Today there seem to be few composers as central to the popular operatic repertory as Puccini. A perennial favourite of audiences the world over, his most enduring works are staples of opera companies from San Francisco to Sydney. Puccini is, to put it bluntly, a safe bet: at a time when adventurous productions of new works pose considerable financial risks for state-subsidised theatres, even a very run-of-the-mill production of La bohème, for instance, can be relied upon to bring in the mainstream operatic audience and, in the process, balance the books. Puccini also represents to a perhaps unrivalled extent the very essence of Italian opera, at least as it is popularly imagined: tuneful, passionate and emotionally direct. At first glance, then, there would seem to be no composer less problematic than Puccini.

A closer inspection of the reception of this intriguing figure's music, however, reveals a far more complex situation. While Puccini's audiences surely still view him as the Italian opera composer par excellence, his reputation among today's critics and academics is – to say the least – mixed. A long-held cultural distrust of overt, comprehensible artistic sensuality seems to relegate Puccini to the second-class carriage of music history. Puccini, one might speculate, is too popular, too unchallenging, too conservative to win the respect that mainstream modernism has long enjoyed. Joseph Kerman's notorious jibe – that Tosca is a ‘shabby little shocker’ – can stand as emblematic of the hostility that Puccini's operas can provoke.