By Our Editorial Staff
100 years after the first performance, an exhibition celebrates the masterpiece by Giacomo Puccini with historical documents and costumes: Lucca – Puccini Museum – Birthplace, 24 April – 1 November 2026, in collaboration with the Textile Museum of Prato.
Turandot, divine beauty – Puccini Museum Birthplace – from April 24 to November 1, 2026 – On the 100th anniversary of the first performance, an exhibition celebrates Giacomo Puccini’s great unfinished masterpiece. In fact, the opera remained without an ending at the death of the great composer from Lucca (November 29, 1924) and the publisher Ricordi entrusted Franco Alfano with its completion, while the debut, already scheduled for April 1925, was postponed to April 25, 1926 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan under the direction of Arturo Toscanini.
The exhibition, housed in some rooms of the museum, is divided into two parts. The first part will be dedicated to the story of the complex and highly anticipated Milanese staging through period images, stage photographs, chronicles of the evening and original documents, offering the visitor the thrill of taking part in the inaugural evening of one hundred years ago. The heart of this section will be two extraordinary historical costumes of Turandot, relating to the first and second acts, used in the first performance of 1926, found a few years ago by the Textile Museum of Prato and subjected to a careful conservative restoration in the laboratories of the same Museum. The original stage jewels will also be on display, such as the crown and head ornament made by the Corbella company and the wig produced by the Biffi factory, both official suppliers of the Teatro alla Scala. As for the stage design, it will be possible to admire two precious original sketches by Galileo Chini. Puccini himself had chosen Galileo Chini for the creation of the scenery and Umberto Brunelleschi for the creation of the costume sketches to which the second part of the exhibition is dedicated. Brunelleschi’s figures were not used for the Milanese premiere – created instead by Luigi Sapelli, pseudonym of Caramba, head of La Scala’s staging – but were used for subsequent ‘premieres’ in Italy and the rest of the world during 1926 and in the years immediately following. Therefore, the itinerary will close with one of the most spectacular and evocative pieces of the museum, taken from Umberto Brunelleschi’s figurine: the dress for the second act of the opera made for the New York premiere on November 16, 1926 and bequeathed to the Giacomo Puccini Foundation by Maria Jeritza, protagonist of that memorable production.
The current exhibition stems from the collaboration between the Puccini Museum and the Textile Museum on the occasion of the exhibition Turandot and the Fantastic Orient by Puccini, Chini and Caramba held in Prato in 2021: on that occasion the Puccini Museum contributed with the loan of some documents, participated in the iconographic research conducted on the costumes of the premiere at La Scala, and in the reconstruction of the correspondence between Casa Ricordi, Puccini, Chini, Brunelleschi and Adami, published in the catalogue of the Prato exhibition, edited by Simonetta Bigongiari and Maria Pia Ferraris, head of the Archivio Storico Ricordi in Milan.Subsequently, in March 2022, the costumes and part of the exhibition were exhibited at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, on the occasion of the performance of Turandot conducted by Antonio Pappano.The exhibition in Lucca, on the occasion of the centenary, strengthens the collaboration between the two museums and offers a unique opportunity to compare three precious historical costumes born from the genius of two great artists such as Caramba and Brunelleschi.
The exhibition curated by Simonetta Bigongiari, director of the Puccini Museum and Daniela Degl’Innocenti, curator of the Textile Museum, is organized by the Giacomo Puccini Foundation – Puccini Museum Birthplace in collaboration with the Textile Museum of Prato. We would like to thank the Ricordi Historical Archive, the La Scala Theatre Museum, the Metropolitan Opera Archive and the Sergio Bigongiari collection for the loan of the materials.The exhibition is organized with the support of Vivilucca – Municipality of Lucca, Banco BPM, Prisma Broker, Martinelli Impianti, media partner QN La nazione.The event will be included in the calendar of events of the festival I Musei del Sorriso promoted by the Museum System of the province of Lucca.
The exhibition will be open during the opening hours of the Puccini Museum; every Saturday and the third Sunday of the month the entrance ticket also includes the guided tour in Italian by the museum staff; from June to September, every Friday at 12:00 including the guided tour in English.
For more information and reservations tel. 0583 584028 / – info@puccinimuseum.it – www.puccinimuseum.org
