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Puccini, famous for his contribution to the world of opera through such works as La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and Turandot, began his musical career playing and composing church music at the age of 14. Pucinni wrote this piece as his graduation thesis when he was only 18 years old. Puccini was born in Lucca in Tuscany, Italy into a family with five generations of musical history behind them. His father died when he was five years old, and he was sent to study with his uncle Fortunato Magi, who considered him to be a poor and undisciplined student. Later, Puccini took the position of church organist and choir master in Lucca, but it was not until he saw a performance of Verdi's Aida that he became inspired to be an opera composer. He and his brother, Michele, walked 18.5 mi (30 km) to see the performance in Pisa. In 1880, with the help of a relative and a grant, Puccini enrolled in the Milan Conservatory to study composition with Amilcare Ponchielli and Antonio Bazzini. In the same year, at the age of 21, he composed the Messa, which marks the culmination of his family's long association with church music in his native Lucca. Although Puccini himself correctly titled the work a Messa, referring to a setting of the full Catholic Mass, today the work is popularly known as his Messa di Gloria, a name that technically refers to a setting of only the first two prayers of the Mass, the Kyrie and the Gloria, while omitting the Credo, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. Puccini's work is, in fact, a Messa. The work anticipates Puccini's career as an operatic composer by offering glimpses of the dramatic power that he would soon unleash on the stage; the powerful “arias” for tenor and bass soloists are certainly more operatic than is usual in church music and, in its orchestration and dramatic power, the Messa compares interestingly with Verdi's Requiem. -- Wikipedia
Attracted to music from a very early age, Giacomo Puccini studied at the Istituto Musicale Pacini in his native city of Lucca. As the son of a well-known composer and organist, he was still only fourteen when he followed in the family tradition and became organist at San Martino in Lucca, but, far from confining himself to organ music, he soon evinced an interest in the orchestra, completing his early Preludio sinfonico in 1876. Rediscovered more than a century later thanks to the researches of Pietro Spada, this brief prelude already attests to Puccini's remarkable skill in handling orchestral forces, a skill that was to be confirmed in 1880 with his much more ambitious Messa di Gloria (originally entitled Mass for four voices and orchestra). Intended as his final exercise at the Istituto Musicale Pacini, this work already finds the young composer developing a wholly unmistakable style of his own. The Mass in A flat major is distinguished by the beauty of its vocal writing and by a heartwarming lyricism underscored by extremely inventive instrumentation. Although the Mass remained unpublished, Puccini was clearly sufficiently proud of the piece to reuse certain of its themes: that of the Agnus Dei, for example, is found in more or less identical form in the opera Manon Lescaut. It would have been shortsighted of Puccini to have eschewed such beautiful melodies either here or in his Capriccio sinfonico. Written in 1883, at the end of his period of study at Milan Conservatory, this last-named piece contains a number of themes that will be close to the hearts of listeners already familiar with La Bohème. --Alain Cochard For more information contact the Choir President, Pat Tyson, or the Choir Director, Stephen Mitchell Archived News: Fall 2007, "Choral Masterworks"
* *For entire story, see press.htm Note: Sound clips were edited from MP3 files available on http://choeurhectorberlioz.free.fr/
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