Ch'ella mi creda libero e lontano (La fanciulla del West)

Puccini saw David Belasco's play The Girl of the Golden West in New York in 1907 and secured the rights; the score took him three years, interrupted by the scandal and the suicide of a servant in his household. The Metropolitan Opera gave the world premiere on 10 December 1910 — the first the house had ever mounted — with Toscanini conducting and Caruso and Emmy Destinn in the leading parts. The harmonic language is markedly more advanced than in the works before it, with whole-tone writing and parallel chords, and the opera ends, uniquely in Puccini, without a death.