Puccini: La Rondine (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed April 20, 2024, repeated April 24, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Wednesday, April 24 my husband Charles and I went to see the rerun of last Saturday’s final performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Puccini’s La Rondine (“The Swallow,” as in the bird) on their “Live in HD” series. La Rondine is something of a stepchild in Puccini’s catalog; he composed it in 1913 or thereabouts (which slots it in between the stunning La Fanciulla del West and Il Trittico, the trilogy of three one-act operas he composed for the Met, which premiered it in 1918) under a commission from the Carltheater in Vienna, Austria. I’d known that for years and had always assumed the piece contained spoken dialogue and was in German, and it wasn’t until the San Francisco Opera did it in the 1970’s (not as part of their main international season but in a lower-cost, both production budget and ticket price, series) that I realized it was a through-sung opera with recitatives instead of dialogue, and (like all of Puccini’s other operas) it was in Italian. It was only in the last few days that I looked up La Rondine on Wikipedia and found that two of Puccini’s non-negotiable demands for this production were that it be through-composed and in Italian. (Verdi was tri-lingual in Italian, French and German, but as far as I know Puccini was mono-lingual in Italian.) Unfortunately, the production ran into a snag called “The Great War” (as World War I was known before there was a World War II), on which Austria and Italy were on opposite sides. Arranging a production involving two countries that were at war with each other proved to be much too complicated, so the opera was finally premiered on March 17, 1917 in Monte Carlo because Monaco was neutral. Italian opera stars Gilda dalla Rizza and Tito Schipa sang the lead roles.

Also, Puccini’s usual publisher, Tito Ricordi, rejected La Rondine as “bad Lehár” (whatever might be wrong with it, it certainly doesn’t sound like Franz Lehár, good or bad!), so Puccini placed it with Ricordi’s great rival, Sonzogno (who already had Mascagni and Leoncavallo under contract but were furious at having missed out on both Verdi himself and Verdi’s successor!), whose offices were bombed in World War II, resulting in the destruction of some of the orchestral score for Puccini’s later revisions of the piece. (In his zeal to revise his old work, Puccini was essentially the George Lucas of his time; in a New Yorker profile Lucas was once asked when he would be done revising the Star Wars movies, and he said, “When I die.”) Basically La Rondine is a mash-up of Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s own La Bohème, though without the tragic underpinnings (i.e., the heroine is not dying of tuberculosis as the female leads of both Traviata and Bohème are) that gave those earlier operas much of their dramatic power. La Rondine is set in Paris in the mid-19th century (though the Met’s production by Nicolas Joël moved it up to the 1920’s) and the leading lady is Magda de Civry (Angel Blue), a high-class “courtesan” (the 19th century French euphemism for prostitute, much the way “escort” is today) who’s kept by a much older rich man named Rambaldo Fernandez (Alfred Walker). Act I takes place at a party at Magda’s home that is attended by the poet Prunier (Bekhzod Davronov, Uzbek tenor making his Met debut), who’s dating Magda’s maid Lisette (Emily Pogorelc). Magda is bored with life as a high-class hooker and is hoping for a man to Take Her Away from All That, and he duly arrives in the person of Ruggero Lastouc (Jonathan Tetelman, whom I’ve heard good things about which he fully lived up to).

Magda’s party breaks up when her guests collectively decide to go to the night spot Bullier’s, and she follows (the Met’s synopsis says she’s “disguised as a shop girl,” but all that changes is she takes off one lavish wrap and puts on another). At Bullier’s (in Puccini’s second act, though as usual for them these days the Met mashed the first two acts into one), Magda meets Ruggero again when he sits at her table. The two fall in love and decide to make a go of it. Act III takes place at a resort on the French Riviera, though they’re starting to run out of money (like Rodolfo in La Bohème, Prunier is a journalist and poet, but it’s not clear how Ruggero makes his living – unless we’re meant to believe he’s living off a well-to-do family and doesn’t have to work) and the hotel officials are suspiciously eyeing them and wondering when they’re going to start paying their bills. Ruggero tells Magda he wants to marry her as soon as his parents give permission, but Magda – who has kept her past secret from Ruggero – already has second thoughts. Those thoughts just become more serious and bitter when Ruggero gets a letter back from his mother, giving him permission to marry Magda but only if she’s a virtuous woman. Magda then tells all, confessing to Ruggero that she isn’t virtuous – at least in the sense Ruggero’s mom means – and at the end Rambaldo shows up and she goes off with him, leaving Ruggero bereft. Musically, La Rondine is gorgeous; though there’s only one aria in it that’s become famous out of context (Magda’s “Che il bel sogno di Doretta,” based on a poem Prunier reads at Magda’s party in Act I; he sings the first stanza but then Magda takes it up), the entire opera is a wash of glorious sound.

