Giacomo Puccini

Born 22 December 1858 into a family that had been cranking out composers since the Baroque, Puccini started where Italian Romantic opera left off and then pushed it somewhere rawer. La bohème arrived in 1896, Tosca in 1900, Madama Butterfly in 1904 — each one landing in the verismo vein, where melodrama met something that felt uncomfortably real. He was still working on Turandot when he died 29 November 1924; Franco Alfano finished it two years later. All four remain fixtures of the repertoire, played and recorded more than almost anything else in opera.