ion held by the publishing firm of Sonzogno. Puccini and his librettist, Ferdinando Fontana, failed to win, but their opera Le villi came to the attention of the Giulio Ricordi, a publisher, who arranged a successful production at the Teatro del Verme in Milan and commissioned a second opera. Fontana's libretto for this second work, Edgar, was unsuited to Puccini's dramatic talent, and the opera was poorly received at La Scala when performed in April 1889. The opera did set what would be Puccini's lifelong association with the house of Ricordi (Sadie The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music).
The first opera for which Puccini himself chose the subject was Manon Lescaut, which was produced at Turin in 1893. This opera achieved a success such as Puccini was never to repeat, and it made him known outside Italy. Among the writers who worked on the libretto were Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, who provided the libretti for Puccini's next three operas. The first of these was La boheme, widely considered Puccini's masterpiece; however, it was not a success when produced at Turin in 1896, perhaps because of its mixture of lighthearted and sentimental scenes and its largely conversational style. Tosca would be Puccini's first excursion into verismo, a new emphasis on realism, and was more enthusiastically received by the Roman audience at the Teatro Costanzi in 1900. That same year, Puccini visited London and saw David Belasco's one act play Madam Butterfly, and he took this as the basis for his next collaboration with Illica and Giacosa. He considered Madame Butterfly the best and technically most advanced opera he had written. He was therefore unprepared for the fiasco attending its first performance in February 1904 when the audience treated the piece with great hostility. In a revised version, the opera was given to great accla
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