Puccini was an Italian, a musician, highly strung, temperamental, diffident and easily discouraged, changing quickly from exaltation to despair. Nearly all of Puccini's biographers remark on his distaste for writing letters, nevertheless when my mother died nearly two years ago I found amongst her papers more than seven hundred letters from him, all written during the last twenty years of his life. From these I have selected, in whole or in part, some three hundred letters to form the basis of this memoir. In no sense of the word can it be considered a formal biography, but rather a portrait, largely self-drawn, of a very lovable character, and the record of a singularly beautiful friendship.
