Giacomo Puccini

By Gregory Nagy, Guest Post

Two librettists, unsung heroes of Puccini’s La Bohème

2018.11.16 | By Gregory Nagy and Martha Cowan §0. This essay is a kind of dialogue between Martha Cowan and me. Paragraph §2, subdivided into §2a §2b §2c... all the way through §2k, is by MC, while paragraphs §0 §1 §3 are by me, GN. Our dialogue centers on the two writers credited with the libretto for the music of Giacomo Puccini in his opera La Bohème, first performed in… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

Poetry Incarnate: Puccini’s Mimì as metonymy and metaphor combined

2018.11.09 | By Gregory Nagy §0. This essay is linked with a lengthy book I published in 2015, Masterpieces of Metonymy. There I argued that metonymy and metaphor, as they are known in verbal art, are analogous respectively to horizontal and vertical threading in the art of weaving. Taking a broader point of view here, I will argue that the art of fabric work in general can be represented as… Read more