cover image PUCCINI: A Biography

PUCCINI: A Biography

Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, . . Northeastern Univ., $30 (343pp) ISBN 978-1-55553-530-8

The life of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) has been frequently rehearsed in biographies and sketches, but seldom with the thoroughness that Phillips-Matz, who authored Verdi, the esteemed biography of the other Italian opera master, brings to it. With an intimate knowledge of the Italian scene, a lifetime's experience in writing about opera and interviewing its practitioners, she has unearthed many new documents and letters that help fill out the picture of a composer highly successful in his lifetime but remarkably lacking in self-assurance. Puccini developed early, aided in great measure by his publisher, Ricordi, who invested heavily in him from the start; seldom has an artist owed so much to a helpful businessman. There are those who feel Puccini never matured beyond those perpetual audience-pleasers, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly and Tosca, but it was not for lack of trying, and both La Fanciulla del West and Turandot were attempts at larger statements. Puccini's relations with his ever-shifting cast of librettists were always in a state of crisis, and he often seemed unable to convey to them quite what he wanted. His domestic relations were even more chaotic. Married early to a woman who cast an eagle eye on his constant flirtations, Puccini seems often to have been a prisoner in his own home; his wife even drove one imagined paramour to suicide. Infatuated all his life with the glamour of speed, Puccini reveled in fast cars and motorboats, though one car crash nearly killed him; otherwise he loved nothing better than to hunt with country friends in the lonely Florentine marshes. This is an exemplary portrait, casting much new light on a generally shadowy figure. Illus. not seen by PW. (Oct. 18).