Giacomo Puccini's wife Elvira became convinced he was having an affair with their maid, Doria Manfredi, and hounded her until she took her own life in 1909. An autopsy proved Doria innocent, Elvira was sentenced for slander, and Puccini paid the family to keep her out of prison. Decades later, letters surfaced suggesting he had been involved with Doria's cousin all along. This episode uses that scandal as a window into a life that reads like one of his own operas: born in Lucca in 1858 into a family that had held the cathedral music post for 124 years, fatherless at six, and so poor at the Milan Conservatory that he pawned his clothes and split a single herring with three roommates.

We trace how publisher Giulio Ricordi kept paying a stipend to a composer whose first opera was disqualified for illegible handwriting and whose second, Edgar,  ...