Puccini: His Life and Works (Master Musicians Series)

Book Description

Julian Budden, one of the world's foremost scholars of Italian opera and author of a monumental three-volume study of Verdi's works, now offers music lovers a major new biography of one of the giants of Italian opera, Giacomo Puccini. Blending astute musical analysis with a colorful account of Puccini's life, here is an illuminating look at some of the most popular operas in the repertoire, including Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot. Budden provides an illuminating look at the process of putting an opera together, the cut-and-slash of nineteenth-century Italian opera--the struggle to find the right performers for the debut of La Boheme, Puccini's anxiety about completing Turandot (he in fact died of cancer before he did so), his animosity toward his rival Leoncavallo (whom he called Leonasino or "lion-ass"). Budden provides an informative analysis of the operas themselves, examining the music act by act. He highlights, among other things, the influence of Wagner on Puccini--alone among his Italian contemporaries, Puccini followed Wagner's example in bringing the motif into the forefront of his narrative, sometimes voicing the singer's unexpressed thoughts, sometimes sending out a signal to the audience of which the character is unaware. And Budden also paints an intriguing portrait of Puccini the man--talented but modest, a man who had friends from every walk of life: shopkeepers, priests, wealthy landowners, fellow artists. Affable, well mannered, gifted with a broad sense of fun, he rarely failed to charm all who met him. A new volume in the esteemed Master Musicians series, Puccini offers a masterful portrait of this beloved Italian composer.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent Musical Bio........2006-04-01

Having read nearly all of the books on Puccini, I feel at least competent to evaluate them. The one that moved Puccini to the level of "worth a book" was Mosco Carner's 1959 book, Puccini, a Critical Biography. The information given was fairly accurate for what was known then. The main fault was the continuing"character analyisis" of the composer. In the 60's Wm. Ashbrook wrote a book on the operas. It too is accurate in presenting many new and interesting facts as well as fasitnating interpretations.In addition it is very well written. Since then there have been a number of other books on the composer and his operas. Of the latest two; Budden and Matz, I must choose Budden. Before discussing Budden's merits, I should say that Matz's book is an excellent chronicle of Puccini's life and filled with anecdotes and interesting facts.It is an entertaining read. The basic problem,for me, is it pretty well leaves the music alone. While Puccini's life is certainly interesting, his music is what is most important, at least for me. Budden's book does a fine job of combining Puccini's life and discussing the music. He writes most effectively about the operas. Their creation struggles. Their multipule revisions. The facts are accurate and presented clearly. He writes with a clarity about music that is both refreshing and rare. There is one other book on Puccini I would like to mention and that is a very expensive one [why??] published by Chicago University and written by Michael Girardi. It presents a most original view of the operas but it is not easy to read. It is stimulating. I hope this helps you decide.
Thanks;
Paul Zappa

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

Average customer rating:

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)
Arthur Groos , and Roger Parker
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0521264898

Book Description

This guide presents a unique collection of critical, analytical, and documentary essays on Puccini’s most popular opera. There are new studies on the background to Parisian bohemianism (by Jerrold Seigel), on Puccini’s musical language (by William Drabkin), and on the opera’s stage history (by William Ashbrook). Following research in Italian archives, and a thorough study of the published sources (many of them previously unknown to modern scholarship), the editors have added further essays on the genesis of the opera, the structure of the libretto, and aspects of the work’s reception. The book also contains a brief study of Puccini’s working methods as seen through the autograph score, a full synopsis, discography, many illustrations, and an appendix of related documents (some published in English for the first time).

Average customer rating:

Disappointing as a Biography
Puccini: a restless visionist and revisionist
Solid biography

Puccini: A Biography
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz , and William Weaver
Manufacturer: Northeastern
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 1555535305

Book Description

Descended from four generations of distinguished composers and organists, Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was driven by family tradition and an ambitious mother to pursue a career that brought him worldwide recognition as the greatest composer of Italian opera after Giuseppe Verdi. But behind the brilliant creator of such lasting works as La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Rondine, and Turandot, there was a person racked with indecision, self-doubt, bouts of depression, and private misfortunes.

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.

Customer Reviews:

Disappointing as a Biography.......2003-10-19

Puccini was reviewed as a wonderful account of Puccini's life and, while the author does tell us the events of his life, this account is less readable than most biographies I've read. She covers the facts of his life in a disjointed fashion. She will bring up a point and then say she will cover it in a later chapter, or she will say she covered it earlier. She arranges the chapters according to the operas he wrote, which is chronological, but the information she writes jumps around so much that it's distracting. The best biographies read as interestingly as the best fiction, and unfortunately this did not measure up. Puccini's life was certainly very interesting and this could have been a great book. Perhaps her editor should have done a better job.

