Puccini did not speak English, which sometimes left him feeling isolated, and he loathed the cold. Caruso was his constant companion — window-shopping for fancy clothes and expensive automobiles, a passion of Puccini’s. They often dined at Del Pezzo’s, an Italian restaurant on 34th Street, and played the card game scopa in the back. Caruso tended to win until, legend has it, the other players had a mirror placed behind his chair.

It was during that first trip to New York that Puccini attended one of the most notorious performances in opera history: the American premiere of Richard Strauss’s “Salome.”

He liked it. Before the premiere, in a wide-ranging interview with The Times in his suite at the Hotel Astor — which was interrupted at one point by a bellboy carrying a card mistakenly addressed to “Mr. Rossini” — Puccini proclaimed that “Salome” was the greatest modern opera.

Based on Oscar Wilde’s play of lust, violence and religion, the opera shocked conservative Met patrons with its dance of the seven veils and its heroine’s climactic kiss of John the Baptist’s severed head. Under pressure from its board, the Met canceled the rest of its run and did not perform “Salome” again until 1934. The episode left a mark on Puccini.

A few months later, when he decided to abandon an opera he had been considering, “Conchita,” based on a psychosexual drama by Pierre Louÿs, Puccini wrote to his disappointed publishers, insisting he had not been influenced by the debacle. “It was not fear (confound the word!) of the prudery of the Anglo-Saxon audiences of Europe and America,” he said. “It was not the example of ‘Salome’ in New York.”

By the time this trip ended he was ready to go home. He wrote Sybil Seligman, an English friend and confidante, “I’ve had all I want of America — at the opera all is well, and ‘Madama Butterfly’ was excellent, but lacked the poetry which I put into it.”