Puccini: A Biography

In this beautifully written work, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz brings to life both the man and his circle. Setting Puccini's intriguing story within the worlds of his beloved Tuscany and the cutthroat opera business, the author follows the composer from boyhood in his ancestral Lucca, to his struggling student years at the Milan Conservatory, to his early successes and failures, to the artistic triumphs that earned him international celebrity and considerable wealth.

Filled with colorful details and anecdotes drawn from extensive primary sources as well as interviews with descendents, family friends, and colleagues, the book chronicles Puccini's personal sorrows and scandals, and recounts his stormy professional rivalries and associations in England, Europe, and the United States. Phillips-Matz also skillfully untangles the threads of the gifted artist's complex and contradictory character. She reveals a sophisticated composer who often drew upon exotic thematic material and an elegant cosmopolite who loved his several villas, expensive cars, boats, and fine clothes. Yet Puccini remained passionately wedded to the simple life of the Tuscan countryside of his youth.

This masterful biography provides the most authentic and revealing portrait to date of this major operatic composer.

Publishers Weekly

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 Boheme, 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). Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Mary Jane Phillips-Matz is the author of Rosa Ponselle: American Diva, also published by Northeastern University Press, and the highly praised Verdi: A Biography, which won the Royal Philharmonic Prize, the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and the New York Governor's Award of Excellence. She served as manager of the Spoleto Festival for several years, and is a regular contributor to Opera News. She lives in New York City. William Weaver is Professor of Literature at Bard College. He is a music critic, author of several books on nineteenth-century Italian opera, and translator of many contemporary Italian writers of fiction. He won the National Book Award for his translation of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics.