Today there seem to be few composers as central to the popular operatic repertory as Puccini. A perennial favourite of audiences the world over, his most enduring works are staples of opera companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Puccini is, to put it bluntly, a safe bet: at a time when adventurous productions of new works pose considerable financial risks for state-subsidised theatres, even a very run-of-the-mill production of La bohème, for instance, can be relied upon to bring in the mainstream operatic audience and, in the process, balance the books. Puccini also represents to a perhaps unrivalled extent the very essence of Italian opera, at least as it is popularly imagined: tuneful, passionate and emotionally direct. At first glance, then, there would seem to be no composer less problematic than Puccini.

A closer inspection of the reception of this intriguing figure's music, however, reveals a far more complex situation. While Puccini's audiences surely still view him as the Italian opera composer par excellence, his reputation among today's critics and academics is – to say the least – mixed. A long-held cultural distrust of overt, comprehensible artistic sensuality seems to relegate Puccini to the second-class carriage of music history. Puccini, one might speculate, is too popular, too unchallenging, too conservative to win the respect that mainstream modernism has long enjoyed. Joseph Kerman's notorious jibe – that Tosca is a ‘shabby little shocker’ – can stand as emblematic of the hostility that Puccini's operas can provoke.

‘Madama Butterfly flopped, flopped irredeemably. Last night's performance at La Scala was not just a failure; it was what one might frankly call a disaster, a catastrophe.’ Of all operatic fiascos, the first performance of Madama Butterfly at La Scala on 17 February 1904 ranks among the most notorious. The ominous silence that greeted much of Act I was replaced in Act II by contemptuous grunts, bellows, guffaws and even bird and animal noises. The rumpus was so loud that the voices and instruments were inaudible, to the point that the leading lady, Rosina Storchio, was reduced to tears when she could not hear her cues. The principal reason for this near-riot was the audience's impatience with a work that seemed excessively long by the customary standards of Italian opera, consisting of a first act of an hour and an interminable second act of ninety minutes.

However, the swiftness with which the disruption spread through the auditorium led to conspiracy theories, with Puccini's supporters immediately declaring foul play. The Ricordi journal Musica e musicisti discreetly relegated news of the disastrous première to a brief statement, claiming that the audience had been ill disposed to the opera from the moment the curtain rose, had gone on to create a pandemonium and had ‘left the theatre as pleased as Punch!’ The use of a hostile claque to disrupt an opera by a rival was not an uncommon practice at this time, although the Madama Butterfly première was an extreme case.

On a grey, drizzling day in late November 1924, 80,000 people lined the streets of Brussels for ‘the passing of a triumphant hero’. Among the many wreaths borne upon Puccini's coffin were an immense bouquet of chrysanthemums and lilies bearing the name Benito Mussolini and a wreath of orchids from the king of Italy. When the coffin later arrived in Milan, those waiting to meet the train included Puccini's librettists Simoni and Adami, Toscanini – reportedly ‘almost petrified with sorrow’ – and the composers Montemezzi and Pizzetti, the latter presumably repenting his attack on Puccini ten years earlier. An overnight vigil was held in the Church of San Fedele before the coffin was moved to the Duomo the following day. The sober candelabras that surrounded Puccini's coffin were placed in an arrangement identical to that which had been used for another national icon, Vittorio Emanuele II.

To read Puccini's obituaries, his status as national hero would seem to be beyond challenge. Although he had been widely criticised for losing his way during the 1910s, this was not alluded to in the grandiose tributes paid to him following his death. In a sixty-page tribute, the Ricordi journal Musica d'oggi recounted every stage of Puccini's demise in graphic detail, under such headings as ‘First symptoms of the illness’, ‘The operation’, ‘The catastrophe’, although even at the very end of his life Puccini's physical vigour was emphasised (‘Puccini enjoyed very good health; with the exception of his minor diabetic condition, his health was not undermined by physical frailty in the slightest’).

The responses that greeted Turandot marked a turning-point in its composer's reception history. After Puccini's death, even his enemies were prepared to acknowledge him as the Italian artist of his day. His status as national composer was now finally secure – to the extent that Renato Mariani would go so far as to write in 1939 that ‘Italy and Puccini are one and the same’ – and the Fascist regime sought to appropriate his music for its own political ends. Adriano Lualdi would write in the 1950s: ‘as far as the theatre is concerned, Puccini's œuvre in fact represents Italian music in the period 1880–1910 much more truthfully than the masterwork Falstaff and much more faithfully than Cavalleria rusticana’. Finally, or so it seems, Puccini had won unequivocal endorsement from the majority of the critics; even if they were baffled by Turandot itself, there can be no doubt that its composer was now seen as one of Italy's most significant creative figures. The question of Puccini's Italianness – for so long a bone of contention among writers and musicologists of all political persuasions – was settled.

