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 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 examines Puccini’s relationship with the other young Italian composers of his generation – who came to be known as the giovane scuola italiana – and demonstrates how they were forced into a sometimes antagonistic rivalry with one another. All of these young men were in competition to attract the attention of the major Milanese publishing houses of the day, Ricordi and Sonzogno, and all wanted to be crowned successor to Verdi as Italy’s new national composer. The chapter discusses the composition competition launched by the Sonzogno firm, Puccini’s unsuccessful entry with his opera Le Villi, and Mascagni’s triumph with Cavalleria rusticana. The chapter examines how many of the young composers of the day turned to the verismo genre of opera and discusses the careers of figures including Catalani, Franchetti, and Leoncavallo. Puccini’s process of selecting literary sources to set is considered, with the author showing the importance of rivalry as a creative stimulus for the composer.

This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with Milan, the city that was most important to his career. It begins with a detailed discussion of the Milan of the composer’s student years, outlining its importance as both an industrial and a cultural centre characterised by cosmopolitanism and modernity. Milan was also the capital of the nineteenth-century operatic world, where many singers, publishers, and critics were based, and with several leading opera houses, most notably La Scala. The chapter discusses how Puccini launched his career in Milan, securing a premiere at La Scala at a very early stage (Edgar). The ill-fated first performance of Madama Butterfly is also discussed, as is the posthumous premiere of Turandot. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of Puccini’s oeuvre at La Scala since his death and the ways in which Puccini came, in a sense, to symbolise the city’s self-image.

Bizet’s Carmen had a major impact on Italian opera, yet its success was not easy or certain. The opera was significantly modified to suit Italian tastes, stripped of its key generic markers, translated and reinterpreted by Italian singers. These changes are more striking since the first Italian version of Carmen appears to have been made by the French, while the opera’s real popularity in Italy corresponds to the appearance of a second, Italianised version. At the same time, French singers, such as Célestine Galli-Marié, regularly performed the role in Italy, so the Italian version had many points of contact with the French performing tradition. The Italian version of Carmen inspired dialogues about the nature of realism’in the Italian press, and affected the realist composers of the giovane scuola (Puccini, Mascagni et al.). Carmen’s success helped turn its Italian publishers, the Casa Sonzogno, into major power brokers in Italian opera, and the opera became a key part of their corporate brand.