Puccini, Il tabarro, and the Dilemma of Operatic Transposition

The presumption that composers transposed sections of their operas solely to facilitate the singer's task has fueled the debate about tonal relationships in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera. This essay proposes-via Puccini's one-act opera Il tabarro-that such alterations should be evaluated not only within the context of an individual work, but also as part of the historical continuum of expanding tonal procedures and, especially, within the context of a composer's own aural history, an "untransposed" compositional practice.