Chi il bel sogno di Doretta (Atto I) (La rondine)

The Carltheater in Vienna commissioned an operetta from Puccini in 1913, offering a large fee for a work with spoken dialogue. He disliked the form, kept the commission and turned the material into a through-composed opera. Italy's entry into the war made a Viennese premiere impossible, so La rondine was first given at the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo on 27 March 1917. Puccini revised it twice without arriving at a definitive version. Lighter in touch than the operas on either side of it, the score keeps waltz rhythms as a structural memory of the commission that produced it.