40. Storiella d'amore (Melodia)

Ghislanzoni’s poem refers to Francesca da Rimini’s famous love story from Dante’s Divina Commedia (Inferno, Canto V), the model for numerous literary and musical representations, but Ghislanzoni ironically plays with Dante’s text.
Puccini’s composition most probably dates from the spring of 1883 (like two other settings of Ghislanzoni poems 39, and 41). This is also supported by the autograph dating of 40.C.1. That copyist’s score of the missing autograph manuscript could have served as the draft for Sonzogno’s first published edition 40.E.1. Puccini presented 40.C.1 as a gift to Emilia Sanpietro, later the Contessa Caraffa, about whom I could not discover anything particular. In 1903, she gave the manuscript to the attorney Careri, whose family sold it in 1950 to Harvard University. It is not certain when exactly Puccini gave the score to Signorina Sanpietro, but he may have done so along with a copy of an excerpt from Le Villi (see 60.C.2), which he dedicated to her on 4 August 1884. In any case, according to the signature of 40.C.1 the composition must have been completed in early June 1883 at the latest.
As indicated in Kaye 1987, the beginning of the song is slightly similar to a passage in Mimi’s aria in Act 1 of La Bohème (67, at fig. 37). Five bars from the middle Lento section (bars 44-48) appear in the Act 3 Trio of Edgar (62, from fig. 36 of the current Ricordi edition; compare Cesari 1994, p. 692).