Giuseppe Giacosa

The Wager is Barrett H. Clark's English version of Una partita a scacchi, a one-act comedy in verse that Giuseppe Giacosa published in 1872 and saw staged in Naples the following April, where it made him famous before he was thirty. A page plays chess with a lord's daughter, his life the stake if he loses and her hand if he wins. Giacosa lived from 1847 to 1906, trained as a lawyer in Turin, and wrote some thirty plays, moving from medieval verse pieces to prose dramas of contemporary family life such as Tristi amori. He is better remembered now for what he did with Luigi Illica: Illica built the structure and the first draft of La Bohème, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, and Giacosa turned the result into verse for Puccini, a job he found exhausting and threatened more than once to give up.