Puccini: a restless visionist and revisionist.......2003-02-11

Having sung in "Tosca" and "Madama Butterfly", my interest was piqued when I first heard about Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's wonderful new biography about Giacomo Puccini. Using his operas as chapter divisions, the author gives a firm basis on which to look at Puccini's life as he struggled with his music, his collaborators, his family, his publisher, his singers, Arturo Toscanini and himself.

Restless and constantly on the move was Italy's greatest twentieth-century composer. The composer was not content to stay long in one place, she tells us. He had a house here, a house there; he didn't like this one, he longed to be at yet another one....this was no laboratory musician! Through the sharing of Puccini's letters (and he wrote unceasingly, it seems), Phillips-Matz offers us glimpses into the continual torment the composer faced, either from his own high standards and inabilities to finish projects to the endless revisions of present and past operas on which he was working. Puccini seemed to be under perpetual pressure. The author is careful not to be judgmental about her subect; in fact she includes a surprising number of revealing interviews that she, herself, conducted with singers who had performed Puccini operas and had worked with him in his later life.

Phillips-Matz's book is not so much a book about Puccini's music as it is about process. How did the composer go about choosing texts? What was he feeling when he composed? How did he envision the final outcomes of his operas? The relationships with those who were closest to him are perhaps the best aspects of this book, especially those with his wife and Toscanini. The author almost seems to be encouraging the reader by saying this: "here is what Puccini was like; now go hear his music and see what connections you can make."

Solid biography.......2002-12-16

Not as good--or as long--as her Verdi, Phillips-Matz's new bio of Puccini is solid and competent. She is at her best with scenery, at her weakest with the music. Though this biography will not soon replace Mosco Carner, it's worth the purchase price and the reader's time.

Puccini and His Operas (New Grove Composers Series)

Average customer rating:

Puccini and His Operas (New Grove Composers Series)

Manufacturer: St Martins Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0312244185

Average customer rating:

Puccini: A Biography
Howard Greenfeld
Manufacturer: G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0399125515

Average customer rating:

The Puccini Companion
Simonetta Puccini
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

History & Criticism | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0393320529

Book Description

What forces helped shape the output of this high-living, often arrogant, but immensely talented composer? This fascinating collection includes Simonetta Puccini's essay full of intimate details about her family, as well as writings by experts on the racist politics behind the creation of Madama Butterfly; Puccini's fascination with American culture as exemplified in Fanciulla del West; his grappling with twentieth-century musical practices in Trittico and Turandot; and the changes that early recording technology sparked in turn-of-the-century operatic performance style.

Giacomo Puccini (Paperbacks in Musicology No 5)

Average customer rating:

Giacomo Puccini (Paperbacks in Musicology No 5)
Kurt Michaelis
Manufacturer: C F Peters Corp
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 379590269X

Starcrossed: A Biography of Madam Butterfly (Signature Books)

Average customer rating:

Starcrossed: A Biography of Madam Butterfly (Signature Books)
Brian Burke-Gaffney
Manufacturer: Eastbridge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Japan | Asia | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1891936484

Book Description

Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Europe and America since its debut in 1904. It has also inspired a global-level debate about whether the tragic heroine of the opera, Cho-Cho-san, was based on a real-life model.

Starcrossed looks at this controversy and presents compelling evidence that, in fact, there was no real life Cho-Cho-san. Nonetheless, the author demonstrates that, despite the cultural disparities evoked by the opera and the clash of values embodied in it, there lie buried in the history of Nagasaki many untold tales of true international romance and cooperation.

Nagasaki, the setting for the opera, holds many of the answers to the international identity debate, however, the city has remained virtually silent in the matter, in large part, argues Burke-Gaffney, because the story of Madame Butterfly is locally viewed as a Western romance with values alien to many Japanese.

Penetrating beyond consideration of Madame Butterfly as a work of art, Starcrossed explores the literature from which the opera springs, including a wide variety of primary sources in both Japanese and Western languages. Drawing on these insights, Burke-Gaffney presents the opera as a window on Japan's changing relationship with Europe and America from the seventeenth century through the post World War II occupation.

Book Description

Puccini the Thinker traces Puccini's development as an opera composer and thinker, focusing on the composer's ideas as they appear in his operas. The book, written for the operagoer and the admirer of Puccini's operas in addition to the musicologist, has chapters on all of Puccini's operas and divides them into three general categories: myth and vision; God, religion, and the Roman Catholic Church; and economics, politics, and society. Within these three subdivisions, this book explores the growth of Puccini's thought, dramatic skills, and ideas. Puccini the Thinker also includes a short biography of the composer, descriptions of notable productions of his operas, and discussions of major Puccinian singers and conductors.

