Puccini had long considered writing a set of one-act operas which would be performed together in a single evening, but faced with a lack of suitable subjects and opposition from his publisher, he repeatedly put the project aside.

However, by 1916 Puccini had completed the one-act tragedy Il tabarro and, after considering various ideas, he began work the following year on the solemn, religious, all-female opera Suor Angelica.

The score combines elements of Puccini's modern style of harmonic dissonance with lyrical passages reminiscent of Rossini, and it has been praised for its inventiveness and imagination.

[1] The plot used in the opera derives from an 1866 edition of The Divine Comedy by philologist Pietro Fanfani, which contained an appendix with a commentary attributed to an anonymous Florentine of the 14th century.

As Buoso Donati lies dead in his curtained four-poster bed, his relatives gather round to mourn his passing, but are really more interested in learning the contents of his will.

The one-act opera genre had become increasingly popular in Italy following the 1890 competition sponsored by publisher Edoardo Sonzogno for the best such work, which was won by the young Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.

Among sources he considered, before proceeding with Madama Butterfly, were three works by French dramatist Alphonse Daudet that Puccini thought might be made into a trilogy of one-act operas.

He further considered the idea of composing three one-act operas to be performed together but found his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, firmly opposed to such a project, convinced that it would be expensive to cast and produce.

[11] In March 1907, Puccini wrote to Carlo Clausetti, Ricordi's representative in Naples, proposing three one-act operas based on scenes from stories by Russian novelist Maxim Gorky.

[23][24] While the sold-out house[6] showed polite enthusiasm for Il tabarro and Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi was, in the words of the New-York Tribune's critic, "received with uproarious delight".

[26] The undoubted "pearl of the evening", he said, was Lauretta's aria "O mio babbino caro" which, despite a public notice forbidding encores, was repeated through popular insistence.

[25] The only singer to appear in all three works was American soprano Marie Tiffany, who played one of the lovers in Il tabarro, a lay sister in Suor Angelica, and Nella in Gianni Schicchi.

[35] Puccini had left London confident that Il trittico would gain a place in the Covent Garden repertoire, but soon learned that the opera house's director, Henry V. Higgins, had removed Suor Angelica, feeling that the audience disliked it.

[27][37] Gianni Schicchi returned to the Met in 1926, after Puccini's death, shorn of the other two parts of its operatic triptych, but instead mated to Ruggero Leoncavallo's two-act opera Pagliacci.

[27] In the following years at the Met, Gianni Schicchi would form part of a bill with such diverse works as Engelbert Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, Italo Montemezzi's L'amore dei tre re, and even be incestuously mated with Puccini's own La bohème.

[40] In 2007, Los Angeles Opera announced that it would be staging Il trittico in the 2008/2009 season, with Woody Allen making his operatic directing debut in Gianni Schicchi.

[41] A 2015 performance, then directed by Matthew Diamond and starring Plácido Domingo in the title role,[42] was filmed for television in association with various international broadcasters, such as Westdeutscher Rundfunk, ARTE, and NHK.

[43] The 2007 Royal Opera House production by Richard Jones updated the action to a shabby 1940s Italy of "unemptied chamber pots, garish floral wallpaper and damp ceilings",[44] with Bryn Terfel in the title role "a masterpiece of monstrous vulgarity".

[29] Alberto Gasco of La tribuna noted that, "In terms of harmonic technique, Il tabarro and Schicchi advance quite startling elements of novelty.

Describing the 2004 Glyndebourne pairing with The Miserly Knight as "flip sides of the same coin", reviewer Edward Seckerson in The Independent found the Schicchi performance "a triumph of ensemble directing and playing, ... wickedly observed, sharp, focussed and funny".

[50] The New York Times gave a positive review to the Woody Allen 2008 production, which is set in a crowded tenement in which the boy Gherardino is practising knife thrusts.

[53] Giuseppe Verdi said of Puccini, early in the latter's career, that "the symphonic element dominates in him",[54] and Gianni Schicchi has been compared by later analysts to that of the final presto movement of a three-movement symphony.

However, the music itself is of the 20th century; Edward Greenfield refers to its "dissonant modernity",[57] with simultaneous clashing chords suggesting that "Puccini was beginning to think in bi-tonal terms".

The opening motif is a rapid burst of rhythmic music, described by Greenfield as of "almost Stravinskian sharpness",[61] which quickly transforms into a mock-solemn dirge depicting the hypocritical grief of the Donati relatives.

[62] Budden dismisses the view that Lauretta's aria, at the midpoint of the opera, was a concession to popular taste; rather, "its position at the turning point of the action is precisely calculated to provide a welcome moment of lyrical repose".

The doctor's dissonant harmonies contrast sharply with the scena music for Schicchi and symbolise Spinelloccio's place as an outsider to the dramatic action of the opera.

[65] The music historian Donald Jay Grout has written that in this opera Puccini's comic skill is "seen at its most spontaneous, incorporating smoothly all the characteristic harmonic devices of his later period.

[59][67] Both composers took the conventions of comic opera into consideration, choosing a baritone for the principal role, setting the tenor-soprano love story against family opposition to the marriage, and constructing a hoax that permits the happy ending.

[68] Charles Osborne cites in particular the trio for three female voices, "Spogliati, bambolino", as equal to anything in Falstaff, "its exquisite harmonies almost turning the unprepossessing women into Wagnerian Rhine maidens", and its lilting melody reminiscent of Rossini.

[55][59] Despite its popularity as a stage work, Gianni Schicchi was not available as a recording until after the Second World War, a neglect described by a Gramophone reviewer as "extraordinary".