Giacomo Puccini Because only three "verismo" works by Puccini continue to appear regularly on stage (the aforementioned "Cavalleria rusticana", "Pagliacci", and "Andrea Chénier"), Puccini's contribution has had lasting significance to the genre. Both during his lifetime and in posterity, Puccini's success outstripped other Italian opera composers of his time, and he has been matched in this regard by only a handful of composers in the entire history of opera. Eleven of Puccini's operas are numbered among the 200 most-performed operas (worldwide, by composers of any nationality, as surveyed by Operabase). Three of his works ("La bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly") rank among
The Royal Opera with cheap admission prices. To succeed Davis, the Covent Garden board chose Bernard Haitink, who was then the musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival. He was highly regarded for the excellence of his performances, though his repertory was not large. In particular, he was not known as an interpreter of the Italian opera repertoire (he conducted no Puccini and only five Verdi works during his music directorship at Covent Garden). His tenure began well; a cycle of the Mozart Da Ponte operas directed by Johannes Schaaf was a success, and although a "Ring" cycle with the Russian director Yuri Lyubimov