Puccini in 1958

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For the musician who grew up in the decade before the Second World War, to write any sort of salute to Puccini in his centenary year, is quite likely to be a surprise. Puccini, the histrionic tune-trundler, the vulgar sentimentalist, the eclectic user-up of everybody else's remnants who had nothing much of his own in the way of raw material, was hardly a respectable figure in my highbrow youth. We could forgive the preWagnerians for their unenlightenment; we could forgive Verdi for being born on the wrong side of the Alps. But Puccini, the casual opportunist who was everything in turn, Wagnerian, Verdian, even Mozartian, Sraussian, modern, romantic, pseudo-austere and exotic - as the …