La rondine has long been considered an anomaly among Puccini’s mature operas. Composed following an approach from Vienna’s Carltheater in October 1913, this story of a courtesan (Magda) who abandons her comfortable life in Paris for a younger man from the countryside (Ruggero) was initially conceived as a species of Italian opéra comique, featuring spoken dialogue in the style of Massenet’s Manon (1884). It thus marked a major stylistic departure for Puccini – a move reflecting the Carltheater’s status as the leading centre of Viennese operetta, where La rondine was intended to be given its world premiere in German.

Puccini soon abandoned the idea of spoken dialogue, but he retained many of the character types and plot devices typical of Silver Age operetta. Following Italy’s entry into the First World War in 1915, however, his original Viennese contract was declared null and void. The opera was eventually premiered, in Italian, in neutral Monte Carlo in March 1917, where it was warmly welcomed in spite of some wartime controversy over its Austrian origins. This first version soon became the ‘standard’, performed in major opera houses across the globe to this day.

Yet Puccini’s preferred configuration of La rondine was in fact a substantially different version, printed in 1921 but almost completely unknown today. Early performances in Italy of the 1917 version prompted the beginning of a complex revision process on Puccini’s part, one that would result in two later versions of the opera. For the second (1919), Puccini transformed the secondary tenor role of Prunier into a baritone, bringing the vocal makeup closer to that of La bohème (1896). He also adjusted and transposed the vocal lines in key ensembles, while revising the whole of Act Three to provide a more muted final scene: it now ended with a duet between Magda and Prunier rather than the face-to-face separation of the two lovers. Barely a month after hearing this second version in Vienna in October 1920, however, Puccini began preparing a third and final version. ‘A happy ending is impossible in La rondine’, he declared to his friend Sybil Seligman in November 1921, while describing the third act of this new third version as a ‘marvel’ to his colleague Riccardo Schnabl.

For the rest of his life, Puccini remained committed to the third version, which offered a total reimagination of what was heard at the 1917 premiere. But efforts to promote it were met with resistance, perhaps particularly given the opera’s chequered performance history. Erich Korngold expressed interest in premiering it in Hamburg, but the first performances would in fact not take place until April 1924 at the Teatro Verdi in Fiume: the small city in present-day Croatia that had recently become part of Italy under Mussolini. Soprano Linda Cannetti took the lead under conductor Umberto Berrettoni, with London’s Musical Digest declaring it a ‘magnificent success in the new version prepared by the author’. The minimal Italian press coverage failed to secure it a future, however. Puccini had been booked to oversee the production, but he was eventually unable to attend or promote the premiere (in part owing to symptoms of the throat cancer that would claim his life later that year), thus weakening this version’s chances of wider recognition.

The third version was later revived with great success in Kiel in 1927, but then its full score and orchestral parts were destroyed in the Allied bombing of Milan in 1943. Today only a vocal score survives. For a production in Turin in 1994, Act Three was performed in a reorchestration by Lorenzo Ferrero, alongside Acts One and Two of the 1917 version; but a reconstruction of the entire 1921 version has, until now, never been attempted. As a result, Puccini’s final thoughts on La rondine have been overlooked in favour of his earliest efforts – this in stark contrast to Madama Butterfly, where the final revision has become the repertory staple. It is only through careful restoration – including Martin Fitzpatrick’s reorchestration of sections of Acts One and Three on the basis of the surviving vocal score and sketches – that it is now possible, for the first time in a century, to hear what could be regarded as the definitive La rondine.

In one important sense, though, the 1921 La rondine marks a return to the origins of the opera’s creation. The plot in 1921 in fact restores the very earliest idea of Magda’s story. When Puccini received the outline for the opera from librettists Heinz Reichert and Alfred Willner in early 1914, the final act, set on the Côte d’Azur, concluded with Ruggero’s brutal rejection of Magda after discovering her past with Rambaldo. Intriguingly, the plot in this original outline was also explicitly contemporary in setting, with abundant references to cars, telephones and other modern gadgets, a fact that partly explains the wealth of modern dance forms (such as the foxtrot and tango) that give the opera its distinctive feel in all three versions.

Working together with Italian librettist and translator Giuseppe Adami – who was given considerable licence in light of the peculiar genesis of the opera – Puccini gradually moved away from this violent denouement, also resetting the story in the Second Empire. Writing to Adami in late 1914, the composer dismissed Ruggero’s shock at discovering Magda’s past, asking ‘where did he find this woman, in a convent perhaps?’ The final scene was changed in 1917 to make Magda and Ruggero’s separation a decision taken by Magda after his proposal of marriage, giving the opera a bittersweet ending as Magda leaves the weeping Ruggero.

The idea of returning to the original scenario for the 1921 revision came at least in part from Willner. He complained to Puccini in a letter of 1919 that the 1917 ending turned Ruggero into a feeble character, and that Act Three as a whole lacked intensity. Puccini did not take up this suggestion immediately; but a seed had been planted. What is more, his eventual revisions for 1921 were not simply limited to the plot – even if the Second Empire period was retained in all three versions. When Puccini began work again in late 1920, he initially returned to the Monte Carlo version, restoring Prunier as a tenor rather than a baritone. Yet he also maintained several of the adjustments to the vocal parts made for the second version, while further reworking the solo and chorus parts in Act Two. These revisions gave Prunier greater prominence throughout, including a new choral passage praising him as the ‘poet of love’ and comical attempts by several of the grisettes to seduce him. Puccini also extended the duet between Prunier and Lisette at the end of Act One, adding greater virtuosity to this charming moment of repose. In the climactic Act Two quartet, the chorus parts were also substantially revised to create the most opulent and sophisticated version of the ensemble.

