Giacomo Puccini, composer of some of the world's most popular operas, including La Boheme, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly, was also a highly literary person who based his librettos on existing works of literature. This work explores that literary inheritance in an effort to enhance the listener's appreciation of the operatic experience. The author argues that the majority of Puccini's operas compose a grand cycle that finds its roots in the romance genre of 12th century France, serving to celebrate the strong, independent heroine. Via a close examination of the source works, the librettos, and the scores, this book offers fresh perspective on Puccini's legacy.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer’s place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini’s orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca’s notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson.

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) is the world's most frequently performed operatic composer, yet he is only beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. In Giacomo Puccini and His World, an international roster of music specialists, several writing on Puccini for the first time, offers a variety of new critical perspectives on the composer and his works. Containing discussions of all of Puccini’s operas from Manon Lescaut (1893) to Turandot (1926), this volume aims to move beyond clichés of the composer as a Romantic epigone and to resituate him at the heart of early twentieth-century musical modernity. This collection’s essays explore Puccini’s engagement with spoken theater and operetta, and with new technologies like photography and cinema. Other essays consider the philosophical problems raised by "realist" opera, discuss the composer’s place in a variety of cosmopolitan formations, and reevaluate Puccini’s orientalism and his complex interactions with the Italian fascist state. A rich array of primary source material, including previously unpublished letters and documents, provides vital information on Puccini’s interactions with singers, conductors, and stage directors, and on the early reception of the verismo movement. Excerpts from Fausto Torrefranca’s notorious Giacomo Puccini and International Opera, perhaps the most vicious diatribe ever directed against the composer, appear here in English for the first time. The contributors are Micaela Baranello, Leon Botstein, Alessandra Campana, Delia Casadei, Ben Earle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Walter Frisch, Michele Girardi, Arthur Groos, Steven Huebner, Ellen Lockhart, Christopher Morris, Arman Schwartz, Emanuele Senici, and Alexandra Wilson.

A comprehensive guide to Puccini's LA BOHEME, featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with over 20 Music Highlight Examples, a complete, newly translated LIBRETTO with English/Italian side-by-side, selected Discography and Videography, Dictionary of Opera and Musical Terms, and an insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis by Burton D. Fisher, noted opera author and lecturer.

A comprehensive guide to Puccini's 12 operas, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, Story Narratives with over 120 Music Highlight Examples, and a newly translated Libretto of each opera (exclusing Turandot) with Italian English side-by-side.

Unfinished at Puccini's death in 1924, Turandot was not only his most ambitious work, but it became the last Italian opera to enter the international repertory. In this colorful study two renowned music scholars demonstrate that this work, despite the modern climate in which it was written, was a fitting finale for the centuries-old Great Tradition of Italian opera. Here they provide concrete instances of how a listener might encounter the dramatic and musical structures of Turandot in light of the Italian melodramma, and firmly establish Puccini's last work within the tradition of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. In a summary of the sounds, sights, and symbolism of Turandot, the authors touch on earlier treatments of the subject, outline the conception, birth, and reception of the work, and analyze its coordinated dramatic and musical design. Showing how the evolution of the libretto documents Puccini's reversion to large musical forms typical of the Great Tradition in the late nineteenth century, they give particular attention to his use of contrasting Romantic, modernist, and two kinds of orientalist coloration in the general musical structure. They suggest that Puccini's inability to complete the opera resulted mainly from inadequate dramatic buildup for Turandot's last-minute change of heart combined with an overly successful treatment of the secondary character.

“But what is this scent of balmy air? What this ray of light in my tomb? I seem to see an angel, amid a scent of roses” sings Florestan in Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera. The role of scents, smells, fragrances, and odours in opera has long been neglected, just as how much opera and its stars have influenced the world of perfumery from the nineteenth century to the present day. In the first book-length study on the topic, Professor Mary May Robertson explores the relationship between opera, perfumes, and their respective protagonists in order to map out the previously undiscussed connection between the two. Through compelling close readings of librettos and rigorous research through thousands of bottles of perfume, the reader will come to appreciate and recognise the influences and exchanges between operas and perfumes and their ultimate marriage in the previously unrecognised genre of Operatic Perfumes, which is to say, perfumes named after operas, composers, and their divas.

A comprehensive guide to Puccini's TURANDOT, featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with over 20 Music Highlight Examples, a complete, newly translated LIBRETTO with English/Italian side-by-side, selected Discography and Videography, Dictionary of Opera and Musical Terms, and an insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis by Burton D. Fisher, noted opera author and lecturer.

A comprehensive guide to Puccini's TOSCA, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with Italian/English side-by side, and over 20 music highlight examples.