Average customer rating:

Complete Operas of Puccini
Osborne
Manufacturer: Scribner
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Board book

General | Music | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0689111843

Book Description

This is the first hand account of Rudolf's Vrba's experience as a registrar in the prison camp as well as the story of his daring escape.

Customer Reviews:

Ben Hecht was wrong.......2007-08-21

Ben Hecht was too easy on Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian "Zionist" leader who sold his soul to Adolf Eichmann. You have to read Dr. Vrba's book to learn just how culpable Kastner was in the extermination of the first 400,000 Jews of Budapest. Until I read Vrba, I thought Kastner's greatest crime was that he saved himself and his friends and family from the Nazis, that he testified at Nuremberg on behalf of SS Col Kurt (Gold Teeth) Becher, and that he lied about it all. Now I know that Kastner got the warning for which Vrba worked so hard in plenty of time not only to warn the Jews of Hungary of what was in store for them (certainly, not "resettlement") but also to lay the groundwork for resistance. It turns out that Eichmann had only 140 Germans in Budapest to help him deport one million people. And they all got on the cattle cars willingly, sheep led to the slaughter.
None resisted. None scuffled with the SS. None tried to take one SS man's life along with his or her own. They even served in Kastner's Jewish police, which helped Eichmann load the cattle cars.
The book is a chore. Despite the title, about 95% of the book deals with the details of Auschwitz. I did not need to read all about 4,000 naked women standing for hours in the December cold waiting to be gassed and other terrible memories. I had read all that before. I borrowed the Vrba book because I wanted to know more about his attempt to warn world Jewry. He succeeded but we all failed him

A Book on Every Page.......2006-04-22

When reading this book I was struck by how many human lives are mentioned in passing, summed up in a paragraph and lost. The volume and diversity of tales told in this book reflects the number and diversity of people Mr. Vrba came into contact with during his horrific ordeal. Most of them died.
Do not pay any attention to the sole reviewer who seeks to discredit Mr. Vrba's testimony. It amazes me that people seek to diminish or descredit personal testimony about the Holocaust by calling into question whether 1.5 million or 1.75 million people were brutally murdered. The simple fact is that the Nazi's and their puppet regimes murdered six million Jews for nothing more than being Jewish. There was no American, Jewish or British conspiracy to make these atrocities up, the Germans kept very thorough records. Records that help convict the remnants of the regime at Nuremberg. These records support the facts documented by Mr. Vrba and far from being a fraud, they suggest that he was a reliable eyewitness to the most horrific and unbelievable systematic extermination the world has ever seen. His struggle is an amazing story.

Trying to understand why it happened........2006-04-20

This is an extraordinary book about a teenager's journey through the Nazi extermination camps. Rudolf managed to escape from Auschwitz and warn the Hungarians Jews about the real purpose behind the upcoming transports thus saving hundreds of thousands.

This book is near impossible to put down as Mr. Vrba recounts in a fairly matter of fact way the horrors that he witnessed and experienced first hand. It is difficult to understand how he did not give up. Curiously, even though Vrba is Jewish, I did not detect a strong religious belief as central. Rather he seems driven by a near preternatural will to live underpinned by his desire tell the truth about the Nazi death machine to the outside world.

Over the last few years, I have been trying to understand the Holocaust and the faultlines of our human psyche that were exploited to make it possible. This book helps as it details how the desire to eliminate Jews and other underdesirables was carried out as the grass root level. Rudolf is at his best describing the day to day jobs of the people who actually did the killing.

The book was near impossible to find as it is out of print with its original title "I Cannot Forgive". The demand for it will only increase as Professor Vrba just passed away.

Also German vast trove of holocaust archives are about to be released. For some reason, Germany held up for sixty years archives that detail the deaths of up to 14 million people. Maybe because they were waiting for all the important figures to die?

Perhaps those who doubt will find answers as these records are released.

A proven fraud and liar...........2006-04-13

Sorry, but Mr. Vrba was exposed as a fraud before a court of law in Canada in 1988. This has nothing to do with " holocaust denial", only with his gross errors of fact. The three most obvious were:

His supposed knowledge of the gas chambers and crematories of Birkenau;

Nothing corresponded to the truth: neither the arrangement of the rooms, nor
their dimensions, nor the number of ovens, nor the number of muffles; for
example, he placed the "gas chamber" and the room with the crematory
ovens on the same level, with a sketch of a railway track running from one
to the other for the flat car; in reality the room with the crematory ovens
was located on the ground floor, while the "gas chamber" was located below
ground, and no railway track could have linked an underground room with a
room located on the ground floor.

