Le villi

What's different

The first version, in one act divided into two scenes, and the only one to carry the title Le Willis. Puccini wrote it for the Sonzogno competition of 1883, where it won nothing; the critical edition finds the staged text only slightly changed from what was submitted.

What's different

Ricordi pressed Puccini to expand the work, and between June and October 1884 he rebuilt it as two acts, adding an aria for each of the lovers and an orchestral intermezzo, and changing the title to Le villi. This text at first lacked Roberto's Romanza "Torna ai felici dì", written the following January and February, and it carried the long form of his scene "Per te quaggiù". The critical edition treats the whole of it as one textual epoch running to March 1885, which takes in that Romanza and the Teatro alla Scala staging of January 1885 that introduced it; sources counting the Romanza as a text of its own arrive at four versions of the opera rather than three.

What's different

The final text, and the one the critical edition reconstructs. Puccini revised the orchestration again and cut "Per te quaggiù" drastically, having begun altering the score in 1885 and worked on it hardest in 1889 for that year's production at the house where the opera had started. Primary here because it is the version Puccini last settled on and the one modern performance takes as its text.