Giuseppe Adami

Italian screenwriter, director, librettist, playwright, author, journalist, and music critic. He was born in Verona on either February 4, 1878 or November 4, 1878 (major reference works differ). He graduated with a law degree from the University of Padua, but rather than entering the legal profession, he devoted himself to literature. He worked for several years as the theatre critic for the Verona Arena. In 1912, Adami published his first play, a one-act entitled La leggenda della Valacchia, in La Lettura, a monthly magazine of the Corriere della Sera. Within a year or so, he had had his first staged production of a play, I fioi di Goldoni. More productions, most of them sentimental comedies, followed. He dabbled in writing scenarios for early Italian films, but his greatest claim to fame came in 1917 when he began a rich association with composer Giacomo Puccini. Adami wrote the libretti for three of Puccini's operas: La rondine, Il tabarro, and Turandot (the last in collaboration with Renato Simoni). Adami also wrote librettos for other composers, such as Riccardo Zandonai, for the opera La via della Finestra. He was a music critic for the Milan magazine La sera and, from 1931 to 1934, he wrote for the magazine La commedia. He continued throughout these years writing plays, and in 1937, he returned to the cinema to write a number of screenplays, some of which were based on his plays and other writings. Adami published the first collection of Puccini's letters (Giacomo Puccini: epistolario [Milan, 1928]) and in 1935 published the first of his two biographies of Puccini. He worked as a publicist for the Ricordi publishing firm, whose head, Giulio Ricordi, had introduced him to Puccini and who was the subject of another Adami biography. He was associated with Ricordi until his death in Milan, October 12, 1946. Giuseppe Adami is buried at the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano.