71. E l'uccellino. Ninna-nanna

The dedication of the song to the “bimbino Memmo Lippi” explains its origin. Guglielmo Lippi, the dedicatee’s father, was a young doctor in Lucca and a good friend of Puccini’s friend Alfredo Caselli. Lippi died on 7 November 1897 at the age of 25 and only a few days after his marriage to the Contessa Nelda Prosperi. Their son was born on 18 July 1898 and was named after his father (Memmo is a nickname for Guglielmo). All of this probably reminded Puccini of his own dead brother Michele who had also been born after the death of his father of the same name.
On 28 July 1898, Puccini asked the famous poet Giovanni Pascoli, whom he had known personally for some months, to write an epitaph for Lippi. Pascoli delivered it in November 1898 (see Cecchi 1984, Nos. 2 and 3); it is engraved on Lippi’s tombstone at the cemetery in Lucca.
Puccini wrote E l’uccellino in February 1899 (see 71.B.1 and 71.B.2). The text for the song, certainly provided at Puccini’s request, was written by his Tuscan friend, Renato Fucini, who also supplied the text for Avanti Urania! (68).Note: *In the Inventario: Archivio Puccini in Torre del Lago from 1980 (p. 51), there is an entry for “‘Ninna nanna’ di Renato Fucini 1896 agosto 10.” It is very probable that this is the text of E l’uccellino, with the year probably misread instead of 1898. This would mean that when Puccini requested the epitaph he also ordered the text for the song, delivered by Fucini only a few days later. Lacking access to the material, this remains a conjecture. It is remarkable that as late as the beginning of 1915 a German language edition of the song was published (71.E.1b), for Italy was then in the middle of discussions concerning the possibility of Italian participation in the war against Germany and its allies.
Guglielmo (Memmo) Lippi, who later adopted the name of his stepfather, Francesconi, and worked in Lucca as a neurologist, was deported to a German concentration camp in 1944, where he was killed.