When Giacomo Puccini was born in 1858, opera was a popular art form. Like today's movie audiences, opera lovers flocked to all the newest works; older material was stuff for specialists, or something to see when nothing new was around.
When Puccini died in 1924, he was writing the last Italian opera to enter the world repertory and achieve widespread popularity. When Puccini died, so did opera as a vital, constantly self-renewing art. Today, opera houses are musical museums.
At age 17, Puccini saw a production of Verdi's ``Aida'' and decided that if he were to become a composer like all his direct male ancestors going back to his great-great-grandfather, he must specialize in opera. After Puccini graduated from the Milan Conservatory, his 1883 one-act opera ``Le Villi'' brought him to the attention of Giulio Ricordi, Italy's leading music publisher.
Ricordi thought that with the proper backing, Puccini would soon be hailed as Verdi's true successor, and provided the young composer with an annuity.
Popular support was slow to come, though. Puccini's next opera, ``Edgar,'' flopped in 1889. Not until the triumphant premiere of ``Manon Lescaut'' in 1893 did anyone mention Puccini in the same breath with Verdi.
Puccini's next three works increased his fame and wealth, and have turned out to be among the most popular operas of all time: ``La Boheme'' in 1896, ``Tosca'' in 1900 and ``Madama Butterfly'' in 1904.
These three operas are still fantastically successful nearly 100 years later, but many of Puccini's following works are all but ignored.
``La Fanciulla del West'' is revived from time to time, mainly for its novelty value. Written for a 1910 Metropolitan Opera premiere, this is a true horse opera - Puccini set to music a Wild West tale.
If ``Fanciulla'' is a horse opera, 1917's ``La Rondine'' is a soap opera about commonplace domestic affairs. There's not a single hit aria in the thing, and if it weren't attached to Puccini's name, the opera would probably never be produced anymore.
In 1918 he completed a trio of one-act works, known collectively as ``Il Trittico.'' They are ``11 Tabarro,'' a seedy melodrama; ``Suer Angelica,'' a sentimental little tragedy set in a convent; and ``Gianni Schicchi,'' a comedy about a greedy Florentine family. These last two works, each about an hour long, are still performed with some regularity.
Puccini completed all but the final duet of ``Turandot'' before his death in 1924. This tale of ancient imperial China, finished by another composer, has become as popular as ``Boheme,'' ``Tosca'' and ``Butterfly.''
It is, in fact, the last truly popular opera ever written. Later works by Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Benjamin Britten and Francis Poulenc have become familiar at the world's major opera houses, but none is as beloved as Puccini's major accomplishments.
Why are Puccini's works adored, while those of his contemporaries are merely respected? In part, because Puccini appropriated the most striking techniques of his predecessors and wrapped them in a tissue of rich melodies bound up with colorful ribbons of orchestration.
Puccini picked up from his Italian contemporaries the concept of verismo opera. Verismo is Italian for ``realism,'' and is a term applied to operas about real life. They're also operas about lowlife. Instead of the captains, kings, heroes and gods of operas from Monteverdi to Giuseppe Verdi, verismo operas concern peasants, con men and itinerant actors and their dirty, petty lives.
Another characteristic of verismo is that it gives most of the melody to the orchestra and requires the vocalists to sing rather monotonous lines approaching the inflections of speech.
Indeed, verismo tries to be so true to life that it saves arias - those big solo numbers that stop the action and show off a singer's pipes - only for moments of intense introspection. Verdi's characters sing poems and speeches; verismo characters mainly sing dialogue.
The leading verismists (or, to be properly Italian, veristi) managed to produce only one hit each. Mascagni's single success is ``Cavalleria rusticana''; Leoncavallo's is ``Pagliacci.''
Puccini, on the other hand, produced a string of hits. He did not completely buy into the verismo movement, but softened the style with a traditional Italian emphasis on lovely melody and an untraditional attention to the orchestra, inspired by the works of Richard Wagner.
One of Puccini's Wagnerian habits was a use of leitmotifs, those snippets of melody that return again and again in an opera, and represent a specific character, idea or emotion. These usually showed up not in the vocal line, but in the orchestra.
It would be a mistake to call Puccini a Wagnerian composer, though. Puccini's motifs are less sophisticated than Wagner's, serving merely as handy scene-setters by recalling earlier moments in the opera.
Puccini's singers must make themselves heard over a rich, assertive orchestra, but they do not require Wagnerian jet propulsion. Tonal beauty, not force, is essential to Puccini singers, as it is to vocalists in almost any 19th-century Italian role.
And while Wagner wrote operas about mythic heroes struggling with great metaphysical and philosophical issues, Puccini wrote about common people and their private tragedies - an unsuccessful poet, a starving seamstress, a rough river-barge captain, a naive geisha.
Even Puccini's few high and mighty characters - the singer Tosca, the empress Turandot - are pulled against their will down into the petty horrors of real life. Their dramas are entirely personal; the characters are mere humans, not symbols of social forces.
Puccini's operas are loved for their emotional sincerity, and their deep poignance that results from an unprecedented melodic tension.
But viewed another way, these and other qualities strike Puccini's detractors as hopelessly tasteless. The operas, they say, are cheap tear-jerkers and shabby pop-culture shockers, just what you'd expect from verismo. Every slap of realism is offset by a drippy smooch of sentimentality.
Puccini's melodies, claim the detractors, are embarrassingly gushy. The music may be impassioned, but it lacks subtle dramatic insight.
In ``Tosca,'' for instance, at the heroine's death the orchestra cries out with one of the opera's most searingly memorable tunes. But it's from the hero's big aria, not the heroine's, and has nothing to do with the woman who's just killed herself. It is simply the most nakedly emotional music at hand. Puccini, say the detractors, is a master of nothing but the shameless manipulation of an audience.
Well, that was once the mark of a great man of the theater. Granted, it has never been the mark of a great composer. But despite his musical weaknesses, Puccini was a composer of such theatrical flair that audiences will gladly submit to his manipulations for a long time to come.
Puccini listening suggestions
Puccini's operas are plentiful on compact disc, but most of the best recordings are rather elderly. The beginner should start with ``Tosca,'' ``Boheme'' and ``Butterfly.''
It is generally agreed that the best ``Tosca'' ever recorded is the 1953 version on Angel/EMI featuring Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano and Tito Gobbi. If you must have a stereo version, a decent second choice would be one of the versions conducted by Herbert von Karajan on London or Deutsche Grammophon.
The finest ``Boheme'' is, again, a mono recording - the 1946 NBC broadcast with Lucia Albanese and Jan Peerce, conducted by the man who'd presided over the work's premiere 50 years before, Arturo Toscanini. A good stereo supplement is the 1958 London set with Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi.
There are fewer classic recordings of ``Butterfly.'' Renata Scotto is a fine heroine in this work, and can be heard with Placido Domingo on a CBS CD set.