Daniel Snowman
A New World of Puccini and His ‘Verismo’ Contemporaries
How to watch
Summary
Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff, premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 9 February 1893, shortly before the composer’s 80th birthday. Just a week earlier, on 2 February, the Teatro Regio in Turin staged Manon Lescaut, the first successful opera by a scarcely known young composer in his early thirties named Giacomo Puccini. In this lecture, Daniel considers whether Puccini could be the successor of old Verdi.
Daniel Snowman
Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. Born in London to a Jewish family in 1938 and educated at Cambridge and Cornell, Daniel became a lecturer at the University of Sussex and went on to work for many years at the BBC as senior producer of radio features and documentaries. A senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), his many books include a social history of opera and a study of the cultural impact of the ‘Hitler Emigrés’ and, most recently, his memoir “Just Passing Through: Interactions with the World 1938-2021”.