Almost hidden in the wall of a side chapel in an ancient Tuscan church is a tiny door, not 70 centimetres across. Covered in the same uneven, pitted and scratched plaster as the wall, it would be easy to miss it, and yet this battered little portal is probably one of the most significant in all Italian music. The 14-year-old Giacomo Puccini would climb through it every Sunday and clamber up to the modest organ to play for Mass, his first steps as a professional musician on his way to a glittering career.
Years later, when he was established as the highest paid composer in the world, Puccini would hang a small photograph of that organ in the lakeside villa that became his cherished home, and where he lies buried in the family mausoleum. He never forgot those early days in the parish church of San Paolino, just around the corner from the house where he was born in the northern Tuscan town of Lucca – a place from which, despite his riches and fame, he would never stray far. Clearly, the mercurial spirit of Tuscany flowed through him as liquid as the melting melodies that were to become his trademark.
This year marks 100 years since Puccini’s death, and Tuscany is remembering this anniversary with gusto. It’s perhaps the perfect year to visit Puccini’s roots, walk the streets he knew, visit his birthplace and lakeside sanctuary and above all, hear the operas that established him as the master dramatist of his age.
Born in 1858, he was christened Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, so acquiring the forenames of the Puccini family musicians who had preceded him, all of whom had been organists at Lucca’s cathedral of San Martino from 1740 until his father Michele’s death in 1864.
His childhood home was a spacious apartment on the second floor of a typical four-storey house in Corte San Lorenzo, just across from Piazza Cittadella, where he played football like any other young boy. Today the piazza has a fine sculpture of the composer at the height of his fame, relaxing in a chair, cigarette in hand (always a cigarette: it’s said he could smoke 100 a day, a habit that would kill him). All around the square are cafés and restaurants named after his operas, the aroma of coffee and good Italian food filling the air.
The ticket office for the birthplace is here, where you can also buy sheet music and see an extraordinary video. A reel of film made in 1924 was discovered when the birthplace was undergoing restoration. It shows Puccini with his wife, Elvira, and son, Antonio, in the garden of a villa that Puccini designed and built at Viareggio, on the Mediterranean coast near Lucca. He sits at the piano and plays, but maddeningly, the film is silent so we can’t be sure what he was playing. This was the year he was working on Turandot, so perhaps he was giving a hint of what was to come.
He didn’t live to finish the opera, but the house where it was composed, after careful restoration, is scheduled to reopen to the public in 2026 to mark the centenary of Turandot’s Milan premiere. Puccini’s 1901 Steinway, the piano at which he composed Turandot, is currently lodged at his birthplace in Lucca. Let’s hope it will return to its home in the studio at Viareggio.
Lucca is entirely enclosed by its mighty ramparts, meaning that the visitor can enjoy its wealth of fine medieval and Renaissance architecture in traffic-free streets. The churches and cathedral have beautiful, multi-layered facades made up of ranks of delicate pilasters backed by bands of green and white marble. Puccini knew and played in most of them as his education at the city’s Luigi Boccherini Conservatoire progressed. The music school is still in operation today, offering free concerts in its auditorium and sending forth a delightful cacophony of trumpet, piano, flute and violin practice out into the surrounding streets.
After he graduated in 1880, Puccini moved to Milan Conservatoire to study with Amilcare Ponchielli. His first opera Le Villi (1883) attracted the attention of the influential publisher Ricordi and while it and the following Edgar (1889) did not meet public approval, the publisher’s faith in Puccini kept him going. Manon Lescaut (1893) finally brought success and a measure of security for a man who was already developing a taste for the good things in life: property (he owned several houses in his lifetime) expensive clothes and later the new-fangled motor car (he would acquire 15 over 23 years).
The massive popularity of La bohème (1896) ensured he could finally settle permanently in his beloved Tuscany, enabling him to buy a property on the shores of the Lago di Massaciuccoli, where he could indulge in his twin passions of shooting by day and composing by night. He transformed what was a rustic house into an elegant art nouveau villa, living and worked here until 1921, his son Antonio ensuring it would be preserved as a museum. Homely rooms are filled with its original furniture and belongings, carefully preserved personal touches that tell you so much about Puccini; photographs of family, fellow musicians and artists, caricatures of crazy rehearsals, manuscript scores in his deft hand. Most poignant are the scribbled notes home he made while undergoing traumatic treatments in Brussels in 1924, telling of his weakness and fear of further surgery – procedures he did not survive.
To walk into the spacious studio in which Tosca was conceived in 1900 and Madama Butterfly in 1904 is a head-spinning experience, until you realise that here too, at the monumental black upright Forster piano, Puccini also composed La fanciulla del West (1910), La rondine (1916) and Il trittico (1918). This was his creative engine room, a swivel chair enabling him to switch from keyboard to desk and back again as he worked feverishly into the night, a place where you can feel his music in the very fabric of the building. Just across the hall is the hunting room, where after a long day, his boots and guns were put away, the ducks and coots of the lake safe at least until sunrise.
Il trittico, the last piece he wrote here, his triptych of one-act operas, is his most “Tuscan” piece. Its opener, Il tabarro, takes place in France, but the other two, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi are set in his beloved province, Suor Angelica in a convent outside Siena and Gianni Schicchi in medieval Florence. While the first two are tragedies, Gianni Schicchi is unashamedly comic, and shows Puccini at his most playful. The music basks in permanent sunshine and Puccini can’t resist including a paean of praise for the Tuscan capital, “Firenze è come un albero fiorito” (“Florence is like a blossoming tree”). Its most famous aria “O mio babbino caro” (Oh, my dear Papa) has become a signature tune for the whole city, sung by busking aspiring sopranos on the Ponte Vecchio almost every day in summer.
A trip to Tuscany would not be complete without hearing some of Puccini’s music, and plenty is on offer this year. The grand Puccini Festival takes place in a 3,200-seater lakeside open air theatre near his villa at Torre del Lago and runs from July to September. The programme this year includes those early works, Le Villi and Edgar, plus Manon Lescaut, La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot.
There are plenty of Puccini pot-pouri evenings in Lucca’s churches, but this year at least, there is a chance to hear some fine music-making in one of Puccini’s favourite haunts, the Caffè Di Simo-Caselli in Via Fillungo. This elegant, late 19th-century building has seen better days, and is currently only open as a music venue, its mirrored shelves empty and its marble-topped bar adorned merely with a lonely coffee-maker, but in the midst of the tables and chairs stands a grand piano, and a series of instrumentalists and singers are performing their own homage to Puccini in his centenary year.
I heard some truly affecting singing from soprano Maria Novella Malfatti with the impressive Petr Yanchuk at the piano. The enthusiastic reception for their music brought to mind a note that US inventor Thomas Edison sent to Puccini in 1920: “Men die and governments change, but the songs of La bohème will live forever.”
