P: Compositores: Opera

This biographical story of Puccini (Gabriele Ferzetti) spans his creative life from early student days to the height of success, including his early flop Madame Butterfly and his incomplete Turandot. Along the way he encounters three women who change his life, including a sexy, beautiful singer (Nadia Gray) whom he drops for a small town girl (Märta Torén), and a servant girl who commits suicide over him.

The life and loves of great composer Giuseppe Verdi are played against a background of the great operas of the 19th Century. A tender love story of his successful and turbulent life, with more than 20 excerpts from his acclaimed operas.

When Italian composer Giacomo Puccini is accused of sleeping with his maid, the scandal threatens to destroy his life and career. This biopic intercuts with director Tony Palmer's efforts to stage Puccini's last opera.

Giacomo Puccini, the son of a Tuscan organist, achieves world-wide recognition as a composer of operas and dies from throat cancer in the middle of an artistic crisis, at the age of just sixty-six.

The life, success and troubles of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as told by Antonio Salieri, the contemporaneous composer who was deeply jealous of Mozart's talent and claimed to have murdered him.

This program uncovers Mozart's character and explores the obstacles he overcame in trying to establish himself as an independent artist during an age when musicians were seen as servants to the rich and powerful. Mozart's years in Vienna (1781-91) were his most productive. There, he wrote his great masterpieces including the operas "Don Giovanni",and "The Magic Flute", the "Jupiter" Symphony, Quintet In G Minor and his last great work, the Requiem, which he composed just before his death at the age of thirty-five. The program concludes with a brief overview of Mozart's work which is useful to experienced music lovers and newcomers alike. The soundtrack features a selection of Mozart's compositions played by members of the Elysium Ensemble.