Doria

My first ten pages are attached below in PDF format.

PITCH/SYNOPSIS:

“Sex. Betrayal. Suicide. For opera composer Giacomo Puccini, the real drama was off-stage.”

The remote Tuscan fishing village of Torre del Lago. Late 1908.

DORIA (21), a devoted housemaid, unwittingly catches Giacomo Puccini’s stepdaughter FOSCA (28) having adulterous sex. Afraid she might talk, Fosca plots to get rid of her by telling the composer’s wife - her mother ELVIRA (48) - that Doria is having an affair with PUCCINI (50). Elvira, who has had to put up with her husband’s womanizing for years, promptly dismisses Doria.

Puccini meets to console Doria and she tells him about Fosca’s infidelity. He informs Elvira, who refuses to believe it and vows to punish Doria for making such a foul accusation against her daughter. She gets Doria fired from her next job, berates her in public and threatens to drown her in the lake. Utterly ashamed and desperate, Doria swallows poison and dies after five days of agony.

Doria’s family sue Elvira for defamation, slander, and menace to life and limb. Unrepentant, she is found guilty and sentenced to five months in prison. Puccini pays the family a huge sum to withdraw the charges and keep Elvira out of jail. She learns he must also pay off Fosca’s husband, who found out about his wife’s adultery and threatened to tell the press.

Years later, after Puccini’s death, Elvira discovers he had indeed been having an affair the whole time - with Doria’s cousin. Doria, who passed notes for the lovers and had a secret crush on the composer herself, could not have admitted what was going on without betraying both him and her cousin.

Elvira attends the posthumous premiere of Puccini’s final opera “Turandot”. The composer himself had come up with the idea of having a young slave-girl kill herself rather than betray the man she idolizes. As Elvira watches the slave-girl commit suicide, she is haunted by visions of Doria and, at last, feels remorse for what she has done.

The death of Puccini’s housemaid was an international scandal at the time. It had always been assumed that the composer’s wife was some half-crazed harpy who fixated her jealousy on Doria for no reason. The full story only came to light in 2007, and we now know much more about what went on behind the scenes. With the 100th anniversary of Puccini’s death coming up in 2024, I think it’s the perfect time to be telling what really happened.