Who is Puccini? His operas, while everywhere heard, have until recently remained in large part hidden from the analyst's eye. Not an opera season goes by without a performance of at least one of his works, and although much has been written about Puccini's biography, his love life, the dramaturgy of his libretti, his psychological makeup, his revisions, etc., less critical attention by scholars has been paid to the actual notes he put together. More than twenty-five years ago, Roger Parker wrote that “Puccini represents a last outpost against the rigours of music theory” and, although that situation has improved with some important analytic contributions at the dissertation level, in books, and in scholarly articles—a number of which do not agree— there has so far been no study of all his operas examined through a primarily analytic lens.

Perhaps the most contentious of those debates are focused on Puccini's cultural and musical identity: is he traditional or progressive? This author does not challenge the sometimes conflicting analytic work by William Ashbrook, Allan Atlas, Nicholas Baragwanath, Andrew Davis, William Drabkin, Michele Girardi, Helen Greenwald, James Hepokoski, Harold Powers, Giorgio Sanguinetti and others, nor suggest that her book will supersede it. Rather, the analytic investigations completed previously have made possible this book's focus. In short, the thesis of this volume is that the diametrically opposed forces of the traditional and the progressive live together in Puccini's music, embedded deeply within his harmonic constructs and in many musical parameters. The author hopes that the observations set forth in these pages will help frame Puccini studies in a way that helps to reconcile previously contentious issues.

Often the question of Puccini's identity is put in nationalistic terms: is he the scion of the Italian tradition or a progressive composer steeped in the foreign influences of his day. This is indeed the subject of Alexandra Wilson's book The Puccini Problem, and the issue is succinctly referenced by the original title of Michele Girardi's volume L'arte internazionale di un musicista italiano (literally, “The international art of an Italian musician”).