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
Julianna Di Giacomo her tennis coach when she was a teenager. She fell in love with the art form and pursued studies in vocal performance at the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating from UCLA, she entered the Merola Opera Program at the San Francisco Opera (SFO). She made her professional opera debut in 1999 with the Western Opera Theater, the SFO's touring company, as Donna Anna in a national tour of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Don Giovanni". In 2004 Di Giacomo joined the Young Artist Program at the Santa Fe Opera. Her first career break came in 2006 when she replaced an