This week, the coronavirus-inspired “Nightly Met Opera Streams” will be showing Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine (The Swallow) for free on Met Opera’s website. This two-hour opera will be available on demand starting at 7:30 pm, Wednesday, April 15, until 6:30 pm the following day.
Scene from Met Video of La Rondine with Roberto Alagna as Ruggero and Angela Gheorghiu as Magda. Photo by Ken Howard; courtesy of Metropolitan Opera.
In a normal year, I might recommend this broadcast to help you forget the pain of just having filed your income taxes; of course, in a normal year, it would not be free. This year I recommend it primarily for two reasons: first, it is a Puccini you have probably not seen (I had not), and the maestro’s music makes it worthwhile; and it features a delightful early performance by soprano Lisette Oropesa in a supporting role.
Puccini’s music for La Rondine is very pleasant, melodious throughout. It has a standout aria, “Che un bel sogno di Doretta”, that will be familiar; it was featured in the movie, Room with a View. Also popular is an ensemble number “Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso” in act II. As I went back through some selections from the opera after watching it once, I found the music very enjoyable to return to, to the point that my opinion of the opera moved up quite a lot. While it is Puccini, and you will note strains that remind you of some of his other operas, it never has the drama of his other operas, nor should it for this lighter venture. La Rondine is also a different Puccini, allowing Puccini to dabble in a sophisticated Broadway style. Conductor Marco Armiliato and the Met Opera Orchestra does a fine job.
I might also add that the opera’s stars, spouses at the time, soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna, give polished performances as the lovers Magda and Ruggero. They had performed this opera several times previously in different venues, and their EMI recording won Gramophone’s Record of the Year in 1997. I was quite taken with the secondary stars. Ms. Oropesa as the cheeky maid, Lisette, is quite fun. More mature now, she won last year’s Richard Tucker Award. I have seen her in live performances recently in Pittsburgh Opera’s Don Pasquale and Washington Concert Opera’s Hamlet, and she has played lead roles at the Met this year. The role of her paramour, Prunier, is played by tenor Marius Brenciu who has a lovely voice and sings beautifully, one of the opera’s treats. Famous American bass Samuel Ramey, then late in his career, sings the role of Rambaldo; his singing seems labored, but his stature fills the role well.
Here is the story in a nutshell: the scene is Paris of the 1830s, similar to La Boheme, but in a salon for the wealthy, not a tenement for starving artists. Our focus is Magda who is maintained in a lavish house by her, shall we say benefactor, Rambaldo (this gets my vote for the best name ever for someone in this type of role). A kept woman, she sneaks out in a rudimentary disguise to have a free night at a local café/dance hall. There she meets and is smitten by Ruggero, a young man who has arrived from a small town in the south of France wanting to experience the big city; he is the son of a friend of Rambaldo, and he does not recognize Magda from an earlier encounter at the salon; she gives her name now as Paulette. He is also smitten. Their love blossoms in the festive scene at the cafe, and they run off to Nice to live for love while their debts pile up (Magda has flown south for love like a swallow, a la the title). Ruggero wants to marry her and move to his hometown, even getting approval in a letter from his mother, but Magda fears her past as Rambaldo’s mistress, which she has not revealed to Ruggero, will ruin him and their chances for happiness (no, she does not have consumption and yes, Verdi got there first). Warning: the remainder of my report contains spoilers about the ending.
In truth though, the story of La Rondine is pleasant enough but is not all that engaging and founders at the finish line. This opera was past its time before its very first performance. It might have worked for the belle epoque (1871-1914), but it premiered in 1917 amid WWI and was perhaps too debonair for such perilous times, offering neither belly laughs for escape nor deep felt cathartic weeping. Still, in the search for something new while live performances are today halted, its relative obscurity makes it worthy of viewing now.
The opera may have been doomed from the beginning because it was supposed to have been an operetta. What! Puccini wrote an operetta? Not exactly, though that was the original offer by the Karltheater in Vienna. Puccini perhaps tried to have his cake and eat it too. He accepted the commission from the theater which wanted him to write a frivolous operetta in the style popular in Vienna at the time. He accepted, but instead, proposed to write a comic opera along the lines of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, and in Italian, not German, and without spoken dialog. The theater supplied a libretto by Alfred Maria Willner and Heinz Reichert. Puccini had it translated into Italian and adapted by his librettist Giuseppe Adami. The war threats in Vienna prevented staging there. Puccini eventually obtained the rights, with the Karltheater still getting half the purse, and had the work premiere in neutral Monte Carlo. Puccini later revised it a couple of times trying to improve the ending and its success, but the work has received only sporadic play. The last Met Opera production of La Rondine before this 2009 production was in 1936.
I think the ambiguity of La Rondine’s ending spoils whatever chance the opera had of being successful; if only Magda had committed suicide or if only the plot led to a comedy where it turns out mom had also been kept by Mr. Rambaldo, but that didn’t happen. The enjoyable side story of her friend the poet, Prunier, and her maid, Lisette, winds up more detracting from the story than adding to it; in fact, that romance might have been the better story for a comic opera. I still feel there is deeper potential to this story, as I have thought more about it. Prunier makes a foreshadowing comment in act I expressing his fear that the desire for money may be gaining hold on Magda. How much was her choice at the end an honorable one to protect Ruggero and how much did wanting the finer things in life that Rambaldo provided play into it? A more profound exploration of that theme might have been interesting. As it is, the dramedy doesn’t work for me because the ending isn’t resolved in a way I can feel deeply about either Magda or Ruggero. Frankly, I’d rather have seen more of Lisette and Prunier. Finally, it’s a Puccini opera. You gonna pass that up?
The Fan Experience: Met Opera is offering a nightly free viewing of selected opera videos during the coronavirus pandemic (Nightly Met Opera Streams). All of these operas are available on Met Opera On Demand and can be accessed by subscription; a seven-day free trial is offered. The operas can be played on computers and mobile devices and on smart TVs using Apple TV, Roku, and other such devices. it’s not likely that videos of operas, many companies now streaming them across the globe, will replace your yearn for live opera, but they do have interest and can help pass the time until the lights go on again, none to soon!