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
Music in Paris founded in 1753, it hosted the first performances of Bizet's "Carmen" and of "Pelléas et Mélisande" by Claude Debussy, and the French premieres of the operas of Puccini. In recent years the historic theater went through economic difficulties, and the permanent company was disbanded in 1972, but the theater continues to present productions by several different companies of both classical and new works of opera and musical theater. The building was closed in 2015 for eighteen months of extensive renovations. Musical theater became very popular in Paris in the mid-19th century, largely because of the witty and well-crafted musical works