2. Rivalries and Reputation

Donald Macleod sees how the characters Puccini created in La Bohème illustrate the penury of the composer's own student years in Milan.

Giacomo Puccini was man of the theatre to his fingertips. Born in Lucca in 1858, into a distinguished family of church musicians, Puccini was never destined to follow in his forebears’ footsteps. His fate was sealed when as a teenager he walked thirty miles to hear Verdi’s Aida. He knew immediately that theatre was his calling and from that point on he wrote almost exclusively for the stage.

A perfectionist and an often unreasonable taskmaster, Puccini agonised over each of his operas. Beginning with Manon Lescaut, the opera that launched Puccini internationally, this week Donald Macleod follows the off and the on-stage dramas of La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La fanciulla del West, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, Il tabarro and the opera he left incomplete at his death in 1924, his final masterpiece, Turandot. The stories on stage are interleaved with events in his personal life, from an early scandal over his affair with a married woman and some very dodgy skulduggery in his business dealings, to the suicide of one of his servants, a tragedy of such proportion, he was plunged in to a deep depression, haunted by the events for the rest of his life.

In a week celebrating a composer whose music expresses every human emotion, there's a host of landmark recordings, including the voices of Jonas Kaufmann, Angela Gheorghiu, Anna Netrebko and Roberto Alagna, We'll hear Mimì's touching calling card from La Bohème, in the classic Victoria de los Angeles version while Renato Scotto pours all Madam Butterfly's hopes into the heartbreaking Un bel dì. There's the raw pain of Sister Angelica mourning her dead son, and the dark desperation of a jealous husband in Il tabarro. On Wednesday Callas and Gobbi’s anguished, sadistic torture scene in Tosca still has the power to shock us as much as it did on its first night in 1900. It's high stakes and nail-biting tension in La fanciulla del West as Minnie trades the life of her outlaw lover on the outcome of a card game. Joan Sutherland’s icy Princess Turandot, a magnificent pairing with Luciano Pavarotti’s Prince Calaf comes on Friday along with a certain aria made famous by the 1990 world cup, heard here in the hands of another Puccini specialist, Jussi Björling.

The project of finding a new operatic subject to follow the success of Manon Lescaut turned in to a scandal when Puccini fell into an argument with another composer over the rights to a book. Was this all a bit of hype engineered by the publishers, or was it a situation of Puccini's own making?

La Bohème, Act 1
Mi chiamano Mimì
Victoria de los Angeles, soprano
RCA Victor Orchestra
Thomas Beecham, conductor

La Bohème, Act 1
Pensier profondo!
Legna!
Si può
Nicolai Ghiaurov, bass, Colline
Rolando Panerai, baritone, Marcello
Luciano Pavarotti, tenor, Rodolfo
Gianni Maffei, actor, Schaunard
Michel Sénéchal, tenor, Benoit
Berlin Philharmonic
Herbert von Karajan, conductor

Capriccio sinfonico
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly, conductor

La Bohème, Act 3
Donde lieta uscì
Dunque è proprio finita….Addio, dolce svegliare
Anna Netrebko, soprano, Mimì
Roland Villazon, tenor, Rodolfo
Nicole Cabell, mezzo soprano, Musetta
Boaz Daniel, baritone, Marcello
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Bertrand de Billy, conductor

Tosca, Act 1
Mario, Mario ... son qui Tosca
Ora stammi a sentir
Non la sospiri la nostra cassetta
Or lasciarmi al lavoro
Ah quegli occhi ... Quale occhio al mondo
Mia gelosa!
Angela Gheorghiu, soprano, Floria Tosca
Roberto Alagna, tenor, Cavaradossi
Royal Opera House Orchestra, Covent Garden
Antonio Pappano, director