However, as this particular issue receded into the background, other problems came to the fore. Turandot prompted such questions: Puccini's conscious attempt to renew his style had thrown into relief the very irreconcilability of modern compositional styles with the basic aesthetic premises of Italian opera.

La bohème is nowadays one of the best-loved and most frequently performed of all Puccini's operas. After its première in February 1896 it was swiftly adopted into the repertory of all the major theatres across Italy, and performances soon followed in such diverse cities as Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Moscow, Lisbon, Manchester, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico, London, Vienna, Los Angeles and The Hague. However, the response of the audience that listened to its first performance at Turin's Teatro Regio was subdued, and that in Rome a short time later little more enthusiastic. Critical responses were polarised (one commentator referred to them as either di cotte or di crude – burnt or raw) and coloured by a significant event that had taken place in Turin a little over a month earlier – the first Italian production of Götterdämmerung. In a city where many critics were relatively tolerant of forward-looking musical tendencies, La bohème was not judged on its own terms but became caught up in heated arguments about the merits of Wagner's music and ideas. Two key themes emerged from the comparison with Wagner: the issue of organic wholeness in music and the separate but related issue of organic growth, or how Italian music ought to progress. Thus, despite the subsequent popular success of La bohème, its initial critical reception was dominated by anxieties about the vitality of contemporary Italian music and its ability to keep pace with musical developments elsewhere in Europe.

‘Puccini … embodies, with the utmost completeness, all the decadence of current Italian music, and represents all its cynical commercialism, all its pitiful impotence and the whole triumphant vogue for internationalism.’ Thus was the project to promote Puccini as a national hero checked in 1912 when the Turin-based academic publishing house Fratelli Bocca released a vitriolic monograph entitled Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale. Fausto Torrefranca, the book's twenty-nine-year-old author, made no attempt to disguise his contempt for the composer promoted by Ricordi as Verdi's successor, and his assessment of Puccini stood in stark contrast to the idolatry of the popular musical press. Nominating himself as the only critic courageous enough to stand out against the current artistic climate of vulgarity and insincerity, Torrefranca wrote his book as a call to arms to his dissatisfied peers, encouraging them to rise up against an older generation characterised by ‘spiritual mediocrity’.

Torrefranca organised his 133-page assault on Puccini into four sections. The first (‘Psicologia dell'opera pucciniana’) considers the decadence of Italian opera and of Puccini's personality, while the second (‘La vita artistica del Puccini e l'ambiente’) is a caustic biographical profile and commentary on Puccini's operas up to 1910. The third, entitled ‘Puccini uomo di teatro’, examines Puccini's attitudes towards dramatic structure and characterisation, and the final section (provocatively entitled ‘Puccini musicista?’) is an assessment of Puccini's musical style and influences.

Tosca is an opera caught between truth and lies. Set in real places, at real times, it is probably the opera Puccini researched most scrupulously in order to ensure historical accuracy. Yet insincerity is its main theme: the opera's principal events are structured around a series of deceptions that intensify in dramatic power and consequence over the course of the work. Act I: Cavaradossi lies to Tosca in order to conceal the fact that he is sheltering Angelotti, the political prisoner. Act II: Tosca makes a false bargain with Scarpia, agreeing to succumb to his lustful advances and then stabbing him as he is about to claim his prize. Act III: Scarpia's deceit is revealed when the ‘fake’ execution he has arranged for Cavaradossi turns out to be for real. Furthermore, Tosca is a performance about performance, with its fictional characters constantly donning masks: Tosca is a singer and actress by profession; Cavaradossi prepares to feign his own death; Scarpia conceals his malevolent nature behind a clerical façade. With its strains of verismo and Grand Guignol, Tosca is arguably Puccini's most self-consciously ‘theatrical’ opera, its high drama epitomised most vividly at the moment when Tosca places a crucifix on Scarpia's chest and floodlights his corpse by surrounding it with candles. Beyond the basic level of plot, contemporary spectators perceived yet further layers of insincerity in Tosca that, as we shall see, permeated through the libretto and into the music itself.