Five Reasons to love Puccini's La rondine

Giacomo Puccini is one of Italy’s best-loved and most-performed composers of opera. But unlike his more famous works Tosca and La bohème, in La rondine (The Swallow) the stakes are relatively low. Here, tragedy and spectacle are swapped for a more delicate, nuanced study of love and human folly.

Right from the start we are confronted with the central theme of the opera. As the curtain opens on a Parisian salon, Prunier, a poet, declares to the assembled crowd that romantic love is back in fashion. A discussion ensues. The host, Rambaldo Fernandez, turns his nose up at the idea and, by presenting his mistress Magda with a pearl necklace, makes clear his position on the real meaning of love: a transaction.

When Ruggero, the son of Rambaldo’s childhood friend and a self-professed romantic, leaves the party for a restaurant, Magda follows in disguise. Their ensuing romance and elopement to the French Riviera severely tests her own beliefs about love, as she attempts to reconcile her new life with past shame and deception.

In La rondine each character exhibits a different understanding of love, which raises the question: what does Puccini think?

Magda de Civry (soprano) is a high-society mistress who yearns sentimentally for a second chance at true romance. But when she goes South with Ruggero – thus becoming the opera’s titular ‘Swallow’ – the love she finds seems impossible to bear.

Rambaldo Fernandez (baritone) is Magda’s security. A wealthy man with no instinct for romance, he calls Magda’s decision to elope with Ruggero ‘insanity’.

Ruggero Lastouc (tenor) believes in a single, eternal love. Even when he finds out Magda’s true identity he insists he loves her anyway.

Lisette (soprano) is Magda’s maid and Prunier’s lover. Like Rambaldo, she is sceptical of romantic love.

Prunier (tenor) is a wit who compares love to ‘an insidious germ circulating in the air’, but who seems to have genuine feelings for Lisette.

The eighth opera that Puccini wrote (out of 13), La rondine features many of the hallmarks that have made his work so perennially popular. Sumptuous, stepwise melodies soar over a huge but delicately handled orchestra; an expertly evoked ambience mixes music with extraneous sounds such as church bells.

Highlights include Magda’s famous Act I aria ‘Chi il bel sogno di Doretta’ (Doretta’s Beautiful Dream) – used to great effect in the 1985 period romance A Room with a View. With its extended upper-range passages, Magda and Ruggero’s Act III duet ‘Ma come puoi lasciarmi’ (But how can you leave me), provides the opera’s impassioned conclusion, requiring serious vocal stamina.

The lyrical pinnacle of the opera comes in the middle of the second act. ‘Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso’ (I drink to your fresh smile), features the merry quartet of Magda, Ruggero, Lisette and Prunier. Backed by the full ensemble, they raise a glass to love in this set piece ‘concertato’ (concerted piece) – a common feature of Italian opera during the 19th century and beyond.

La rondine was conceived in 1913 during a visit to Vienna. While there, the directors of the Carltheatter asked Puccini to compose an operetta – a lighter piece featuring catchy tunes and spoken dialogue. He agreed, on the condition that it would instead take the form of a through-composed comic opera, ‘like Rosenkavalier [by Richard Strauss]’, he suggested, ‘but more amusing and more organic’.

Demonstrating remarkable versatility and craftsmanship, and as a nod to La rondine’s Viennese origins, Puccini stuffed the work with waltzes – the musical form most associated with Germanic operetta. The nostalgic ‘Ore dolci e divine’ (Hours sweet and divine), for example, is written in waltz time, its musical motif recurring throughout Act I, while multiple waltz themes emerge and coalesce during the Act II dance scene.

Act II’s ‘Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso’ – a ‘brindisi’ or drinking song – is another conscientious nod to operetta. Richard Strauss, meanwhile, whose opera Der Rosenkavalier Puccini had hoped to emulate, also features: during Act I, as Prunier describes the kind of woman he finds attractive, a mention of ‘Salome’ is underpinned by a melody from Strauss’ pioneering opera about the Jewish princess.

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Although the 1917 premiere of La rondine in Monte Carlo was well received, the opera was not a lasting success. (It didn’t receive a full performance at Covent Garden until 2002!) Contemporary critics found the central crisis too weak – not in keeping with such a period of upheaval – and its plot too similar to Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. (Some called it the ‘poor man’s traviata’.)

La rondine was also premiered during a period of waning popularity for Puccini, who in his last opera La fanciulla del West had curbed his lyrical impulse in favour of greater harmonic experimentation, alienating many of his admirers. From the other side, Puccini was being attacked by a younger generation of composers who found his music too safe and sentimental.

Not immune to criticism, he responded with two sets of revisions to La rondine. But it is the original version that remains performed today. With the benefit of hindsight, today we can see how remarkably modern this version is. With its deeply human story, subtlety and irony, the work does exactly what Puccini set out to do, building interest and momentum not though blunt force but with ‘finesse, nuance, suppleness’.

Written by Timmy Fisher, sub-editor within the BBC Proms Publications team, co-host of The Classical Music Pod, writer and journalist.