Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, presentation of the book

“Il Maggio Musicale Fiorentino per Giacomo Puccini. Un’antologia”

by Manuel Rossi

(Edizioni Edifir, 2024)

February 21st 2025, Foyer gallery, 5.30pm

Florence 20 February 2025 - After Emanuele Luzzati (2022) and Franco Zeffirelli (2023), the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino celebrates Giacomo Puccini by dedicating a volume in which are collected and narrated ten of the performances that have marked the history of May from the famous Turandot with the scenes and costumes of Umberto Brunelleschi, to another «Princess of frost»: that, certainly no less celebrated one, staged in 1997 by Zhang Yimou and again resumed, with equal success, still in the 86° Maggio Musicale, the last edition of the Festival in order of time.

A selection to attempt a narrative of the fortune of Giacomo Puccini’s opera throughout the twentieth century, through those performances that have most marked the history of the Maggio Musicale, in a relationship not taken for granted but essential, as evidenced by the more than 170 Florentine productions of Puccini titles, with a result surpassed only by the master and giant of always - Giuseppe Verdi.

Here, after the numbers, the reinterpretation of the Puccini’s work found in Florence one of its places of choice, It was precisely from this assumption that the Festival wanted as a place dedicated to the rediscovery of great masterpieces through a renewed dialogue between visual arts and music. And it is precisely following this long trail that in the great magnum sea of Puccini to Maggio have been selected ten productions - thinly reconstructed and discussed through the essays of Maria Alberti, Daniele Galleni, Michele Girardi, Didier Pieri, Manuel Rossi and interviews with Pier Luigi Pizzi and Zubin Mehta - which seemed particularly relevant to outline a history of the interpretation of Puccini in Florence, taking its cue from Umberto Brunelleschi’s Turandot del riscatto (1940), to be followed by the production of Luigi Squarzina and Pier Luigi Pizzi in 1971, to arrive at the double Fanciulla del West - Malaparte/Soffici in 1954 and Bussotti twenty years later - the paintings Madama Butterfly (1979) and Manon Lescaut (1985) by Pier Luigi Samaritani, the "Trittico" of 1983, and then reached the double turning point represented by the «fascist» Tosca of Jonathan Miller (1986) followed a few years later by Bohème (1994), also postponed in time.

A dense review that can also serve as a litmus test to understand how long the twentieth century has changed the perception and enjoyment of Giacomo Puccini’s works, in a broader and more necessary cultural and intellectual rehabilitation that seems to proceed parallel to the critical and musicological.