exaggerations and enough will be said about it in this book. The first
appreciable change in this negative attitude was brought about in the
1920s, by Gianni Schicchi and, notably, Turandot. Were these works from
the same pen which had written the 'tear-jerkers' La Bohème and Madam
Butterfly, and 'that brutal assault on our nerves', Tosca? This question was
on the lips of every observant musician and intensive searchings of the
heart started. Puccini began to appear to us in a new light. Symptomatic
of this process was the appearance, in 1932, of a book by Richard Specht,
an eminent Viennese critic, who devoted to Puccini, man and artist, what
must be accounted the first study to claim comprehensive treatment allied
to a critically sympathetic and highly perceptive approach. Significantly,
Specht opened with the declaration that his book represented 'an admission
of error' on his part and 'an act of atonement and expiation', words testifying
to this author's intellectual honesty. However, writing a generation after
Specht, I feel no cause to echo the sentiments expressed in his preamble.
For in the intervening period our opinions of Puccini have travelled a long
distance farther in his favour; partly, perhaps, because modern operatic
aesthetics are no longer exclusively dominated -- as during the early decades
of this century, particularly in Central Europe and the Anglo-Saxon
countries -- by the Wagnerian concept of the mission of opera. The lyrical
theatre as a moral institution, a vehicle for Wehanschauungen and meta-
physical thought -- these were the tenets to which traditional Italian opera
could and would never subscribe. For all his so-called 'internationalism"
the thorn in the flesh of his quondam Italian critics, Puccini never deserted
the ground in which that tradition had grown; indeed, it is part of his
strength that his roots are so deeply embedded in it. It was the young
George Bernard Shaw who was one of the first to recognize this outside
Italy: after the first London production of Manon Lescaut in 1894 he gave
it as his opinion that ' Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than
any of his rivals'. These were prophetic words. For in the period since
Verdi's death, who is it who towers above a host of Italian opera composers
and who in a sense is the only one to claim the proxime accessit? Puccini.
In addition to those misapplied Wagnerian concepts, it was, I hazard the
suggestion, the inability or the refusal of the majority of his critics to perceive
him in this light which so long delayed recognition of his full stature.
After the lapse of a century since Puccini's birth, and almost a third of a century
after his death, we should at last be in a position to see him in historical perspec-
tive and assess his achievements with a measure of dispassionate detachment
denied to his contemporaries.

This book represents an attempt in that direction. It is the result of both
practical experience and a close study of the 'problem' Puccini. My years as
an operatic conductor brought me into almost daily, living contact with
his operas and permitted me an insight into his stagecraft such as I should
never have obtained from poring over his scores in my study or as a passive
spectator in the opera house. After settling in England, I began to occupy
myself more systematically with the man and his music but for a variety

-x-