Unable to speak because of the radium needles placed in his throat, here (along with some of the sketches for Puccini's last and unfinished opera Turandot) are the heartbeaking pages Puccini used to communicate during his painful fatal illness at the radium clinic of Professor Louis Ledoux at the Institut de la Couronne in Brussels. Puccini's wife Elvira was ill at the time and remained in Milan.
"The operation was performed on the twenty-fourth of November [1924]. It lasted three hours and forty minutes. Seven doctors watched it. Dr. Ledoux felt it unwise to put Puccini under a total anesthetic because of the possible strain on his heart, and so Puccini was bound to he table and the operation was done with a local anesthetic. His throat was punctured and radium needles were inserted into the tumor. Returned from the operating froom, Puccini took a pad of paper and wrote: 'Will I be cured?' He was now unable to speak or eat. He was fed liquids through the nose. He was continuously suffering from thirst. But he sat quietly - he insisted on sitting up - with the needles in his throat, writing from time to time little messages to the people around him. Two days after the operation, Dr. Ledoux was hopefull....[he] planned to withdraw the needles in a few days. Dr. Ledoux, a conservative man, went so far to say, 'Puccini en sortira. [Puccini will recover from it].' [Puccini's son] Tonio telegraphed the good news to Elvira and asked her to come to Brussels as soon as she could. But on the twenty-eighth of November, after a good day, Puccini, around six o'clock in the afternoon, suddenly slumped in his chair. Tonio ran to call Dr. Ledoux, who came immediately, saw that Puccini had suffered a heart attack, and removed the radium needles. It was too late. Puccini could not recover. He [had] scribbled on a piece of Paper, 'I am worse than yesterday - Hell in my throat - I am going to faint - Fresh water.' At night a priest came. Puccini did no have to suffer long. He died at four o'clock in the morning."
(From George R. Marek's "Puccini A Biography" Simon and Schuster, NY 1951, pp. 301-302)
