Giacomo Puccini remained popular. "Turandot", Puccini's final opera, was left unfinished, and the last two scenes were completed by Franco Alfano based on the composer's sketches. The libretto for "Turandot" was based on a play of the same name by Carlo Gozzi. The music of the opera is heavily inflected with pentatonic motifs, intended to produce an Asiatic flavor to the music. Unlike "La fanciulla", "Turandot" contains a number of memorable stand-alone arias, among them "Nessun dorma". The libretto of "Edgar" was a significant factor in the failure of that opera. Thereafter, especially throughout his middle and late career, Puccini was extremely
Robert Alfano meetings and conferences for OSA and SPIE, and later co-chairing many optical imaging conferences with Britton Chance, whereby he introduced young scientists and engineers to biomedical optics, and attracted other researchers to the field. In addition to his faculty position as a Distinguished Professor at the City College and Graduate School of New York, Alfano has held, or currently holds, a number of directorship positions: Alfano notes that he attended college mainly because his father thought it was important (though his parents hadn't had such advantage). Alfano chose Fairleigh Dickinson University because it was close to his childhood home in