This chapter considers recent trends in Puccini staging and direction. It notes that Puccini productions have tended to be ‘safe’ compared with the works of composers such as Wagner, inviting audiences to sit back and enjoy rather than sit back and pay attention: Regieoper has tended to avoid Puccini. Recently, however, Puccini’s operas have been subjected to some more unusual and innovative directorial treatment, in productions that are designed to speak to an audience viewing in cinemas and at home as much as in the theatre. Three productions are discussed as case studies. The first is Richard Jones’s 2007 Covent Garden production of Gianni Schicchi, situated in a kitschily decorated mid-twentieth-century British working-class home. The second is Stefan Herheim’s bleak, resolutely unsentimental 2012 La bohème for the Norwegian National Opera, which flips between a contemporary cancer ward and flashbacks using nineteenth-century-style sets long used at the same theatre. The third is Christophe Honoré’s 2019 production of Tosca for Aix-en-Provence, which also intermingles past and present productions, making intertextual reference to the opera’s earlier performance history.

This chapter examines the topic of Puccini on video – the composer’s appearances as a character in narrative films or television dramas, and versions of his operas conceived expressly for film or television, starting from the arrival of sound cinema. Puccini started being fictionalised as a film character from the 1950s. Detailed attention is paid to Carmine Gallone’s biopic Giacomo Puccini of 1952, a film which takes considerable liberties with historical facts, and the same director’s Casa Ricordi, about the composer’s publishing house. The discussion then moves to the 1980s, to consider Tony Palmer’s Puccini, and to the 2000s, to discuss Paolo Benvenuti’s Puccini e la fanciulla, both of which home in on the Doria Manfredi scandal. The author then discusses transferrals to video of Puccini’s operas, concentrating particularly on Tosca and examining films from the 1940s onwards. Particular attention is paid to a filmed version by Gallone, to the same director’s Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, and to a series of slightly later film versions made especially for Italian television during the 1960s and 70s. A 2001 film of Tosca by Benoît Jacquot concludes the survey, chosen because it interrogates the tension between televisual or filmic authenticity and operatic artificiality.

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 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.

The decades between unification and World War I saw opera in Italy absorb multiple literary and musical influences from beyond the Alps, including exoticism and naturalism and, successively, the operas of Meyerbeer and Wagner. For the generation of the giovane scuola this was often characterised as a crisis of national musical style and identity, strongly linked to the post-Risorgimento imperative to create a compelling civic and political culture for the new nation. The religious question, and the battle between the Church and state, posed a further set of questions in developing this national identity, which can be traced through opera's engagement with foreign influences. Examining new Italian operas ranging from Franchetti's Asrael to Puccini's Tosca, this chapter will suggest that librettists and composers approaching religious themes were keenly aware of the need to create a vocabulary of religious images and sounds which the predominantly Catholic audiences across Italy could recognise, even when adopting ideas from French or German literary and musical models. Ultimately, this period was crowned with the arrival of Parsifal on Italian stages, when Catholic readings of Wagner's symbology and echoes of Palestrina promoted a particularly Italian interpretation of the opera’s meaning and musical language.