Giacomo Puccini - Softcover

Wilson, Conrad

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714847755 ISBN 13: 9780714847757

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2008

Synopsis

With works such as La Bohème and Madame Butterfly, Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) created some of the world s most popular and widely performed operas. His colourful orchestrations, beautiful melodies, rare theatrical sensibility, and daring choices of subject matter combined to produce timeless stage works that continue to appeal to a broad audience. In this powerful biography, Conrad Wilson examines this great composer s works and the ways in which they were influences by his many relationships with women and his contradictory personality.
Giacomo Puccini is part of Phaidon s successful 20th Century Composers series, which presents authoritative and engaging biographies of the great creative musicians of our time, augmented by striking visual material and essential reference information. This edition of the book features a whimsical new cover by Jean-Jacques Sempé, the world-renowned illustrator and cartoonist.

About this title

Review:

The latest in Phaidon Press Limited's fine 20th Century Composers series, this biography plows ground that's already been gone over many times, but does so very well. Like the rest of the books in this series, it's aimed at the more-than-casual but less-than-expert reader, and puts the composer's life and art into perspective, assisted by assorted photographs. This is a particularly good starting place for someone captured by Puccini's music dramas who's interested in how it all came about. There are no musical examples, which can be a positive or a negative depending on one's point of view and whether one reads music. New listeners may find the overly brief discography in the back of the book a useful guide.

From the Back Cover:

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) is perhaps the world's most popular composer of operas. Works such as La boheme and Madama Butterfly have a universal appeal and are an essential part of the repertoire of every major opera house. With Turandot, completed after his death, Puccini composed the last Italian work in the genre to hold a firm place in the international repertoire. Although he composed a handful of non-operatic works, his fame rests entirely on his operas, beginning with the gothic Le villi (1884) and reaching a peak of success with Boheme, Tosca and Butterfly. He is renowned above all for his gift as a melodist, but he was also a new force in musical drama, and possessed a tremendous sense of theatre. The author draws attention to the felicity, daring and extraordinary colouring of Puccini's music, and counters the view that he was a retrogressive who through his choice of harrowing subject matter aimed to shock. His effects may often have been described as 'calculated', but he wrote with an emotional tenderness and a powerful sense of theatricality for which he has not always been given full credit. His many relationships with women were an influence on his music and he was one of the greatest creators of operatic heroines, commemorating them in music that played directly on the heartstrings. The contradictions in Puccini's personality - that he was a man who revelled in the affluent lifestyle and worldly success his operas brought him, yet remained insecure about his creative powers - are fully explored in this biography which is a polemical, passionate and rational attempt to set the man from Lucca among the immortal greats.

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0714847755
• ISBN 13: 9780714847757
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240