Giuseppe Adami

that?Puccini essentially seems to have had quite a lot of questions and doubts about how to work out the story of this opera really right from the beginning.

So he was sent a draft by, um, two librettists in Vienna who worked regularly for the operetta company, uh, which he agreed to work on.

And when he first received this outline for the opera, there are some really interesting things we notice about it.

First of all, it was supposed to be completely contemporary in plot.

And what's really fascinating about this to observe when we go back to look at the libretto, when we look at the music, is that actually what Puccini did was he went right back to the drawing board.

And not simply going back to the first version in terms of the story, but he went back to the very earliest draft he was ever given from Vienna, and he decided to make this version of the story in which Ruggero finds out about Magda's past and that he ends and walks away from the relationship.

So in a way, having spent all of these years working on L'arronde, he sort of went back to the very first idea he'd been presented and thought, "Ah, no, these librettists, they were onto something.

We're going to write a tragic version of an operetta."