This chapter examines Puccini’s relationship with Milan, the city that was most important to his career. It begins with a detailed discussion of the Milan of the composer’s student years, outlining its importance as both an industrial and a cultural centre characterised by cosmopolitanism and modernity. Milan was also the capital of the nineteenth-century operatic world, where many singers, publishers, and critics were based, and with several leading opera houses, most notably La Scala. The chapter discusses how Puccini launched his career in Milan, securing a premiere at La Scala at a very early stage (Edgar). The ill-fated first performance of Madama Butterfly is also discussed, as is the posthumous premiere of Turandot. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of Puccini’s oeuvre at La Scala since his death and the ways in which Puccini came, in a sense, to symbolise the city’s self-image.

Understanding the training of professional musicians in nineteenth-century France may require some conceptual adjustments. Words that seem to mean one thing for us today can actually have meant something rather different then. Accompagnement, for instance, meant practical keyboard harmony and thoroughbass, harmonie meant practical counterpoint, and contrepoint meant imitative counterpoint in the form of fugues and canons. As we shall see below, when Gabriel Fauré wrote a harmony exercise in which he provided the bass and a student was to add the implied tenor, alto, and soprano voices, he intended it to be completed as an informal type of fugue, the locus classicus of counterpoint. “Counterpoint” was a word deeply rooted in the practices of trained medieval monks who could improvise a series of points (= notes) against (Lat. contra) the notes of a Gregorian chant.

Can you teach someone to be an actor? Paradoxically, the French cultural context while constraining the remit of the actor allowed acting to emerge as an autonomous science. The conservatoire training model that flourished in France in the nineteenth century was vigorously resisted by the nineteenth-century English actor-manager. Training or talent: the classical debate: Cicero and Quintilian resisted Aristotle’s claim that acting was merely ‘natural’. Early modern apprenticeship in the science of acting: our best evidence comes from Paris in the Shakespearean era, where Hardy’s classical dramaturgy demanded new skills. Multiple skills served the craft of acting. Early modern schooling: the example of Marston’s boy actors: how boys with a rhetorical education challenged the older generation of professionals. Hamlet: fencing as a foundation for acting: Hamlet learns to ‘act’ by learning to fence, and I trace the enduring place of fencing in actor training, distinguishing Italian and English methods. The pedagogy of Charles Macklin: a case study in how eighteenth-century acting was taught. The birth of the conservatoire: first championed by Lekain and his contemporaries.