Customer Reviews

Puccini: A Biography

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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."

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.

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.

Being a lover of Puccini's operas, I felt that Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's book might give a deeper appreciation of his life and the work that went into his compositions.
While she has painstakingly done her research, including letters, interviews and reviews, the book remains just that - research. There is little cohesion to the material and she does not inject any interpretation or further character study of the man. Aside from a few peccadillos, Puccini comes off as a dry, unhappy person who happens to write beautiful operas.
While the operas form the outline of the book, they are given rather short shrift; Puccini argues with his librettists, gets on Ricordi's nerves, finally writes the opera and it's staged successully. There is no description of the gestation of the works themselves - The various revisions of "Madama Butterfly" particularly suffers from this lack of explanation.
A great disappointment from the author who gave us an authoritative book on Verdi.

By researching in sources where other biographers have not researched, the author found much information which is available nowhere else. I already knew very little of the information in this book, even though I have read two Puccini biographies before.

Read this book if you're as interested in Puccini as I am. But don't read this book as a brief overview. The book does not hit all the high points, nor does it purport to. The book does not analyze Puccini's music, nor does it purport to.

Incidentally, there is one place where the author injects an opinion of her own: on page 268, she draws some parallels between Turandot and Aida which I had never noticed before.

A big fan of Puccini, I was anxious to learn something about his life. So, I came to this book with a lot of expectations, but, sad to say, they were disappointed. The book reads like a sequence of factual notes for a biography, rather than as a coherent piece of work itself. The style just awful; run on sentences and other stylistic infelicities abound. An good editor would have/could have helped immensely. And so much of what is included is irrelevant, such as the names of steamships on which various personages traveled back and forth across the Atlantic. And there is really no conclusion of any sort. Puccini dies; Turandot is completed and performed (sevaral pages) and... that's it. And...that's it. I'd recommend it...but warn not to expect too much.

Mary Jane Phillips-Matz had written a magisterial biography of Verdi (Verdi: A Biography); this work is far less thorough, but is nevertheless fascinating for Puccini fans (including such details as "every few yards, he would come to a complete standstill, pausing to light one of his eternal cigarettes").

After the success of Madame Butterfly, "By any standard, Puccini was rich, and his operas were astoundingly successful." However, this very success "left him dissatisfied with his own work. Believing that audiences had begun to tire of what he called his 'sugary music,' he changed direction and embarked on years of anguish as he sought to create works of greater resonance."

He considered the opera Edgar "a blunder," and wrote on a copy of the score that belonged to a friend, "May God protect you from this opera." She also notes that Mahler and Britten both intensely disliked Puccini's work.

It's not an extensive treatment, but it's an excellent one, and well worth reading for Puccini fans.

This is a very weak work full of wrong translations, on ancient state of information. In the moment does not exist any english biography of Puccini, that would be worth reading. To learn the truth about Puccini you have to learn german and read the outstanding works of Schickling and Krausser. Of both do exist italian translations, but, in the usual arrogance, no english ones.