Most radically, however, Puccini also reworked the entire musical structure of Act Three, albeit drawing extensively on the existing music of the 1917 version. The opening duet between Magda and Ruggero was partly transformed into an orchestral prelude, depicting the idyll of their life by the sea and echoing similar orchestral experiments in Manon Lescaut and Madama Butterfly. Magda and Ruggero embrace ecstatically in the now extended conclusion of their duet, but are interrupted by three saleswomen who arrive with luxury goods. These women are a satirical musical reminder of Magda’s previous life in Paris: a past that gradually, across the final act, presses in on her dreamlike new existence.

After Prunier and Lisette’s arrival at Magda’s hotel – a visit that in this version is directly instigated by Magda’s patron Rambaldo – a newly composed duet between Magda and Rambaldo unfolds. This set piece offers Rambaldo some of the lyrical intensity his character had earlier shunned, as he tries to lure Magda back to Paris by evoking imagery of the swallow’s migration. At the same time, however, the number gives a new symmetry to the opera; all five principal characters appear in this final act, and there are several musical reminiscences of Act One.

he duet that follows between Magda and Ruggero again reworks existing music, but with an ending very different from that of the 1917 version. Ruggero discovers Magda’s former life via a letter and throws in her face some money Rambaldo had left. This violent humiliation recalls the gambling scene that concludes the second act of La traviata (1853), much as the letter that Magda leaves Ruggero at the end of the second version echoes Violetta’s farewell to Alfredo earlier in the same act. Yet there is no protective pater familias to defend Magda here. Her humiliation is shocking and total: she is thrown to the floor and crawls begging for Ruggero’s understanding. Lisette eventually comes to comfort her mistress, revealing greater tenderness to their relationship and reminding Magda that time can bring healing as well as loss. But an uncertain future still awaits Magda despite Rambaldo’s pleas for forgiveness.

Magda’s decision to leave Ruggero in the 1917 La rondine has appealed to recent scholars and directors precisely because her agency seems to distinguish her from more victimised heroines such as Manon Lescaut or Butterfly. There is no painful rejection for the 1917 Magda: instead, she makes a considered decision to leave a broken idyll that she believes would satisfy nobody (including perhaps Magda herself, the Parisian sophisticate now contemplating a sedate life in Montauban). At the same time, this less tragic ending has for some seemed a more appropriate conclusion to a work that in every version offers an unusual mixture: on the one hand, of light-heartedness and character types drawn from operetta; on the other an emotional intensity and orchestral sophistication typical of Puccini’s serious works. Compared to this, the 1921 La rondine can seem conservative: a return to a type of female heroine who populated the nineteenth-century stage – one whose fate is decided by men, and who clings to romantic love even in the face of physical abuse.

Why, then, Puccini’s decisive return to the original Viennese plot? Why the commitment to tragedy? At one level, the 1921 finale brings Magda strangely closer to Liù in Turandot, the opera Puccini began composing in early 1921. The later opera offers an even more extreme example of a character clinging obsessively to the ideal of romantic love: Liù’s self-sacrifice and devotion are directly contrasted with the princess Turandot. Perhaps, one might speculate, the postwar context made this deep commitment to older ideals newly appealing as a theatrical idea. 750,000 Italian lives had been lost in the conflict, and Italy’s theatrical industry was battered by economic challenges. Romantic idealism may now have seemed more compelling as a dramatic theme – especially when juxtaposed with the materialistic values of Magda’s Parisian social circle.

And yet, compared to Liù, Magda is still unmistakably an experienced woman of the world: after all, she made a deeply pragmatic decision about her limited choices in pursuing financial security with Rambaldo. As becomes clear in her Act One aria, ‘Ore dolci e divine’, however, she is now aware of the passing of time and yearns to experience the romantic intensity of her youth – even if a distant voice warned her as a poor grisette not to succumb to fantasies (a detail directly echoed at the end of Act Two).

Rather than a naïve victim, then, Magda understands perfectly well the dangers of her decisions. She also knows first-hand the social codes that she has chosen to reject: from the irony and cynicism of Prunier and company; to the bourgeois morality embodied by Ruggero, which ultimately leaves no room for a compromised woman such as herself. No pure happiness, perhaps, can be found for a woman who has understood this existential bind. And yet, for three months at least, the fiction is sustained until reality inevitably breaks through. La rondine in this final version thus has a theatrical symmetry lacking in the 1917 version, but moves more decisively from comedy to tragedy, from operetta to opera, across its three acts. Rather than a prelude to Magda’s return, the comic elements in Act Three here become echoes of a world Magda is determined to leave.

‘Destiny has a double face’, Prunier declares in Act One when he reads Magda’s palm; ‘a smile, an anguished sob? A mystery!’ The different versions of La rondine offer different answers to this question, giving audiences today a choice about which of Magda’s stories speaks most meaningfully to them. Is the pursuit of romantic love a bittersweet diversion from modern life or a tragic act of resistance? For Puccini, facing his own late middle age, the answer seemed to have been the latter. One century on from its largely forgotten premiere, modern audiences can now discover Puccini’s beloved opera in its most sophisticated and considered form – one that stages Paris in all its glitter and allure, only to reject it for the dream of wordless passion.