The problem with La Rondine is that none of the characters are dramatically interesting: Magda has neither the vulnerability of Violetta in La Traviata nor the pathos of Mimì in La Bohème. Ruggero is pretty much a dramatic cipher, and because his parents aren’t depicted onstage we don’t get anything like the dramatic conflict between Violetta and Giorgio, her beloved Alfredo’s father, nor the worm-turning climax as Giorgio realizes that even though she’s flouted the conventional moral norms, Violetta has been a “good woman” all along in the sense of being true to her own values and living by the Golden Rule. Prunier and Lisette are basically the comic-relief characters, and even as such they’re well below Marcello and Musetta in Bohème – though Charles thought the plot of La Rondine would have worked as a 1930’s screwball comedy and it’s interesting to imagine the story that way (with the inevitable punch-pulling that would have been required under the Production Code). The production was conducted by a woman, Speranza Scappucci (her first name means “Hope” in Italian), the first time I’ve ever seen a Met telecast with a female conductor (in the “it’s about time!” department), and she led the score with passion and authority even though I was perplexed by some of her comments in the pre-recorded intermission interview. She praised the score for its transparency and careful delineation of instrumental voices, where I’d been enjoying it for a glorious overall wash of sound. When I first saw the previews for this production, I’d wondered why Angel Blue, an African-American “woman of size,” was dressed in a gown that made her strongly resemble Bessie Smith. I don’t mind them casting singers of color in roles that don’t necessarily correspond to their real-life races – that’s a battle we won long ago when Leontyne Price regularly appeared as the Japanese heroine of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – and indeed I loved the irony that a white singer was playing the servant of a Black one (and Rambaldo, Magda’s sugar daddy to whom she returns at the end of the opera, was also cast as a Black singer here).

I noticed that when the Met hosts, Julia Bullock, was introducing Angel Blue she mentioned that she made her initial mark as the Ethiopian princess in Verdi’s Aïda – a role I hope she doesn’t get “typed” in the way Price did because the character is supposed to be Black. Angel Blue has also sung Violetta in La Traviata, and I’d love to hear her do that because, though the two are alike in that they’re both high-end prostitutes who fall genuinely in love with attractive and rich young men but then lose them to family conventions, Violetta is simply a deeper and richer character than Magda, and would give Angel Blue much more to work with as a vocal and dramatic actress. It also doesn’t help that Puccini chose to make both Ruggero and Prunier tenors, and the Met compounded his mistake by casting them both with singers whose voices are quite similar to each other’s. (That was a mistake Mozart made in Idomeneo, too, though that’s a bit more understandable because in the original version of Idomeneo, Idomeneo was a tenor and his son, Idamante, a castrato. Later Mozart had to adapt the opera for a production in a city that, for the obvious reason of public disgust, had already banned the castrati – so in that version he made Idamante a tenor but kept Idomeneo a tenor, too. I’ve long thought Mozart should have rewritten Idomeneo as a baritone so there’d still be a father-and-son distinction between the two voices.) I quite liked La Rondine, despite its flaws, and wish it were better known; for some reason British critic Spike Hughes didn’t include it in his book Puccini’s Great Operas, and it’s the only one of Puccini’s mature operas Renata Tebaldi never recorded (though she would have been great in it!). But still it’s an opera that cries out for glorious singing and expert staging, both of which it got from the Met on April 20.