some critics dismiss him as sugary and sentimental, no opera house can hope to stay in business long without including in its repertory the three major monuments to Puccini's career—La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly. Puccini himself once made a list of the houses where his operas were playing; Tosca alone was then being given in 73 cities. His works steadily draw both dedicated opera buffs and occasional fans who might not recognize another note of opera but cherish every note Puccini wrote. Last week, with special performances of The Girl of the Golden West in the composer's home town of Lucca, the musical world was busy honoring Puccini in the centennial year of his birth.
Musical Millionaire. Surprisingly, every one of his biographies in English is out of print, including the best recent one, the 1951 Puccini, by George R. Marek (which draws much of its material from previously unused letters). The reason perhaps is that Puccini's life seemed to sound a few simple themes, uncomplicated by the frailty of a Mozart or the herculean sufferings of a Beethoven. He looked less the popular image of an artist than of a successful banker, and he probably made more money from his music ($4,000,000 at the time of his death) than any serious composer before or since. He surrounded himself with yachts and expensive motorcars, maintained several estates and a game lodge, dyed his hair, and made fun of "artists who think they have to have dandruff to be geniuses."
But the public Puccini was not the whole man, as Marek and others have shown. As a child, he lived with his widowed mother and seven brothers and sisters in harsh poverty. His father, one of a long line of musicians, had been a church organist, but Giacomo started studying organ with little enthusiasm ("Your son," said an early teacher to his mother, "is meat which does not wish to be salted"). In time he showed a talent for composition, was shipped off on a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory. He was a good but not brilliant student. After graduation he stayed in Milan, ran up such debts with his good friend, Pietro Mascagni (Cavalleria Rusticana) that the two of them got a map and inked out in red the sections of the city they could not walk through for fear of meeting creditors. Puccini scored a critical success with his first opera, a one-acter entitled Le Villi, but he did not win a large following until at 34 he collaborated with his two most successful librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, to produce Manon Lescaut. After that his popular success was secure.