E lucevan le stelle (Tosca)

Puccini saw Sardou's La Tosca with Sarah Bernhardt and wrote to his publisher in 1889 that this was the opera he needed. The rights passed to Alberto Franchetti before returning to him in 1895; Illica and Giacosa then spent four argumentative years reducing the French melodrama to three acts. Composition ran from January 1898 to September 1899. The premiere at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900 was postponed a day after warnings of an anarchist bomb; the reviews were indifferent, the twenty performances that followed sold out. The action occupies a single day in Rome in June 1800.