Giacomo Puccini

On Viale Verdi, facing the Palazzina Regia and a few steps from the Palazzo Municipale, there is a sculpture that attracts the attention of many tourists.

It is a bronze work donated to the city by the artist Aidyn Zeinalov[1] and dedicated to Giacomo Puccini (Lucca, 22 December 1858 – Brussels, 29 November 1924), who like Giuseppe Verdi, was a frequent visitor to Montecatini and an admired guest of the spa town in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

It was thanks to the genius of Busseto that the composer from Lucca arrived in the city.

After the numerous successes achieved – especially with Manon Lescaut in 1893 and in 1896 with La Bohème which at the Teatro Regio in Turin had Toscanini as conductor – Verdi advised the publisher Giulio Ricordi to take Puccini among the authors he preferred, thus indicating him as his musical heir.

Puccini thus became a regular at the grand hotel in Montecatini, La Locanda Maggiore, when Verdi was on holiday there.

At the Torretta or Tettuccio spa, Puccini would often meet with conductors such as Arturo Toscanini on the eve of performances of his old and new operas around the world.

It has been said that he had already had meetings with Verdi at the Locanda Maggiore, thanks to which he had entered the musical stables of the publisher Ricordi.

In nearby Uzzano, the Villa del Castellaccio (now Villa Anzilotti) proved to be the ideal setting for the continuation of the composition of his Bohème, as evidenced by the two autographed inscriptions he left on a wall: “Finished the 2nd act of Bohème 23-7-1895”, “Finished the 3rd act of Bohème 18-9-1895”.
Performed at the Regio in Turin on February 1, 1896, a year before Leoncavallo's opera of the same name - which debuted at the Fenice in Venice in May 1897 - it 'burned' its success. And the more Leoncavallo was angry about such a theft, the more Puccini mocked him by calling him "leonbestia", "leonasino" or even "bisbestia" inspired by the name of his rival composed at the same time of the terms "leone" and "cavallo".

Referring to the strange combination of that surname, the famous illustrator Romeo Marchetti left to posterity a drawing in which the author of Pagliacci walks with lion's paws sowing musical notes between one foot and the other. Of Giacomo Puccini, instead, he left a courtly portrait while the composer is intent, with a quill pen in his hand, on composing a musical score.

Also in Montecatini, Giacomo Puccini, fresh from the success of Tosca, secretly met Gabriele D’Annunzio. The two artists were linked by the project of an opera by Puccini, the standard-bearer of melodrama in the last phase of its centuries-old tradition, on the verses of the most prominent Italian poet of the time, Gabriele d’Annunzio, “Vate of the nation”, a project also conceived in terms of advertising by Casa Ricordi that would never come to fruition.

But it was in the spa town that the Maestro from Lucca discovered Giacchino Forzano, a journalist for La Nazione with excellent artistic creativity, who would become the librettist of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, operas that, together with La Rondine, would form the Trittico that was staged at the Metropolitan in New York in 1908.

Finally, it was at the Appennino hotel in Montecatini Alto (where a small theater, the site of the first musical rehearsals of the opera, is still preserved) that he came to compose part of La Fanciulla del West, because it had “an enchanting view, quiet and good food”.

In 1924, the great composer had to interrupt the writing of Turandot to go with his son to a hospital in Brussels where his days ended.

The mourning was universal because, as Gabriele D’Annunzio had already written in 1901 for the death of Giuseppe Verdi, also for Giacomo Puccini it could have been repeated that, with his works, he had cried and loved for all of us.

[1] Famous Russian sculptor, associate professor of the Department of the Academy of Drawing at the State Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in Moscow, member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts and, since 2018, of the Academy of Arts and Drawing in Florence, the oldest in the world.