The Threat Hidden in a Tender Aria

A hero from Dante's Hell

The song comes from Giacomo Puccini's short opera Gianni Schicchi, the last of a set of three one-act operas first staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in December 1918. After moving audiences to tears with La bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, Puccini produced his first and only comic opera.

Its hero, Gianni Schicchi, is a real thirteenth-century Florentine who appears briefly in the Inferno of Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante placed him in Hell among the falsifiers, as a man who impersonated a dead rich man and dictated a fake will to divert his fortune.

A daughter's sweet blackmail

The story goes like this. When the rich Florentine Buoso dies, his relatives flock in, open the will, and find he has left everything to a monastery. Furious, they call in the cunning Gianni Schicchi to fix things. But Schicchi dislikes these snobbish relatives and refuses to help.

At that moment his daughter Lauretta steps forward. She is in love with Rinuccio, a young man of that family, and for them to marry, this problem must be solved. So Lauretta sings to her father: I love him, I want to go and buy the ring, and if not, I'll go to the Ponte Vecchio and throw myself into the Arno. Please, father.

That tender melody carries, in fact, a sweet threat. In the end her father relents and stages a daring fraud, impersonating the dead Buoso and dictating a new will. Who ends up with the richest share of that will? Watch the opera and find out.

The song's own road

The aria has become far more famous than the opera. People who don't know the story hear the song on its own and remember it as a pure love song. It is a fine example of how the same melody can sound entirely different depending on the story around it.