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Frenzy of Remorse. Away from his public, Puccini was a painfully shy man, given to periods of black depression accentuated by a stormy family life. He had met Elvira Gemignani when he was 26, lured her away from her husband (and Puccini's old school chum), had a child by her. He married her 19 years later when her husband died. Their affair fluctuated between periods of passionate affection ("little mouse," he called her) and her storms of insane jealousy. Once he was famous, Puccini had a string of affairs with his more shapely Mimis, Musettas and Butterflys ("I am guilty," he wrote, "but it is my destiny that I must be guilty"), and Elvira was driven to following him, dressed as a man. As a last resort, she slipped camphor in her husband's pocket on the theory that it had a debilitating effect and would diminish his ardor. It didn't. Finally, when he was 50, Elvira unjustly accused a servant girl of being his mistress, drove her to suicide — and Puccini to a frenzy of remorse. When he died in Brussels at 65 after an operation for cancer of the throat, his last words to his stepdaughter were: "Remember that your mother is a remarkable woman."
Puccini once showed a friend a French lithograph of a nude girl pressed against a grated window in Venice. "This," he said, "is the kind of libretto I want for my next opera." Failing in his lifelong search for a girl who combined frailness with sensuality, he built those qualities into a procession of operatic heroines — Manon Lescaut, Mimi in Bohème, Cio-Cio-San in Butterfly, Liù in Turandot. His obsession with swift love followed by swifter death gave his work a narrow emotional range, a failing of which he was conscious. He envied Wagner his heroic themes and majestic brasses, idolized Verdi's poetic tragedies, in later life even made an effort to understand the moderns (although on first hearing he thought Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps "the creation of a madman").
But he also knew where his genius lay, wisely rejected both the Wagnerian influence and the broader version of the Italian verismo style as practiced by Mascagni and Leoncavallo. Instead, he clung to his own romantic, melodious, bittersweet tales shot through with a uniquely warm lyricism and underscored with lushly singing strings. A painstaking workman who admired clarity ("The black scores," he said, "are the easiest to fake"), he left as his legacy only eleven operas. But 34 years after his death, the world of opera has not found a composer who can speak to the universal audience Puccini commands.