Festival Puccini

The Festival Puccini (Puccini Festival) is an annual summer opera festival held in July and August to present the operas of the famous Italian composer Giacomo Puccini.

The Festival is located in Torre del Lago, Italy, a town located between Lago di Massaciuccoli and the Tyrrhenian Sea, 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) from the beaches of Viareggio on the Tuscan Riviera and 18 kilometres (11 mi) from Pisa and Lucca, Puccini's birthplace.

In presenting four or five performances of up to four operatic productions each season, the Festival attracts about forty thousand spectators to its open-air theatre, the Teatro dei Quattromila (so named for its seating capacity, although 3,200 seats were actually installed), located very close to the "Villa Puccini," the house which the composer had built in 1900 and in which he lived and worked on his major operas until pollution from the lake forced him to settle in Viareggio in 1921. Along with other members of his family who died later, Puccini is buried in a small chapel inside the Villa, in a room transformed into a mausoleum after his death.

The Puccini Festival was started in 1930 following what is believed to have been Puccini's comment to friend Giovacchino Forzano, one of his librettists, in 1924 just before he left for the clinic in Brussels for his throat operation: "I always come out here and take a boat to go and shoot snipes … but once I would like to come here and listen to one of my operas in the open air." The composer was thought to be expressing the hope that his operas would be performed in the extraordinary natural stage offered by the Massaciuccoli Lake. However, this is disputed by his granddaughter, Simonetta Puccini.

Nevertheless, on 24 August 1930, together with Pietro Mascagni, who had been fellow student of Puccini's, Forzano produced the first performances of a Puccini opera on the lake shore, in front of the Maestro's house. In a provisional theatre, the Carro di Tespi Lirico with its stage built on piles stuck in the lake, a travelling opera company performed La bohème directed by Forzano and conducted by Mascagni. The same company came back in 1931 when Beniamino Gigli and Adelaide Saraceni performed in La bohème, while Rosetta Pampanini and Angelo Michetti performed Madama Butterfly. This was the beginning of what was to become a major opera festival.

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