PUCCINI AND LUCCA
- Puccini operas in an open-air theatre near his home.
- New, larger amphitheatre opening in 2008 to mark the 150th anniversary of Puccini's birth.
- Based in Lucca with visits to a selection of art and architecture and to places associated with Puccini.
NEAR THE HAMLET OF TORRE del Lago on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli, only a couple of miles inland from the Tuscan coast, Giacomo Puccini built himself a villa. Here he wrote most of his operas, and in later life sought refuge between the rigorous demands of the worldwide tours which fame and success had thrust upon him. Here also is the open-air theatre where, since 1955, there has been an (almost) annual festival to celebrate the local boy who brought to a culmination the most Italian of the arts, lyric theatre. In 2008 the festival will celebrate the 150th anniversary of Puccini’s birth in Lucca with the inauguration of a larger and more impressive theatre on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli.
Other places associated with the composer are scattered through the hills and valleys of the hinterland including his birthplace in Lucca, the village of his ancestors and childhood holidays, churches where he worked as an organist, bars he frequented. Though Rome, China, Paris and Japan provide the settings of his best-known operas, it is salutary and strangely enlightening to sense the creative process in the context of turn-of-the-century Tuscany.
Puccini was the last Italian opera composer whose works continue to be regularly performed in opera houses throughout the world; his death marked the end of three hundred years of Italian hegemony in this branch of artistic creation. Moreover, his works are perhaps the best loved in the whole operatic repertoire. An occasional critic may still cavil, but Puccini’s music-dramas continue to exercise their glorious power by going straight for the heart, and the tear ducts.
The tour is based in Lucca, which is only fifteen miles from Torre del Lago. Within the remarkably complete and beautiful circuit of Renaissance ramparts, Lucca consists of a dense network of streets and squares with innumerable fine palaces and churches, outstanding among which are the Romanesque churches with distinctively Lucchese façades of superimposed arcades.