La Rondine - the Swallow

It's odd to think that although La Rondine lies on the bottom shelf of the Puccini oeuvre, I've seen it three times in the last ten years. The Met did an HD simulcast production in 2008 with Alagna and Gheorghiu, touting an alternative ending that Puccini tried out in Palermo in 1920 and then dropped; the Skylark Opera Company did it here locally in 2015 on a pleasantly small stage; and the Minnesota Opera is doing it now.

In fact, Puccini modified the opera's ending several times, and modern composers have added a few variations of their own, which can be taken as an indication of how problematic the plot structure was to begin with.

Only one of the opera's arias, the melancholy "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" ("Who could guess Doretta's beautiful dream?") appears with any frequency on anthology recordings, yet the far more cheerful duet at the end of act 2 between Magda, our heroine, and country boy Ruggero, "Bevo al tuo frescosorriso," (I drink to your lovely smile) is widely considered the emotional high-point of the work.

The plot calls to mind several more robust and popular operas, but it contains subtleties that are worth pointing out. Magda ran away to Paris early and is now a "kept" woman. Her benefactor, Rambaldo, is kindly, perhaps, but a little dull, and that military uniform with bright red pants doesn't suit him at all. 

At a social gathering hosted by the couple, the charming but cynical poet Prunier, evidently a regular visitor, observes that in Paris nowadays everyone is talking about "love," a concept that he finds slightly risible. Magda, instinctively defending the love impulse, pines for an excitement she no longer feels, though Puccini succeeds in conveying the impression that she isn't just a thrill-seeker but is suffering some sort of existential crisis. 

Near the end of the act, Prunier confesses his love to Magda's maid Lisette—though he has difficulty explaining to the audience how he has come to stoop so far beneath his social station. Meanwhile, Magda steals off to town in an effort to revive, if only for one evening, her moribund emotional life.

Earlier in the act, a young man named Ruggero had arrived. The son of one of Rambaldo's old friends, he's visiting Paris for the first time, and the assembled guests giddily discuss which nightclub would provide him with the best introduction to the City of Lights. They settle on Bullier's. Magda is off-stage during this scene—she doesn't meets Ruggero—and as it turns out, she shows up at Bullier's, too. In an attempt to escape the unwanted attentions of several male admirers, she sits down at the table of an innocent-looking stranger. Needless to say, the young man is Ruggero. They chat. He's naive but charming and sincere. Magda begins to feel the warmth of emotion again. She's falling in love.

The plot is thickened by the arrival of Prunier and Lisette at Bulliers—they supply much of the incidental entertainment throughout the opera—but the central point remains the same, and near the end of the act, when Rambaldo arrives at Bulliers to bring Magda home, she gives him the heavy ho. As act three begins, she and Ruggero have run away to a villa on the Riviera to further cultivate their blossoming relationship.

Lacking both the salon setting of the opening act and the boisterous barroom flavor of the second, act three seems a little dull from the moment the curtain rises. Ruggero is head over heels in love—his first and only love—while Magda is stricken with anxiety by the fact that she has told her lover nothing about her checkered past. 

Ruggero is financing the getaway, so Magda is still a "kept" woman; it's just that her protector doesn't know it yet. When Ruggero informs her that he's written to ask his mother's blessing to marry Magda, her world begins to crumble once again. Her doom is seals when Ruggero shows her his mother's response and asks her to read it aloud.

Magda (and the audience) is chilled to hear Ruggero's mother highlight all the virtues that Magda lacks—purity, chasteness, etc.—and underscore the importance of motherhood as the sine qua non without which the attraction couples feel for one another remains empty and without purpose. Magna realizes that she could never enter Ruggero's world, within which she had hoped to find a more meaningful life. But she's not in the mood to shatter his illusions by telling him why. 

Unlike several of Puccini's other heroines, who die of consumption in the arms of their lover (Mimi) or kill themselves nobly (Butterfly) or in desperation (Tosca), Magda, the "swallow," is doomed to return to a lackluster life with Rambaldo, drinking champagne and listening to jaded, cynical talk about "love" while pining about things that might have been.

In one alternate version Rambaldo arrives at the villa, in another Ruggero finds out about Magda's past and creates a "scene." Puccini even toyed with the idea of having Magda commit suicide, but that seemed too dire a way to end an opera so heavily peppered with barroom music and frothy declarations of love.

The tack chosen by the Minnesota Opera seems just right to me. Though it isn't very operatic, it makes Magda a tragic heroine by keeping our attention focused on her self-sacrifice and almost Kierkegaardian anguish in the face of a situation from which she can see no good way out.

Do opera plots matter? I think they do. Last spring Hilary and I saw Massenet's Thais, the plot of which is simply dreadful—too wretched to describe even briefly. There was no avenue upon which to enter that drama emotionally, and it ruined the show.

But it can be a mistake to think about the plot too much. In the case of La Rondine, the fact that Ruggero knows absolutely nothing about Magna calls into question the depth of their love, as does the fact that she would rather call it quits than take a chance on Ruggero's ability to understand and accept her past follies. Rather than pursue this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, perhaps it would be better to settle back and luxuriate in the music, the staging, and the lively and affectionate bantering that goes on between Prunier and Lisette--just as if they were already a long-married couple.