Festival Puccini

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The Villa Puccini in Torre del Lago

The Puccini Festival (or Puccini Festival) is an opera festival that takes place annually in July and August in Torre del Lago in Italy and performs works by the Italian composer en Giacomo Puccini .

background

The festival is held in an open-air theater in Torre del Lago. The place is located between Lake Massaciuccoli and the Tyrrhenian Sea , about 4 kilometers from the beaches of Viareggio on the Tuscan Riviera and 18 kilometers from Pisa and Lucca , the birthplace of the composer.

Several operas by Puccini are staged at the festival each year, with four to five performances per opera. In recent years, operas by other composers, recitals and concerts have also been part of the festival's program. This attracts around forty thousand spectators per season to the Gran Teatro all'aperto Giacomo Puccini (Great Open-Air Theater Giacomo Puccini) with its 3,200 seats.

The open-air theater is close to Villa Puccini , where the composer lived, composed and indulged his passion for hunting from 1900 to 1921. Puccini worked here on his operas Tosca , Madama Butterfly , La fanciulla del West , La rondine and Ilertrico . The pollution of the lake caused Puccini to settle directly in Viareggio in 1921 . After the composer's death in 1924, he was buried in a small chapel in Villa Puccini .

history

Monument to Puccini by Vito Tongiani near the house where he was born in the city of Lucca

Beginnings

The Puccini Festival has been held since 1930. The idea for this is said to go back to a statement by Puccini that he made in 1924, shortly before his death:

View of the Gran Teatro all'aperto Giacomo Puccini

"I always come here and go bird hunting by boat ... but one day I want to come here and enjoy one of my operas in the open air."

- Giacomo Puccini, 1924
Puccini monument in Torre del Lago

On August 24, 1930, the librettist Giovacchino Forzano and the composer Pietro Mascagni , both friends of Puccini, staged an opera by the maestro on the lakeshore in front of Villa Puccini . In a makeshift theater, the Carro di Tespi Lirico , with a stage built on stilts, a traveling opera company conducted by Forzano and conducted by Mascagni performed La Bohème . The same opera company performed La Bohème again in 1931 with Beniamino Gigli and Adelaide Saraceni and played Madama Butterfly with Rosetta Pampanini and Angelo Michetti in the leading roles.

In the years before 1949, due to the political climate and financial circumstances, there was only one further performance at the Carro di Tespi Lirico, namely a concert in 1937.

It was not until the 25th anniversary of Puccini's death in 1949 that the festival was held again with La fanciulla del West and then continued at irregular intervals until the 1960s with many of the composer's well-known works.

Festival since 1966

The Puccini Festival has only been held annually in the summer since 1966, when the festival area was moved further north near a small harbor.

After the Puccini Festival Foundation was established in 1990, which gave the festival a solid financial basis, a new open-air theater with state-of-the-art equipment and acoustics was planned and implemented. The city council of Viareggio bought 25,000 square meters of land to create the Parco della Musica (music park) and to build the Gran Teatro all'Aperto Giacomo Puccini on it. In addition, additional rooms for rehearsals and workshops as well as a roofed studio theater with 600 seats were built.

In the long history of the festival, the Torre del Lago stage has hosted the most famous and celebrated names in the opera world. Among them were Tito Gobbi , who made his debut here as a director with Tosca , and Mario Del Monaco , who celebrated his departure from the stage here with a performance of Il tabarro , as well as Beniamino Gigli, Giuseppe Di Stefano , Plácido Domingo , Josep Carreras , Luciano Pavarotti , Renata Scotto , Katia Ricciarelli and many others.

In 2000, the 70th anniversary of the first performance by Forzano and Mascagni, the 46th Festival Puccini presented two major new opera productions with Madama Butterfly and Tosca . The program also included Puccini's first opera, Le Villi , with performances by Katia Ricciarelli and Josè Cura .

In 2004 the 50th Puccini Festival was celebrated with two major events: one of them was the new production of Madama Butterfly on the occasion of the centenary of its premiere on May 28, 1904 in Brescia . It conducted Plácido Domingo with Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato in the leading roles. The second event was an evening dedicated to Puccini's heroines, presenting the most popular arias of his favorite characters, with Plácido Domingo as the narrator in the role of Puccini.

Festival since 2010

See also

literature

  • Karyl Charna Lynn, Italian Opera Houses and Festivals. Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-8108-5359-0 .
  • Simonetta Puccini, Giacomo Puccini in Torre del Lago , Viareggio, Tuscany. Friends of Giacomo Puccini's Houses Association 2006.
  • Niclo Vitelli, Un bel dì vedremo: Il festival di Giacomo Puccini. Cronaca di un'incompiuta . Firenze Leonardo Edizioni 2016. ISBN 978-88-6800-040-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Festival Puccini at www.puccinifestival.it. Retrieved December 27, 2017 (Italian).
  2. ↑ a b A vivat of Puccini's music. Retrieved December 28, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Puccini Festival 2017. Accessed December 28, 2017 (Italian).
  4. ↑ GIACOMO PUCCINI. Retrieved December 28, 2017 (Italian).
  5. ^ Puccini Festival in Tuscany. Retrieved December 28, 2017 .
  6. ↑ The Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago offers intense productions and great voices. Retrieved December 28, 2017 .
  7. ^ A b c Niclo Vitelli: Un bel dì vedremo: Il festival di Giacomo Puccini. Cronaca di un'incompiuta . Leonardo Edizioni, Florence 2016, ISBN 978-88-6800-040-0 .
  8. ↑ Puccini Festival 2018. Accessed October 1, 2018 (Italian).