Himmler's alleged visit to Birkenau in January of 1943 for the inauguration
of a new crematory with, at its highpoint, the gassing of 3,000 persons;
and the supposed total of 1,750,000 Jews gassed at Birkenau from April 1942
to April 1944.

Himmler's last visit to Birkenau took place in July 1942. Furthermore, in January
1943, the first of the new crematories at Birkenau was far from finished (the
Auschwitz museum has documents from the construction staff which mention the
construction problems caused by the winter cold, which verify that Vrba's claim is
false.). Vrba's book opens grandly with the alleged 1943 visit, described with a
great wealth of detail; even the reflections and conversations of Himmler and of
his entourage were reported. But all of that, too, derived from Vrba's imagination.

According to Vrba, the Germans had "gassed" about 1,750,000 Jews in Birkenau alone
in the space of just 25 months (from April 1942 to April 1944). Of that figure,
150,000 came from France. But Serge Klarsfeld, in 1978, in his Memorial to the
Deportation of the Jews from France, had concluded that, during the entire length
of the war, the Germans had deported to all their concentration camps a total of
only 75,721 Jews (French, foreign, and stateless) from France. Furthermore, the
total number of deaths in the camp according to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum was
"about 1,500,000",far less than the number Vrba claimed for April 1942 to April 1944
alone.

Vrba was forced into headlong retreat regarding his claims. Instead of maintaining
as he had for years, that in the book he had shown the greatest care for truth
and accuracy, he declared that it was just a literary effort in which he had
recourse to poetic license, meaning fiction and falsehood.

The story of a heroic survivor and witness of 'the Shoah'........2006-04-02

Rudolf Vrba passed away at the age of eighty- two in late March 2006 . He was one of five Jews who escaped the Auschwitz death camp during World War 2. This book contains the story of his heroic escape . He and a friend Alfred Wetzler, a Hungarian Jewish leader, hid three days in a pile of lumber and then using a mixture of tobacco and gasoline to throw the dogs and guards off their scent, made their escape. In spring of 1944 they described to the Allies the situation of the camp in what were called 'The Auschwitz Protocals'.
This was one of the major sources for enabling the world to know of that horror of horrors which was the world the Nazi extermination camps.
This is by all accounts one of the most powerful of all accounts of personal witness of the 'Holocaust'
Vrba went on to become a Professor of Pharmacology and build a family of children and grandchildren in Canada.

I Cannot Forgive (AKA I Escaped from Auschwitz)

Average customer rating:

A proven fraud and liar.
Holocaust brilliance.....
This Book Makes a Lasting Impression
Survival of the Fittest, With a Smile

I Cannot Forgive (AKA I Escaped from Auschwitz)
Rudolf Vrba
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

Customer Reviews:

A proven fraud and liar........2006-04-15

Holocaust brilliance............2001-06-01

This book is undoubtably one of the best written books on the Holocaust and stands together with such masterpieces as Olga Lengyel's 'Five Chimneys' and Alicia Appleman-Jurman's 'Alicia, my story'. Vrba writes in a plain, informative, no holds barred fashion and describes in intense detail his escape from Slovakia to Hungary, the time at Novacky Camp in Slovakia and ultimately the time he spent in Auschwitz. His escape from Auschwitz together with Fred Wetzler is nothing short of a miracle. This book seems to have been forgotten and does not appear on the shelves in bookshops these days and it really should as one of the best testimonies from the era.

This Book Makes a Lasting Impression.......2001-05-08

I read this book when I was a teenager in the sixties. It was my education in the Holocaust and the concentration camps of WWII Europe. The book made such an impact on me, I remember the title to this day. It's a story of courage and determination, and it's a wonderful example of the strength of the human spirit. It should be required reading.

Survival of the Fittest, With a Smile.......2000-01-04

Although a testimonial full of unbearable, vivid horror and suffering, it isn't this that makes Vber's book so gripping, and so important. What endures is his robust personality, his unbelievable physical tenacity, and, incredibly enough, his sense of humour. In short, his character. Life in the camps was capricious enough, but this book slaps you with the fact that only those with a great and unshakable optimism had any chance at all. And moral people? Forget it. Dead within hours. The survivors had to tread on bodies to stay afloat. Talk about natural selection.

I Cannot Forgive - The Full Sotry of the Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz in 1944

Average customer rating:

I Cannot Forgive - The Full Sotry of the Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz in 1944
Rudolf and Bestic, Alan Vrba
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JV5H8A

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books