When Björling was born on February 5, 1911, Puccini was resting at his lakeside retreat in Torre del Lago in Tuscany. Five days earlier the composer had written to Arturo Toscanini recalling their collaboration in New York the previous December, when La fanciulla del West had been given its world premiere at the Metropolitan with Enrico Caruso as Ramerrez. Björling would have the honor of “creating” this role in Swedish twenty-three years later.

When Puccini died on November 29, 1924, Björling was already an experienced performer, who had been singing in public for nine years. On that day he gave a recital with his brothers Olle and Gösta and their father David in a church in Skutskar, on the Baltic coast near Gävle. It is not known whether he had sung any of Puccini's music at that age, but he was probably familiar with a number of arias—from La bohéme, Tosca, and La fanciulla del West—that were in his father's concert repertoire, and would soon start singing them himself as his voice moved down into the tenor range. By the time Turandot (the last opera he would record complete) was staged at La Scala on April 25, 1926, Björling was beginning to sound like a tenor. He performed that day in Skurup Church in the south of Sweden with Gösta and Olle.