This chapter considers the complex task of editing Puccini’s works, informed by the production of the Ricordi critical edition (launched in 2008 and ongoing). An abundance of materials exist upon which the editor can draw, including autographs, sketches, printed editions, and correspondence, thanks to Puccini’s close and long relationship with the Ricordi firm. However, some gaps exist in the surviving sources, and some sources disagree with others. The author explains that the editor must choose a text on which to base the edition, drawing on further sources as necessary to make informed interventions, striving to get as close as possible to the composer’s intentions, but mindful of the fact that his intentions and preferences changed over time. In Puccini’s case, second editions usually reflect the works as performed at their premieres, the first edition already becoming obsolete in rehearsal. The chapter discusses the various decisions and interventions that an editor must make in order to make an edition both faithful and usable. Puccini’s working method and process of revising his operas are discussed in detail. The chapter ends by asking whether early recordings, as well as printed and written documents, should inform an edition.

This chapter considers the relationship between Puccini and politics. It shows that Puccini was an admirer of Mussolini at the beginning of the Fascist period, speculates how his political allegiances might have developed had he lived longer, and asks whether Turandot can be read as a ‘fascist’ opera. It discusses the politicisation of high culture during the composer’s lifetime but shows there is no evidence that the work was intended as a political allegory. Much of the chapter is devoted to a consideration of the issue of politics in Tosca, ranging across themes such as anti-clericalism and whether the figure of Scarpia anticipates a specifically fascist brutality. The author uses Carmine Gallone’s film Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma as a lens through which to consider these issues. The chapter also considers stagings of the opera that put an explicitly political slant on the work, as well as discussing a variety of political (and purportedly ‘anti-political’) readings of the opera in the Puccini literature.

This chapter opens with a consideration of the parallels in the careers of Puccini and Rachmaninoff, both disparaged as conservative throwbacks to an earlier era and purveyors of a cloying sentimentality who reached larger audiences than any of their contemporaries. The author shows, however, that these stereotypes have been reconsidered in recent years, before proceeding to consider Puccini’s influence on the composers who followed him, including both composers of art music and the creators of mid-twentieth-century musical theatre. He argues that Puccini’s works came to be seen as having established the dominant rhetorical conventions of how music expresses human emotion, and argues that in Puccini’s hands, music rather than text becomes the primary driver of storytelling (an approach the author contrasts with that of Richard Strauss). The emotions in Puccini’s works have a universality to them, which has been a key factor in their global success. The author argues, however, that Puccini’s hegemony is now under threat, partly because contemporary popular music now diverges so sharply from the classical tradition and partly because the idea of universal human emotions and experience is being challenged in an era of identity politics.

This chapter considers the music publishing industry in Puccini’s Italy, with a particular focus on Puccini’s principal publisher, the Casa Ricordi. The chapter examines the role that publishers played within the wider operatic industry, which by Puccini’s time included managing contracts between composers and opera houses and influencing casting, as well as the more traditional business of printing, publishing, and promoting scores. The particular musical specialisms of the Sonzogno and Ricordi publishing houses are discussed. The author shows how Ricordi elevated Puccini to the position of national-composer-elect towards the end of Verdi’s lifetime and constructed a ‘Puccini myth’. Expensive, sophisticated publicity tools and marketing strategies were used to promote Puccini’s works, not only in Italy but in territories across the globe. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s relationship with the firm changed as a result of the succession of power from Giulio to Tito Ricordi upon the former’s death, as well as the firm’s management of Puccini’s works after his own death.

This chapter examines Puccini’s early life in the Tuscan town of Lucca. Puccini came from a long line of church musicians and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers as maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino. The chapter briefly outlines the careers of these musical forebears and their influence upon the young Puccini, whose musical career would ultimately take a very different course. It examines Puccini’s musical training and the family members and other figures who provided funding for his education. The composer’s move to study at the Conservatorio in Milan is briefly considered, with a particular emphasis on the composers and critics who were his teachers and mentors. These figures played a vital role in helping him gain a foothold in the Italian operatic world of the 1880s, setting him on the path to musical greatness.

This chapter discusses the Italian critics who wrote about Puccini’s music during his lifetime. Though dilettante writers showered Puccini with praise, more rigorous music critics of his era took a rather more sceptical view of his compositional merits. Puccini’s career coincided with the development of professional music criticism in Italy and also with the rise of musicology as an academic discipline. Significant critics discussed in this chapter include Amintore Galli, Filippo Filippi, Luigi Torchi, and Luigi Alberto Villanis. Particular attention is paid to Fausto Torrefranca, the author of a denunciatory and scathing text called Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale, which blamed Puccini for many of the ills of the modern musical world. Many young critics of the era, such as Torrefranca, Giannotto Bastianelli and Ildebrando Pizzetti, associated Puccini with a backward-looking bourgeoisie and were keen to promote avant-garde Italian music, as well as non-commercial music from the more distant past. Puccini found approval amongst a new generation of pro-Fascist critics during the 1920s. Time and again, Puccini found himself dragged into debates about politics and national identity that went far beyond music.

