Puccini the Thinker: The Composer’s Intellectual and Dramatic Development

'Puccini the Thinker' traces Puccini's development as an opera composer and thinker. The subject is the composer's ideas as they appear in his operas. The book, written for the operagoer and the admirer of Puccini's operas in addition to the musicologist, has chapters on all of Puccini's operas and divides them into three general categories: myth and vision; God, religion, and the Roman Catholic Church; and economics, politics, and society. Within these three subdivisions, this study explores the growth of Puccini's thought and dramatic skill.
In this book John DiGaetani analyzes the operas as artistic reflections of Puccini's intellectual and dramatic development. The book includes translations of many of the composer's own verses, the first translations into English for most of these poems.

The Author: John Louis DiGaetani is Professor of English at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His previous books include: An Invitation to the Opera; Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the Eighteenth-Century Venetian Theater, An Afterlife in Opera; Penetrating Wagner’s Ring: An Anthology; Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel; Opera and the Golden West; and A Search for a Postmodern Theater.