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Ottorino Respighi composed La Fiamma, an opera in three acts, to a libretto by Claudio Guastalla based on Hans Wiers-Jenssen's 1908 play Anne Pedersdotter, The Witch. It premiered on 23 January 1934 at the Teatro Reale dell'Opera in Rome, with Respighi himself conducting, and was received with considerable success. Respighi and Guastalla shifted the original Norwegian setting to seventh-century Ravenna, reworking the historical tale of a woman condemned as a witch into a story of forbidden love, superstition, and tragedy: Silvana, daughter of a woman burned as a witch, falls for her own stepson Donello, and when her husband dies suddenly, she is accused of causing his death through sorcery and condemned to death herself.

Musically, La Fiamma stands among Respighi's most ambitious achievements for the stage, bringing the same vivid orchestral imagination heard in his celebrated Roman tone poems to a large-scale dramatic work for voices. The score draws together an unusually wide range of stylistic influences, from Gregorian chant to the harmonic language of Stravinsky and Strauss, and moves fluidly between intimate lyrical writing and the grand, hysteria-charged choral scenes that give the opera its dramatic power. This stylistic breadth, combined with substantial vocal writing for a large principal cast, makes it a compelling and unusually colorful addition to the early twentieth-century Italian repertoire.

Though it has remained rarer on stage than Respighi's orchestral works, La Fiamma has enjoyed a steady revival of interest since the 1950s and continues to draw attention from opera houses seeking a dramatically striking, richly orchestrated rarity outside the standard repertoire. For any company or ensemble looking to bring a genuinely distinctive and atmospheric twentieth-century Italian opera to the stage, a complete score and set of parts offers a rare opportunity to explore this powerful, lesser-known work by one of the era's great orchestral colorists.