La Rondine ("The Swallow") is an opera by Puccini premiered in 1917 and rarely performed since that date. It's puzzling combination of full-throateed Italian opera lyricism combined with a modernist, almost Proustian, sensibility. Aspects of the narrative can be viewed as either audaciously profound or completely idiotic. But, in any event, La Rondine, first and foremost, is about the power of memory and regret. The show invokes Grand Opera tropes but dares to imagine a narrative that demonstrates that all the arias are lies, every grand proclamation of undying passion is fraudulent. (Puccini demonstrated this with half the arias in Madame Butterfly -- Pinkerton's seduction of the heroine is based on callous self-interest and deceit.) In La Rondine, Puccini goes farther -- everyone imagines themselves to be more heroic and more passionate than they are in fact: the big dramatic moments are instances of the characters deluding themselves.
The first of the opera's three acts is a work of genius. The quality of the opera declines after that act, skirting melodrama and bathos, but, I think, narrowly avoiding those qualities. In Act One, nothing really happens. We see brittle salon conversation between middle-aged women and their pudgy consorts. Magda, a kept woman, is disenchanted with her burly, stupidly costumed patron -- the fat man wears red pantaloons. He has given her a house but she longs for something more ardent and dangerous. A poet maudit, Prunier, sings a song about a girl's dreams, playing on the piano. This song awakens in Magda a desire for erotic adventure. She recalls when she fled the care of her elderly aunt, met a boy in a bar, and drank a beer with him -- this inconsequential encounter is central to the opera: Magda wonders what would have happened if she had continued the relationship with the young man. On cue, another young man, a boy from the provinces arrives. He is enamored with Paris and its opportunities and sings a paean to the City of Light (particularly touching in light of the fact that Puccini wrote this opera when Italy was at war with France.) Everyone suggests that the boy go to cabaret called Bulliers for his first night in the big city. The hyper-aesthete Prunier, who seems to cultivate wealthy haute bourgeois widows (he's a bit like Rilke) is secretly carrying on an affair with the saucy maid. He arranges to meet her at Bulliers later in the evening and Magda dresses like a grisette, so that she can also go to that cabaret incognito. This Act is an exquisite combination of polite and dull salon banter and exquisite arias that are represented as wavering somewhere between overt expression and the world of suppressed desires and fantasies. The gently morose shadow of Der Rosenkavalier is cast over this glittering world of romantic melancholy and erotic regret -- the music is both sad and beautiful. And the plot is bold, content to linger on scarcely acknowledged amorous fantasies and yearning desire as opposed to acts and deeds.
In the second act, the libretto adopts a convention familiar to audiences from Shakespeare but quite incomprehensible to modern viewers -- the idea is that if you go abroad in clothing different from your accustomed garments, you become invisible or wholly strange to even those who know you best. (Because of the show's modernist impulses, there's some sense that the characters may recognize one another, but are simply play-acting at not knowing one another -- thereby, adding to the erotic frisson -- it may be like an older married couple pretending to be strangers to pick each other up in a bar.) This act is set at Bulliers and features a loud chorus, much dancing, and a charged erotic encounter between Magda and Ruggero, the young man to whom she was just introduced at her salon a couple hours earlier. Magda seduces Ruggero and, in an uncanny touch, asks him to re-enact the erotic rendezvous involving the young man and the beer that he bought for her fifteen or twenty years earlier. Prunier and the maid cavort and, when Magda's patron appears, she ends the relationship with him.
The last act enters the realm of an opera that I despise, La Traviata, but is so weird that I'm willing to give Puccini's enigmatic work the benefit of the doubt. We see Magda and Ruggero in bed together, enjoying an expensive luxury hotel in Nice. They can't pay the bills and it's pretty certain that the idyll is going to come to screeching halt. Unbeknownst to Magda, who is not really looking for commitment, Ruggero has written to his parents announcing that he intends to marry his girlfriend. He portrays her as completely virtuous and immaculate. (He seems not to have figured-out her previous existence as the mistress of the fat financier.) Ruggero's mother writes and says that "love is sanctified by motherhood", looking forward aggressively to the grandchildren that she is going to enjoy as a result of the marriage that she has now blessed. This is too much for Magda -- the maternity stuff is a bridge too far for her. She utters words no one wants to hear from his girlfriend: "I'm speaking to you as your mother would", herself forbidding the marriage. It's clear that she's going to return to her rich patron; at least, he can pay the bills. Prunier who has tried to turn his inamorata, the maid, into a cabaret singer is disenchanted -- the girl can't perform and, further, has been traumatized by the men at the tavern whistling at her. They have an angry spat and break up and she asks for her job back with Magda. However, once the maid dons her little French maid's outfit, her desire for her old clandestine relationship with the poet is aroused and the two of them make an assignation for that evening at 10 pm when she is off work. (Again, it's the garment that defines the character.) The outcome for Ruggero is less happy. After a duet in which the two lovers shriek their regrets at one another over huge blasts of orchestral sound, he wander stage-right, meets an ensign, who hands him a WW I carbine, and, then, the rear projection shows a nasty battlefield with oozing mud, shell-holes, and a thick undergrowth of barbed wire. Throughout the opera, we have seen a silent middle-aged woman in an elaborate hat who appears from time to time to scrutinize the action. This is supposed to be Magda ten years hence, suffering the pangs of regret. As the elder Magda moons around the rear of the stage, the rear projection shows us Ruggero's battlefield grave on which she deposits a bouquet of flowers as the curtain falls. (I assume that the business with the middle-aged lady is a directorial interpolation -- it's obvious but effective.)
The opera contains much ravishing music. But the music is defeated by the cynical libretto -- the claims of eternal passion are just empty rhetoric, at least as far as Magda goes (Ruggero is callow and, maybe, believes his own protestation of love.) But society defeats the lovers. Inadvertently, perhaps, this dynamic is reflected in the music: the lovers have to hit daunting high notes fortissimo to overcome the suavely beautiful orchestral accompaniment. Often they seem to be screeching over the wall of sound produced by the orchestra -- they can't quite be heard over the ambient noise and are overcome musically just as the libretto shows them overcome by the society in which they live. Ultimately, they revert to what they were before they found one another -- Ruggero is just a naïve boy from the provinces who becomes cannon-fodder; Magda returns to her role as courtesan. What makes this opera intriguing is its radical first act -- a forty minute composition that suggests that everything important in this show will occur as a result of erotic fantasy and regret. Erotic fantasy is the currency of grand opera but La Rondine posits that is simply not enough. Eschewing poetry for simple, unalloyed lust, Prunier and his little maid cynically show us the way that love plays out in the real world. (Prunier gets to sing a passage in falsetto, another astonishing aspect of this opera -- he sounds a little like Prince.)
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