Creativity, and creative people, and their creative works, often make me emotional. I don’t think I’m alone in that. There is something about slamming into a work of artistic genius – the emotional connection, the feeling of truth writ large, the distillation of human truth – that can be overwhelming. I don’t think I understood any of that about Nineteenth Century Italian opera when I went to see Verdi’s Il Trovatore as my first opera, aged five; back then I looked at it more as a gripping adventure story, and the fact that everyone seemed to be singing like their lives depended on it seemed exciting. But the more I learnt about Italian society in the closing quarter of that century, the more fascinated I became.

Because, as the golden era of Italian opera entered its last stretch, with Verdi ageing-out and contenders circling to inherit his crown, paradoxically, the number of talented composers seems to have been higher than ever, many of them crammed into the bustling streets of Milan. I’ve often tried to imagine what it was like to live in a city where so many of them lived and competed. Puccini, Leoncavallo, Ponchielli, Catalani, Mascagni, Giordano, Cilea, Boito, others now all-but-forgotten, like Emilio Pizzi, Franco Leoni and Alberto Franchetti (who also found time for a second job as an early racing car driver!). So numerous was the roll-call of composers, one imagines it was almost like the ubiquitous stereotype of waiters in New York handing out their actors’ resumes - so, in 1890s Milan, perhaps one might have had a score pushily served with one’s coffee and cannoli.

Rehearsals for 'That Bastard, Puccini!' – Lisa-Anne Wood and Alasdair Buchan (photo: Ben Hewis Videography)

So much artistic intensity in such a relatively small area – and what makes that intensity seem all the more, well, intense, is that this was the era of verismo opera. That blood-and-thunder style where hearts are not so much worn on characters’ sleeves as slapped, raw and bleeding, on tables – as their owners sing of emotional desperation, and at some point, quite often, commit murder or fight a duel (either is acceptable). It’s easy to make fun of, but there’s a reason verismo operas were so popular, and still are – they offer a direct line into pure, concentrated emotionality. Consequently, one imagines being in the company of the men tapped into that kind of inspiration to be entirely exhilarating. Add a large dose of competitiveness, dishonesty and desperation (just because they were talented didn’t mean they were all successful, or even comfortably-off) and it must also have been maddening, exhausting (and, for lovers of gossip and intrigue, delicious!). But what a time, in what a place.

All of this is distilled in the fantastic story of Puccini, Leoncavallo and ‘the battle of the Bohèmes’. Although not-widely known, I’d been aware of a version of it since my father enlivened a Friday-night video showing of Puccini’s La bohème by simply telling me that Puccini had filched the idea for that subject from Leoncavallo. What I only discovered years later was that both men embarked on a race to compose their own version, that the attendant scandal rocked Italy, quite how much was at stake, and the fantastic gallery of supporting players. It was, and is, one heck of a juicy story, at once extremely funny and profoundly moving. But more than that, researching it after the Covid-enforced long abstinence from theatres, it struck me how much of the essence of the creative process itself, and what it demands, and what it gives – or doesn’t – in return, could be encompassed within it.

Rehearsals for 'That Bastard, Puccini!' – Sebastien Torkia and Alasdair Buchan (photo: Ben Hewis Videography)

And so I set out to write my new play, That Bastard, Puccini!. There were new discoveries all along the way; unbelievable twists and turns that I would not have dared to make up (‘Of course you know about that night in Venice…’ said the then-head of La Fenice Opera House, before casually telling me the most incredible anecdote that would later become one of my favourite scenes in the play). The composers’ wives became, rightly, vitally important characters; while the story stretched to incorporate other composers, from other lands – Massenet in France, Mahler in Czechoslovakia and Austria. And writing about all of this creativity freed me up to feel I could take creative liberties in the way the tale would be told.

And so, here we are. Some four years after I began writing the play, Puccini’s Milan will come to London’s Finsbury Park, as That Bastard, Puccini! is about to open at the esteemed Park Theatre, with a cracking cast and director. And, whatever the oft-cited ‘art that conceals art’ might be, I’m hoping for the precise opposite – a work of art that reveals something of, well, art itself. Set in one of its most glorious periods.

Four formative verismo recordings

A playlist of four recordings (some of them live/unofficial) that helped to shape my love affair with the verismo composers:

1) Leoncavallo, Pagliacci – Corelli, Micheluzzi, Gobbi, cond. Simonetto (various labels including Archipel Records)

Caught in Milan in 1954, this may be the all-round most vivid and idiomatic ‘Pag’ on record. Tito Gobbi’s Prologue, in vocally his best period, is a masterclass in expressive singing, while Corelli is thrillingly intense as Canio, and Mafalda Micheluzzi has you wondering why she didn’t have a bigger career. Conceived as the soundtrack to a television film, this works far better without the badly-dubbed visuals!

2) Ponchielli, La Gioconda – Tucker, Souliotis, MacNeil, Elias, Washington, cond. Bartoletti (various labels including Opera Depot)

What a blazing 1966 night in Buenos Aires this must have been! The difficulty with staging Ponchieli’s masterpiece is not only, famously, that a theatre has to blow up a ship on stage, but that you also need five, world-class singers to soar in the composer’s all-or-nothing vocal writing. This was one of Richard Tucker’s signature roles at the Met, and all these years later, he still clearly ‘owns’ it. As exciting, Elena Souliotis is caught at the peak of her short-lived career, singing with delicacy as well as the power she was famous for. Even Cornell MacNeil, on best vocal behaviour, is fabulously imposing.

3) Giordano, Andrea Chenier – Gigli, Naiglia, Bechi cond. De Fabritiis (Naxos)

Umberto Giordano was still alive in 1941, when this recording was made in Italy, though dead by the time it was released in the UK (the delay was due to the wartime divide between the two countries). And one can feel a stylistic direct line to verismo’s heyday. Cast and conducting are magnificent – Gino Bechi towering (in the days before he ceded the spotlight to Gobbi), and an ‘oh look!’ supporting cast of Italian opera luminaries. But it’s all about Gigli who, aptly enough for the role of a revolutionary poet, turns his every aria into, well, sheer poetry.

4) Leoncavallo, Zaza - Jaho, Massi, cond. Benini (Opera Rara)

Just to show we are all still being formed all the time (!), I only discovered Leoncavallo’s Zaza a couple of years ago, and the complete Opera Rara recording under Maurizio Benini makes the most convincing case possible – which is pretty darn convincing – that Zaza is really Leoncavallo’s neglected major work. Ermonela Jaho in the lead has a rare, and fascinating, blend of smoothness and that traditional Italianate style of spinto which often comes with a bit of acidity in the voice, but not so here.

James Inverne’s play, That Bastard, Puccini!, starts performances at The Park Theatre, London, from July 10, with its final performance on August 9. For more information, visit: parktheatre.co.uk