Puccini: A Biography

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.

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.

Came in great quality! =)

This author may be a fine researcher, but if she were writing about Jack the Ripper, somehow he would come out covered in gray putty as a schoolyard bully. Where are the passions, the longings, the excitement that surely Puccini felt in his worldwide travels and struggles? His mother's intense pursuit of her son's education, his youthful indifference to family expectations, his girlfriends, his not-always-discreet affairs and his long-suffering wife Elvira wind as a ribbon through details of his homes, love of cars, clothes, luxury, and arguments with publishers and conductors. Where are the smells, the clothing textures, the changing scenery that make a person's life come alive? It's a good book and the only biography I've read on this great compuser, but it falls short of making him real enough to imagine being with. It pursues the changes in world history, like the founding of Italy, and world travel, like crossing the Atlantic, that evolved through Puccicin's life. A good book and well documented, in need of a bit of editing, but no page turner. I bought it at the Austin Lyric Opera shop before a performance and feel it's a good introduction to the composer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I loved it! It really gave me a feel for what Puccini was like. Very very detailed, including many excerpts from letters Puccini wrote. I bought this for my husband, but read it before he did since we were on our way to Lucca and Torre del Lago.

superb bio