Questo amor, vergogna mia (Edgar)

Edgar was Puccini's second opera and the one he never stopped repairing. Ferdinando Fontana's libretto, freely drawn from Musset's verse play La coupe et les lèvres, handed him a plot he later admitted he did not believe in. The four-act version reached La Scala on 21 April 1889 and was received without enthusiasm; he compressed it to three acts in 1892 and went on revising as late as 1905, salvaging material for other scores along the way. What survives in performance are the arias, sung far more often than the opera is staged.