Carltheater

It always took him longer to come up with a new project, and he'd been playing around with a few ideas at this point.

And in 1913 in October, he goes to Vienna to supervise the production of one of his operas, and he is given an offer he can't refuse, which is to write an operetta for the Carl Theater in Vienna, which is the main theater operetta.

And he thinks about it for a little while, and he comes back and says, "Yes, I'll do it.

It's a great offer, but I do need control over the libretto." And so what happens essentially is that he's then given this very unusual chance to actually finally write a piece that's going to have spoken dialogue, something that Puccini had never done before in his career.