Gianni Schicchi

Gianni Schicchi is the third panel of Il trittico and the only comedy Puccini completed. Giovacchino Forzano built the libretto out of three lines in the thirtieth canto of Dante's Inferno, where Schicchi is punished among the falsifiers for impersonating a dead man to dictate a false will. The Metropolitan Opera gave the premiere of all three operas on 14 December 1918; Puccini could not cross the Atlantic so soon after the war. Of the triptych only this one entered the repertoire independently, and its single aria has long outgrown it.