This chapter considers the music publishing industry in Puccini’s Italy, with a particular focus on Puccini’s principal publisher, the Casa Ricordi. The chapter examines the role that publishers played within the wider operatic industry, which by Puccini’s time included managing contracts between composers and opera houses and influencing casting, as well as the more traditional business of printing, publishing, and promoting scores. The particular musical specialisms of the Sonzogno and Ricordi publishing houses are discussed. The author shows how Ricordi elevated Puccini to the position of national-composer-elect towards the end of Verdi’s lifetime and constructed a ‘Puccini myth’. Expensive, sophisticated publicity tools and marketing strategies were used to promote Puccini’s works, not only in Italy but in territories across the globe. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s relationship with the firm changed as a result of the succession of power from Giulio to Tito Ricordi upon the former’s death, as well as the firm’s management of Puccini’s works after his own death.

This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with early film. The composer’s career coincided with nearly the first thirty years of the cinematic art form, and it was a form of technology with which Puccini had an ambivalent relationship. The chapter begins with an account of Puccini’s known thoughts about film and cinema going. There follows an extensive discussion of Puccini’s and Ricordi’s legal efforts to prevent the use of his music as film accompaniment, and of the difficulty in recouping royalties. By the 1920s, however, Ricordi was including a clause about film usage in opera contracts, including that for Turandot. From the 1930s, with the arrival of the ‘talkies’, commercial opportunities became apparent and the company pursued a more liberal course. The chapter also considers how Puccini’s operas were brought to the screen during his lifetime and shortly after – there was a particular vogue for Tosca films – and discusses the ways in which the composer’s works might be considered ‘cinematic’.