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Giacomo Puccini: Catalogue of the Works.

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Giacomo Puccini: Catalogue of the Works. By Dieter Schickling. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2003. [446 p. ISBN 3-7618-1582-2. $167.50.] Music examples.

Many readers may remember a popular undergraduate music history text that made only begrudging reference to Puccini, relegating the discussion of his entire oeuvre to a paragraph. The unspoken judgment was that any work that enjoyed wildly popular success in a twentieth-century opera house was somehow unworthy of scholarly scrutiny. I remember my first national American Musicological Society meeting, in the early 1970s, when all opera was relegated to the Sunday morning slot, and even then the only Italians deemed fit for discussion were Verdi and Rossini.

Happily that is all behind us, thanks largely to a handful of pioneering musicologists who looked more deeply at Puccini's works and their sources. Linda B. Fairtile's survey of the history of Puccini scholarship documents the history of the increasing interest in the composer (Giacomo Puccini: A Guide to Research [New York: Garland, 1999]). A serious hindrance to Puccini studies, however, has been the lack of a comprehensive catalog of sources. Musical sources for the operas are voluminous, as the composer was seldom content with what he had written, and was one of the great revisers in the history of music, often adjusting things well after the premiere according to what worked best onstage. Relating the manuscript sources to the chronology of the genesis of the work and identifying the relationships between the various printed editions are daunting tasks, further complicated as more sources come to light and knowledge of the composer's work habits increases.

With his masterful biography of the composer (Giacomo Puccini: Biographie [Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1989]), and a steady stream of important articles, Dieter...

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