O mio babbino caro (Gianni Schicchi)

Gianni Schicchi is the third panel of Il trittico, the triple bill Puccini assembled during the First World War, and the only comedy he completed. Giovacchino Forzano's libretto expands six lines from the thirtieth canto of Dante's Inferno, where a Florentine is punished for impersonating a dead man in order to dictate a false will. The premiere of the whole triptych took place at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 14 December 1918, five weeks after the armistice; Puccini did not travel. Of the three works this one detached itself fastest and is now played more often alone than in sequence.