Defining Italianness: The Opera That Made Puccini

Abstract

On February 1, 1923, Giacomo Puccini attended a gala performance of Manon Lescaut at La Scala. This was no ordinary revival: it was intended to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the work's premiere. The opera, in a revised, “definitive” version, was the centerpiece of the 1922–23 season, receiving seventeen performances—more than any other work.1 For the gala performance the theater was sold out, the performers excelled themselves, and the audience called Puccini to the stage countless times. After the opera, the Puccinis, together with the conductor Arturo Toscanini, retired to the elegant Ristorante Cova, where a banquet was laid on for three hundred guests; entertainment was provided by young ladies who danced to the minuet from act 2 of Manon Lescaut.2 Puccini was moved at the affection shown by the Milanese for his opera, feeling it to be some recompense for the ill-treatment the La Scala audience had paid him at the premiere of Madama Butterfly in 1904.3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.