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
Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù Xyndas, for example, wrote the Greek opera "O ypopsifios" ("The Parliamentary Candidate") which became the first opera composed on an exclusively Greek libretto and was performed at San Giacomo in 1867. The oral tradition held that operatic performers who found success at the theater were distinguished with the accolade "applaudito in Corfú" ("applauded in Corfu") as a tribute to the discriminating musical taste of the island audience. The theatre was replaced by the Municipal Theatre of Corfu in 1902. The Municipal Theatre and its historical archives, many of which belonged to Teatro di San Giacomo, were destroyed during a Luftwaffe