Puccini: A Biography.

by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz Northeastern University Press, 336 pp. $30

Puccini: His Life and Works

by Julian Budden Oxford University Press, 400pp. $40

Even though the works of Puccini have helped keep many an opera house running during the past century, only recently has the composer begun to get the kind of unbiased analytical attention he deserves. It seems that musical criticism is finally learning what the operagoing public has known for a long time: Puccini was much more than a talented audience-pleaser with a gift for vocal writing. This shift in attitude is evident from the number of scholarly articles devoted to the composer in recent years and from the ongoing critical edition of his works. But it also may be seen in the simultaneous appearance of books on the composer by two authors who have made major contributions to our appreciation of the life and work of Verdi: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz (whose authoritative biography of Verdi appeared in 1993) and Julian Budden (author of an indispensable three-volume study of Verdi's operas).

Phillips-Matz's new book is much smaller than her one on Verdi, and not only because Puccini's life was shorter. Her approach here is informal, often a bit conversational. She sometimes pauses to elaborate a detail or take a brief detour, perhaps in the form of an aside discussing recent critical writings or a personal anecdote based on her longtime acquaintance with some of the most famous opera singers of the twentieth century. At one point, for example, she tells us why Manon Lescaut was Ezio Pinza's favorite Puccini opera; elsewhere she recalls a conversation from 1969 with Gilda Dalla Rizza, the first Magda in La Rondine.

This intimate, idiosyncratic approach suits her view of Puccini. The man she describes is not a larger-than-life figure. He is down-to-earth, friendly though somewhat reserved and beset by the same problems as his audience and, at times, his characters. The reader sympathizes with the loss of his mother and brother, his financial ups and downs, marital difficulties and the medical problems following his terrible car accident, and gets to know his associates the Ricordis, Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa and Arturo Toscanini, as well as his family and friends. Phillips-Matz also devotes a good deal of attention to Puccini's wife, Elvira, a complex, troubled figure, treating her with compassion and understanding.

The author is particularly effective when depicting Puccini's Italy. She describes with obvious affection the Tuscan countryside and people, and she gives the reader a good sense of life in nineteenth-century Lucca, the composer's birthplace. The result is an informative, highly readable biography that examines the man more than the musician. There is some discussion of the operas, but the focus is largely on how they came about, rather than on the finished works. While the author's side trips do not break the narrative flow of the book, some of the documentation does. Instead of the copious endnotes that ...