The early Twentieth century: the world is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. New technologies, considered mere curiosities until a few years earlier, are becoming an integral part of everyday life in Western society. The gramophone, for example, brings music and theatre directly into the home, revolutionizing the way people experience and enjoy a genre like opera. Alongside this is the exponential expansion of cinema, which offers longer and more narratively complex features. Giacomo Puccini, already an established name in Italy and abroad, destined to become the most famous living opera composer and one of Casa Ricordi's greatest economic successes, finds himself, along with his publisher, at the crossroads of these epochal changes. What impact would these modern challenges have on traditional music publishing, on copyright, on live theatre performances? They had to be approached with creativity and welcomed as opportunities to bring an ever wider and more varied audience closer to the world of opera. This exhibition invites you to discover an era in which the relationship between art and technology changed the face of opera theatre forever, a story of creativity and adaptation, rich in parallels with the technological revolutions of our own times.

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