41. Ad una morta!

Ghislanzoni’s poem, the first line of which begins “Spirto gentil, dal carcere / Terreno assunto ai cieli”, was published in 1882 in the second edition of his collected poetry entitled Melodie per Canto. So Puccini’s setting probably dates from spring 1883 (like his other texts by Ghislanzoni; see 38, 39, and 40). That time frame is further corroborated by Puccini’s own dating of 41.C.1.
41.C.1 , as well as 40.B.1, once belonged to Emilia Sanpietro (later the Contessa Caraffa). In 1903 she gave the two manuscripts to the attorney Careri, whose family sold it to Harvard University in 1950.
Without any doubt 41.C.1 is the definite and the only complete version of the song. The voice part (bars 5-42) differs from 41.A.1 and 41.A.2 in a few details, augmented by extra expression markings, and insofar nearly coincides with Kaye’s partial reconstruction (41.E.1). Bars 43-49 contain the ending, missing from Kaye 1987, and agreeing with 41.A.5. Furthermore, it has a different and shorter prelude (4 instead of 6 bars for the piano), corresponding to 41.A.3. The autograph date of the manuscript (27 July 1883) and its calligraphic character could signify that after finishing Storiella d’amore (see 40) Puccini hoped to have Ad una morta! become one of his published songs, but it was never published in his lifetime.
Puccini obviously also orchestrated the song (see 41a), but that version is only preserved in fragments (see 41.A.3, 41.A.4, and 41.A.5).
Puccini used a melodic motif from this song (bars 13–15) in Roberto’s romanza, with the text “ridean i fior, fioria per me l’amor” in Le Villi, composed early in 1885 (see 60), as well as in Act 4 of Edgar (see 62). Another short passage (bars 16-21) belongs to the thematic material of the Capriccio sinfonico (see 55), written not long after Ad una morta!. From there, the same music was incorporated in Le Villi as well as in Edgar (further details about these self-borrowings are reported in Cesari 1994, pp. 685-686, and Francesco Cesari in Biagi Ravenni and Gianturco 1997, pp. 450-451).