Giacomo Puccini

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) understood exactly what he was doing: he was writing operas for people who cried at them. He studied with Ponchielli and Mercadante, failed the first two times he tried for the Conservatory, and arrived at his mature style through a patient process of figuring out exactly what worked. What worked was: a soprano in an impossible situation, a melodrama with no ambiguities, a plot that moved like a train. He understood cinema before cinema existed.

La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904) are three of the most performed operas in the world, and they are constructed with surgical precision to produce specific emotional effects at specific moments. Puccini learned from Wagner (the leitmotif system), from Mascagni (realism as spectacle), and from his own theatrical instinct (which told him to cut anything that slowed the story down). The results are not subtle, but they are extraordinarily effective: the third act of Butterfly is one of the most devastating things in opera, and it earns every minute of it.

He spent the last decades of his life working on Turandot, which he left unfinished at his death. Turandot is a different kind of opera — colder, more architecturally ambitious, with a score that looks forward to the 20th century more than back to the 19th. The incomplete final scene was completed by Franco Alfano, which Puccini's estate refused to use for decades. The famous Nessun dorma that ends Act III was written three years before Puccini's death — he was still finding new things to say.

StyleItalian verismo at its most theatrical. Cinematic pace, soprano-centric drama, lush orchestral scoring. Morality is simple; the emotions are not. No irony, no distance, no comfort.

Listen: La Bohème, or Tosca if you want something harder. Start with the famous arias — they are famous for a reason — then go back and hear them in context.