Verdi knew who he was.

He was opera, and opera was Italian.

He bestrode the operatic world like an Italian colossus.

He explored and extended the possibilities. He enlarged the orchestra.

He manifested the unwritten rule. Give the tenor an aria. Show why he’s the hero.

Give the soprano an aria to show why she focuses the tenor, and give her high notes to show she can reach them.

Verdi loved literature and words. He wanted the best. The giant of music wanted the giant of words. So, of course, Shakespeare. Not just the story, but the words themselves which would reach new heights with the singing voice.

He respected his singers. He understood the baritone was overlooked and gave him his own opera with top billing name recognition – Rigoletto.

I was especially grateful to Verdi for writing me an opera. I could hunch, twist and shout, bellow and plead, range the emotions and get the last word.

Verdi was up to the minute. He kept track of the rest of the world. When he went up the street to Germany to visit Wagner at Bayreuth to see what he was up to, he saw the new stage with trap doors and flying wings and said, “I can use that.”

When he heard the Wagnerian orchestra and the heldentenor, he said, “That too.”

He came back and wrote “Otello,” the German enlargement without the Wagnerian excess, Shakespeare again.

And last, comedic Shakespeare, “Falstaff,” to show that he could write anything and be ageless.

He cast his eye around the operatic world and made a pronouncement: “We needn’t worry about the future of opera. We have Puccini.” Even George Bernard Shaw agreed.

This recognition, before Puccini had written his greatest works, shows Verdi could read the future. Puccini’s Manon Lescaut premiered within a week of Verdi’s last, Falstaff.

And Puccini took the mantle which had never dropped. He too loved words, and operatic stories. He traveled the world to find them, and brought back the folk music of their origins.

He had his own specialties and developed them. He had a special fondness for early morning.

In La Boheme, Act III, as the world comes awake at the city gates. In Madama Butterfly, the women’s chorus takes us through a sleepless night. In Tosca, as the final dawn breaks, a shepherd boy sings the world awake. In Turandot, no one slept.

With a nod to Verdi and Rigoletto, Puccini wrote an opera for a baritone and called it Scarpia. But he realized that, though Scarpia’s music hovered over the last act, the baritone was already dead, and he compromised by putting Scarpia’s name in the soprano’s last cry.

Puccini didn’t parade elephants on stage the way a President might do to flaunt his power, though he could have. But he explored new ways, not just the upper class, but people you might see on the street, even cowboys wrangling in the Old West.

And he inspired his colleagues, a librettist who went on to write his own devil of an opera.

And Puccini knew, as Verdi did, that when you write for the ages, even first-time hearers will say, “This is immortal!”

Puccini took the Verdi orchestra and swelled the voice. He gave us “the tenor aria,” and “the soprano aria.” He wrote to the very last, and died before he finished.

In an otherwise diminishing world, we still have Verdi and Puccini, and can say, “The future is in good hands.”