Born 150 years ago this month, Puccini lived a life as full and raucous as his shrewdly crafted, soaringly beautiful and ever-popular operas, writes Eileen Battersby

MELODY IS paramount to the art of Puccini, the composer who most fully makes opera live and soar and weep and celebrate the enduring beauty of song. He is to opera what Dickens is to fiction - glorious excess, doomed heroines who either die or commit suicide, dastardly villains, wet heroes, complex plotlines and, more often than not, not a dry eye in the house.

In common with Dickens, Puccini lived at a frenetic pace. His private life was even more operatic than his work. Both artists had their share of scandal and both were often criticised during their life times - and since - for being too popular. But then who ever listened to critics? It was Puccini, through his 12 operas, who most brilliantly and emphatically carried the Italian bel canto tradition of Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi into the 20th century. Just as another great showman, Handel, had done, Puccini regarded the human singing voice as a precious gift and gleefully composed some of the most beautiful vocal music ever written. Admittedly his operas don't tend to celebrate the more heroic aspects of human nature, yet with characters such as the devoted and ultimately dignified Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, the courageous little slave girl Liú in Turandot and the fiery Tosca, Puccini appears to be saying that women are capable of noble, even terrifying acts love, even if men usually aren't.

Born 150 years ago this month on December 22nd, 1858, in Lucca, a village about 13 miles from Pisa, Giacomo Puccini was fated to a life in music. Aside from sharing a birthplace with an earlier Italian master, Boccherini, Puccini followed four generations of family musicians who had long held the position of organist and choirmaster at Lucca Cathedral. Puccini's father was also a music teacher and had taught the future composer's mother, who was 18 years his junior. Puccini's father died when he was five years old, leaving his mother to raise him and six other children on a tiny pension.

The young Puccini studied under his uncle, who filled the organist's job vacated by his father's death until Giacomo was old enough to succeed. He sang in the choir and he also worked part-time in the local casino.

From early in life Puccini showed a liking for wild living, and was not opposed to stealing if he had to. He liked drinking, heavy smoking and chasing women, which he considered a sport.

A visit to Pisa for a performance of Verdi's Aïda made him decide to go to the Milan conservatory. In 1880, financed by a bursary as well as a loan from a comfortable great-uncle, he set off to study in Milan, where his student life seems not all that far removed from that pursued by the impoverished young bohemians in La Bohème - with time in cafes interspersed with sessions freezing in the attic.

As a student under Amilcare Ponchielli, he quickly showed a talent for composition. His teacher encouraged him to enter a one-act opera for the Sonzogno competition in 1883. Le Villi, set in medieval Germany and featuring a village maiden who, having died of a broken heart, returns to haunt her faithless lover, did not win. Yet it did lead to a commission, some five years later, for a second opera, Edgar.

It premiered not all that successfully at La Scala and a disappointed Puccini toyed with emigrating to Argentina, where his brother was living; but Michael had his own problems and this discouraged Puccini. The failure of Edgar alerted Puccini to the importance of a good libretto. About that time he was reading an 18th-century French novel, and it had given him an idea for what became his third opera, Manon Lescaut.

It was an immediate success when first performed in Turin in 1893. It is to Puccini's credit that he managed to make the foolish, grasping Manon unexpectedly likeable. As early as this opera, Puccini is also demonstrating his flair for romance and squalor.

Manon starts to keep bad company and her career goes from bad to worse. She is falsely accused of theft and prostitution by a discarded lover, and deported to America. Her true love, the admittedly hapless Des Grieux, talks his way on to the prison ship. Manon dies on the road outside New Orleans, but the crazy plot is largely irrelevant, such is the extraordinary maturity of the musical style.

PUCCINI TRAVELLED WITH Manon Lescaut to various European cities, supervising the various productions. He was also working on another opera, the composition of which had a competitive element that appealed to Puccini. Aware that a fellow composer, Ruggero Leoncavallo, was working on an opera based on Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème, Puccini was also drawn to Murger's text.

Puccini won the race and his La Bohème, for all the melodrama and the appalling cowardice of Rodolfo, is generally regarded as his finest opera and probably the most popular in the operatic repertoire. Why? The breathtaking quality of the music. When Puccini completed Mimi's death scene on a December night in 1895 he was moved.

"I had to get up," he later recalled to his biographer, "and, standing in the middle of my study, alone in the silence of the night, I began to weep like a child. It was as though I had seen my own child die."

La Bohème premiered on February 1st, 1896, conducted by the then 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Within a year it had become what it remains today, the most popular opera of all time. Who else but Puccini would have succeeded in deflecting the natural outrage most people would feel in realising that Rodolfo the poet, a man sufficiently sensitive to tenderly observe, "Che gelida manina" ("Your tiny hand is frozen"), would later abandon his beloved because he was incapable of dealing with her terminal illness. Still, he and his wayward pals eventually join forces to assist Mimi in her dying, and the result is an immortal opera.

Puccini knew what made a good tune; he also knew how to hold an audience. He reasoned like a wily entrepreneur and composed like an angel, and the man caught between the two was not particularly endearing. A former schoolfriend who often invited Puccini to supper would applaud as the young composer played duets with Elvira, the schoolfriend's wife. Puccini duly ran off with Elvira, who abandoned her baby but brought her daughter with them.

