La rondine

What's different

The original version, and the one almost always performed. The work began as a commission for a Viennese operetta, which Puccini turned into a through-composed comedy, and the war sent its premiere to neutral Monte Carlo instead. It is primary here because it is the text the publishers circulated: Sonzogno and Universal Edition distributed this version alone for most of the century, and the second German edition of 1929 reprinted it in preference to the revision Puccini had made, though he had rejected it.

What's different

The second version. Prunier's part moves from tenor to baritone, Ruggero gains an aria in the first act, passages of the third are rewritten and the plot is altered in places. It was heard in German at the Volksoper in Vienna on 9 October 1920 with further adjustments, and that performance settled nothing: Puccini came away dissatisfied and began planning a third version within the month.

What's different

The third version, finished early in 1921, whose premiere waited seventy-three years. He rewrote the third act again, adding three shop assistants, Fleury, Mariette and Rorò, who sing a new trio, and replacing the letter scene with a new duet for Magda and Rambaldo: more than a hundred new bars in all. Sonzogno printed the vocal score and never produced the orchestral material, so a full score of this version has never existed. Lorenzo Ferrero orchestrated the missing passages of the third act for the Teatro Regio in Turin, which gave the version on 22 March 1994, and even that was not the whole of Puccini's final thought, since his corrections to the first two acts were left out. One earlier performance may have used this text. La rondine was given at the Teatro Verdi in Fiume on 11 April 1924, a few months before Puccini died, and Prunier was sung there by a tenor, which rules out the second version and leaves the first or the third. Nothing else about that evening is recorded, and no cast is known for the three shop assistants who would settle it.