It’s hard to imagine today’s opera companies without the music of Giacomo Puccini, and indeed it’s likely that many an opera company might not be here today were it not for the box-office reliability of the Italian composer’s work. Puccini’s life was relatively long if tragically abbreviated — he died in 1924 at age 65 after an operation for throat cancer — but his list of completed work is rather small. He seemed unable to work when he didn’t have a theatrical project, and he was endlessly fussy about every single detail of his operas. That has stood him in good stead for the works holding up year after year, but it also means there’s less Puccini to go around.

As late as 1996, when the third edition of his “Lives of the Great Composers” came out, the late “New York Times” critic Harold Schonberg could cite performances of Puccini’s first two operas — “Le Villi” and “Edgar” — as rarities, and he could say the same thing about “La Rondine” (“The Swallow”). Puccini wrote it on commission from Vienna’s Carltheater, which had asked for an operetta on a different subject. It premiered in 1917 in Monte Carlo, since World War I made performances in Vienna impossible.

It faded soon after its premiere, but now it appears to be coming on strong. Opera America lists about 20 major productions by its members since 2000, one of which was the Metropolitan Opera’s breakthrough mounting on New Year’s Eve of 2008 with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna. The Met broadcast a matinee performance of the production almost two weeks later. Almost lost in the excitement over the piece was that it was the Met’s first production of “La Rondine” since 1936.

That production led other opera companies and audiences to take a closer look at the opera, and in this coming season, Florida Grand Opera will mount it for the first time, with soprano Elizabeth Caballero (pictured above) in the role of Magda. Portuguese tenor Bruno Ribeiro will be Ruggero, and Craig Colclough will sing Rambaldo. Lisette will be sung by Corinne Winters, a 2010 first-prize winner at the Palm Beach Opera Vocal Competition, and Daniel Shirley will take the role of Prunier. Six performances of the opera are set for the Ziff Ballet Opera House from Jan. 21 through Feb. 4.

“I have to give Elizabeth Caballero a lot of credit for this,” said Florida Grand Opera’s General Director Robert Heuer. “It is a piece she has loved, and every time we have been together, she will lobby me: ‘Why haven’t you scheduled ‘La Rondine’ yet? So part of it was that here was an artist that we love, who has been an important part of this company, who was really an advocate for this piece.

“But the other part of it is that we would all love it if there were more Puccini operas,” he said. “They’re popular, they sell well … and as I was looking at the repertoire we’ve done over the years, ‘Rondine’ was one that was never performed here. So it was an opportunity to expand our repertoire and expose our audience to a piece they might not know.”

Caballero said she fell in love with the opera after singing Magda at the Teatro Verdi in the Italian city of Trieste. She disputes the often-heard contention that the opera — which concerns Magda, the kept woman of the much-older Rambaldo, who falls in love with a younger man only to return, swallow-like, to Rambaldo — is “the poor man’s ‘Traviata.’”

“’Rondine’ is a lot more realistic,” Caballero said. “This is basically a woman going through a mid-life crisis … She creates this whole fantasy, this whole dream and it blows up in her face. She has to face her reality. How many of us have been there?”

Musically, it’s a comfortable role for to sing, she said, and dramatically, she tries to bring her own life experience to the performance. “I’m getting a little wiser in my years, so I really can see a lot of myself in here,” she said. “That’s what I love doing with any kind of character: bring some of myself to them. That’s the kind of actor I am.”

That quality of relatability squares well with Puccini’s approach, and Caballero said it’s central to his success as composer.

“He was not just someone who knew how to write a beautiful melody. He knew how to make the characters realistic,” she said.

Puccini followed “La Rondine” with a trilogy of one-acts on widely different subjects. “Il Trittico,” which premiered at the Met in 1918, is perhaps best-known from the aria “O mio babbino caro,” which appears in “Gianni Schicchi,” the last opera in the trilogy. Florida Grand Opera paired the second opera, “Suor Angelica,” with Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” in 2009, but Caballero said the whole trilogy is on her wish list next.

“That’s my next thing to bother Bob about. I want to do the whole ‘Trittico,’” she said, then joked: “I’m going to be on him like white on rice.”