And the stars were shining…

A hundred years after his death on November 29, 1924, Giacomo Puccini remains a legend, the musician who knew how to make the classical music of melodrama truly popular. Between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the famous composer was also a real star. Young and old dressed like him - with a bowler hat, a cane, a coat - and like him they wore moustaches. In the streets you could hear the most famous arias from his operas being sung, romances that spoke of love, sensuality, passion. Back then, these were not emotions that you saw every moment on television. Everything was hidden, whispered in silence. Then you sang an aria by Puccini and imagined that you too were the protagonist of a great love melodrama. Puccini was modernity, he was the twentieth century that advanced and swept away everything old. He was a mass myth as demonstrated by his photos and the many interviews he gave to newspapers and magazines of the time. Dialogues with the press that resurface in Patrick Poini's volume "Puccini. Interviews with a star" (GFE, 2024, pp. 194).

The volume shows how, with a colloquial language and a focus on passions rather than musical science, cultivating friendships with reporters from national and foreign newspapers, improvising press conferences when they did not yet exist, Puccini managed to reach fans like no one had ever done before. It is no coincidence that his arias were the hits of the time.

You could listen to them on gramophones and the first radio stations broadcast them. Puccini was, in fact, different from the composers who preceded him, and you could feel it in his music. You could feel the passions of men and women, the feelings. No ancestral myths of the Germanic nation like Wagner or rhetoric about the independence of the Italian people like Verdi. With Puccini, melodrama left the theaters to enter the collective imagination, becoming the bridge to new forms of music, more popular, less cultured, "lighter".

Poini's book tells us all this and is fundamental to understanding how the Maestro wanted his character to be perceived by the public and how he amplified the success of his music and the stories it accompanied through communication with the press. The bohemian past, the love at first sight for Madama Butterfly, the never completed Maria Antonietta, the attempts at a collaboration with D'Annunzio, the fight against piracy in the United States and the last interview in a clinic in Brussels, are just some of the contents brought to light by Poini through the words of his protagonist.