This chapter is the third of three to consider Puccini’s travels, both for work and leisure. It examines Puccini’s travels beyond Europe, primarily to South and North America. South America was a vital outpost of Italian operatic culture, with a large expatriate Italian population. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s works were exported to the major opera houses of the region and his travels to supervise performances in Argentina and Uruguay. Drawing upon Puccini’s correspondence, the author pays detailed attention to the life Puccini would have experienced on board ship, travelling in some luxury, unlike the many poor Italians who were migrating to the Americas for economic reasons – including the composer’s own brother, Michele Puccini. The chapter also discusses Puccini’s travels to New York, where he could not speak the language and was troubled by the weather. The author argues that the vast hotels and ships encountered by Puccini on these trips had a bearing on the sense of epic space in some of his later operas, notably La fanciulla del West. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Puccini’s tour of Egypt in 1908.

This chapter explores Puccini’s relationship with the Italian spoken theatre of his time. Stage plays were often adapted as operas during this period and there are plentiful examples in Puccini’s oeuvre. Puccini preferred to adapt foreign plays, rather than Italian ones (even sometimes, as in the case of Madama Butterfly, selecting a subject whose original text was in a language he did not understand), and he ranged across a wide variety of different theatrical genres. The chapter considers developments in Italian theatre during the nineteenth century, and the emergence of key native playwrights, as well as the national penchant for foreign works in translation, such as the plays of Shakespeare. The author examines changes in acting technique that took place in Italy and more broadly during this period and considers the careers of leading actors of the time such as Eleonora Duse. Puccini’s choice of dramatic subjects – the sorts of themes that attracted him and stimulated his musical imagination – is discussed in detail, as is the range of dramatic devices that he borrowed from a variety of different theatrical traditions.

This chapter examines the representation of race in Madama Butterfly and Turandot and the controversies that surround the performance of these works today. It shows how casting, design, and other elements in contemporary productions of the two operas become entangled with the fraught racial politics inherent in their scores and librettos. The chapter makes a particular note of the participation of musicians, directors, set designers, costume designers, and critics of Asian descent whose active presence adds an additional layer of complexity to the discussion. Madama Butterfly began to be discussed in Japan soon after its première and by the mid-twentieth century companies were beginning to seek out experts from Japan to lend enhanced cultural credence of their productions. More recent productions, however, have moved away from striving for ‘authenticity’ and begun to re-envision Puccini’s text in radical ways. Productions of Turandot have either staged the opera in authentically Chinese fashion or drawn on the abstract modernist impulses inherent in the work. Chinese audiences have been far less exposed to the work and Chinese artists less involved in its rethinking, at least until the late twentieth century. The advent of social media has broadened the questioning of the ethics of these works.

This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

This chapter describes the literary milieu of nineteenth-century Italy and considers the influence of a range of different literary schools on Puccini’s artistic practice. It endeavours to understand exactly what is meant by operatic verismo – a contested term – and to trace the term’s relationship to literary verismo. Some of the key Italian literary movements of the nineteenth century, such as neo-classicism, had little impact on Puccini’s oeuvre; others were far more influential, such as the Scapigliatura movement, which appeared in northern Italy in the 1860s. Key figures involved in this movement were connected with the circles in which Puccini moved. The literary verismo movement – centred on the Italian south – is discussed in detail and direct connections are drawn between this movement and Puccini’s style in works such as Il tabarro. The author also traces the relevance for a consideration of Puccini’s oeuvre with such movements as decadentism, crepuscolarismo, hermeticism, modernism, and futurism.

This chapter considers how Puccini has been commemorated through biographies and obituaries. It begins with a discussion of biographies or studies of the composer published during his own lifetime, in Britain, Italy, and Germany – some flattering, some decidedly hostile. The author then discusses international responses to Puccini’s death, via press obituaries, remembrance ceremonies, and other tributes. Puccini’s memorialisation in Italy was effusive; that abroad somewhat less so, with some French obituaries verging on the disparaging. Obituarists attempted to weigh up Puccini’s significance within music history and to assess the extent to which he represented a quintessentially Italian style. The chapter then discusses books of various types that were published about Puccini after his death, including biographies and collections of letters. It considers how Puccini was remembered on the occasion of various significant anniversaries and how Puccini’s reputation was reappraised over the century since his death.

This chapter considers Puccini complicated relationship with the musical canon, or rather with two canons. The author argues that while Puccini’s works stand at the apex of the performing canon, they have been denied entry to the scholarly canon, a body of works deemed historically significant and of high artistic worth. The chapter traces how Puccini’s operas established their place in the international operatic repertory (observing different regional patterns), via stage performances, publisher promotion, and recordings, to the point where they became pre-eminent. The author then turns to examining Puccini’s critical fortunes and evolving reputation among music historians across the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. She explains how Puccini has been castigated as a derivative, overly sentimental composer who appealed to ‘the wrong people’ and did not deserve a place in the history books, though his reputation was to some extent rehabilitated by the end of the twentieth century, finally regarded as worthy of serious scholarly analysis. In recent years, however, Puccini has become the target of calls to dismantle the canon and his works have been criticised for their treatment of gender, sexual violence, race, and class.

This chapter considers the treatment of religion in Puccini’s operas, with a strong focus on the two works with particular ecclesiastical themes, Tosca and Suor Angelica. It shows how Puccini drew upon the example of earlier models of religious representation in opera, by composers including Boito and Verdi. It considers the changing relationship between the Church and the state during Puccini’s lifetime, and the ongoing (though evolving) role of censorship laws. The use of liturgical scenes by Puccini and his contemporaries within the giovane scuola is discussed, with close analysis of stock techniques that are employed. The author concludes that Puccini’s works are made particularly effective by their habit of contrasting the secular and the sacred, using a more nuanced characterisation than is found in the works of his contemporaries.