She and Puccini then had a son, born on December 23rd, 1886, the day after Puccini's 28th birthday. It was at about this time that Puccini, greatly out of favour in his home town and in debt, and with his great-uncle asking for his loan to be repaid, had considered fleeing to Argentina.

There is no doubt that Puccini was selfish: he used his wealth on cars and boats, including a yacht named Mimi I; enjoyed shooting; and continued chasing women as his life with Elvira developed into an ongoing drama. Yet in the midst of all his excess, he did buy back the family home in Lucca. Ruthless, egotistical and sentimental in equal measures, Puccini was above all shrewd. He looked to Jules Massenet and saw literature merely as something that could yield a winning libretto.

TOSCA, IN WHICH the diva of the title vainly attempts to protect her lover, Cavaradossi, an artist who in turn is shielding an escaped political prisoner, and ends up throwing herself off the ramparts in grief, premiered in Rome in January 1900. The violence of the tale, including an offstage torture, raised objections from some critics and sections of the public. Yet within six months a favourable reaction in London, followed by a triumph in New York in February 1901, consolidated its reputation as one of the world's great operas.

At about this time Puccini was involved in a car accident that left him with a limp, and delayed the composition of Madama Butterfly, his personal favourite of all his operas. During his long convalescence his doctors discovered he was diabetic.

The accident was to have further repercussions. By that time, Puccini and Elvira had lived together, albeit often explosively, for close to 20 years. They married in January 1904, after her husband died. But by then Elvira was fully paranoid, suspicious of her sexually marauding husband and given to embarrassing coughing fits. Puccini never involved her in his social life.

The decision to employ a maid went badly wrong for everyone. Doria Manfredi was 16, plain and shy. Her parents were wary of allowing her to work for Puccini because of his reputation, but she did join the household. Elvira quickly began to suspect her husband.

Meanwhile, work continued on Madama Butterfly. The opening night in Milan in February 1904 went badly. "A diabetic opera," pronounced one critic, "the result of an automobile accident." Puccini fought back, made extensive revisions and was rewarded with rapturous approval. The role of Butterfly, as recently performed by the Korean soprano, Yunah Lee, in an excellent Opera Ireland production, includes some beautiful arias including the ethereal Un bel di (One fine day). Whatever about the apparent passivity of the character, Puccini does develop Butterfly, who sees her hopes collapse yet chooses death for the sake of her son.

After a six-year lull (during which Puccini searched for a suitable libretto which eventually resulted in La Fanciulla del West in 1910), he was more famous than ever, and not only for his music.

One night in 1908, his wife, woken by a coughing fit, heard voices. Puccini was speaking with Doria. Elvira accused the pair of having an affair. The girl was terrified and, after hiding in her room, ran back home. Elvira decided to announce to the village at large that Doria was a slut.

Puccini set off for Paris, where the king of Greece attended a performance of Tosca. Doria, who was devoted to Puccini, refused to eat. Three weeks later she took poison and died after five days of agony. The post mortem confirmed she had never had sexual intercourse. Her tragedy deeply affected Puccini. She may well have inspired Liú, the faithful slave girl in Turandot, who kills herself to protect Calaf, whom she loves.

The incident left a shadow over Puccini's marriage, although the couple were reconciled during his final illness. Turandot, for all the gore and a shocking storyline which centres on Princess Turandot's bizarre revenge quest, is a dramatic work with echoes of Debussy and even Schoenberg, revealing a Puccini determined to try something different. He was never to complete it. While undergoing treatment in Brussels for throat cancer, he died in November 1924 of a heart attack. The opera, possibly most famous for Nessun Dorma, would later be completed from Puccini's notes. Yet when his old friend, Toscanini, conducted the first performance on April 26th 1926, he symbolically ended the performance where Puccini had stopped, at the death of Liú.

• The Glory of Puccini, celebrating Puccini's anniversary, features the Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso in concert with the Orlando Chamber Orchestra, at the National Concert Hall on Sunday at 8pm. www.nch.ie

Doomed heroines, dastardly villains: Four great Puccini operas

La Boheme

What can you say about a poet who can't deal with his girlfriend's illness? Not much aside from "your tiny hand is frozen" - but do listen and wonder at the beauty of the love duet, O soave fanciulla. No less than Debussy maintained that Puccini truly captured mid-century Paris in this, the world's most popular opera.

Tosca

If you're looking for a classic recording of Tosca, it has to be the young Maria Callas singing that great aria, Visi d'arte, with the chorus and orchestra of La Scala, Milan, under the baton of Victor de Sabata.

Madama Butterfly

The only excuse for Pinkerton, the navy officer who weds Butterfly, only to leave her and return three years later with his American wife, is the extreme clash of cultures. Think of the humming chorus; think of the flower duet, Gettiamo amani piene; and, of course, think of Un bel di.

Turandot

It is a shocking story and Princess Turandot is a terrifying creature, yet this is a magnificent work. Turandot's In questa reggiais a gift to any dramatic soprano, while Nessun Dorma, as sung by Placido Domingo on a 1982 recording under Herbert Von Karajan should make you forget all about its stint as the 1990 World Cup theme.