7 Giacomo Puccini 7del west (1910; The Girl of the Golden West). These four mature
works also tell a moving love story, one that centres entirely
on the feminine protagonist and ends in a tragic resolution.
All four speak the same refined and limpid musical language
of the orchestra that creates the subtle play of thematic
reminiscences. The music always emerges from the words,
indissolubly bound to their meaning and to the images
they evoke. In Bohème, Tosca, and Butterfly, he collaborated
enthusiastically with the writers Giuseppe Giacosa and
Luigi Illica. The first performance (Feb. 17, 1904) of Madama
Butterfly was a fiasco, probably because the audience found
the work too much like Puccini’s preceding operas.
In 1908, having spent the summer in Cairo, the Puccinis
returned to Torre del Lago, and Giacomo devoted himself
to Fanciulla. Elvira unexpectedly became jealous of Doria
Manfredi, a young servant from the village who had been
employed for several years by the Puccinis. She drove
Doria from the house threatening to kill her. Subsequently,
the servant girl poisoned herself, and the Manfredis
brought charges against Elvira Puccini for persecution
and calumny, creating one of the most famous scandals of
the time. Elvira was found guilty but was not sentenced,
and Puccini paid damages to the Manfredis, who withdrew
their accusations.
The premiere of La fanciulla del west took place at the
Metropolitan in New York City on Dec. 10, 1910, with
Arturo Toscanini conducting. It was a great triumph, and
with it Puccini reached the end of his mature period.
Puccini felt the new century advancing with problems no
longer his own. He did not understand contemporary
events, such as World War I. In 1917 at Monte-Carlo in
Monaco, Puccini’s opera La rondine was first performed
and was quickly forgotten.
Always interested in contemporary operatic composi-
tions, Puccini studied the works of Claude Debussy,