Puccini's Orchestration

Abstract

In order to say anything new about Puccini's orchestration, it is necessary to subject his manuscripts to a detailed scrutiny and it soon becomes apparent that many pages of his writing have not yet been microscopically examined. In fact the early copyists, probably working under the difficult pressure of a late arrival of the manuscript from the composer and an imminent theatrical rehearsal, appear to have approached his compositions with a certain creative flair of their own. Of the two operas which I have been able to copy out almost completely from the manuscripts, La Bohème and Tosca, only three or four pages towards the end of Act I of Tosca could be said to have been accurately copied, as though the work of copying might have fallen into different hands for those pages. Elsewhere throughout both scores, apart from the obvious changes which Puccini brought to his composition subsequently, there is a general wash of ‘editing’ which has introduced an average of from 40 to 50 small changes on each and every page of the score.