Giacomo Puccini Because only three "verismo" works by Puccini continue to appear regularly on stage (the aforementioned "Cavalleria rusticana", "Pagliacci", and "Andrea Chénier"), Puccini's contribution has had lasting significance to the genre. Both during his lifetime and in posterity, Puccini's success outstripped other Italian opera composers of his time, and he has been matched in this regard by only a handful of composers in the entire history of opera. Eleven of Puccini's operas are numbered among the 200 most-performed operas (worldwide, by composers of any nationality, as surveyed by Operabase). Three of his works ("La bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly") rank among
Tu che di gel sei cinta Tu che di gel sei cinta "Tu che di gel sei cinta" ("You who are girdled with ice") is a soprano aria from act 3, scene 1, of Puccini's 1926 opera "Turandot". It is sung by Liù under torture, prior to her suicide. The words were written by Puccini himself while waiting for librettists Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni to deliver the next part of the libretto. When the librettists read them, they decided that they could not do better than that. In their work on "Turandot", Ashbrook and Powers suggest that Puccini's failure to complete the opera much beyond