Beatrice Venezi’s BLOG –
Opening
Paris. The Second Empire. The Bar Bullier: smoke, glasses, students, grisettes, a small orchestra playing a waltz. Everyone is dancing. Everyone is laughing. It is the joie de vivre, the joy of life.
Listen carefully, though. Listen to that waltz. Something isn’t quite right. Lurking beneath the party is a lingering melancholy, as if someone were watching the party from outside, through a window, as if the party were already over, and what we’re hearing were merely a memory of it.
There you go, you’re already in La Rondine.
In 2017, I had the privilege of conducting this opera on the exact centenary of its creation: 1917–2017. I spent months poring over a score that very few people are familiar with. Rarely performed, little-loved, and certainly underrated.
This is Puccini at the pinnacle of absolute orchestral refinement. A brilliant, ironic score, as light as only music that conceals something profound can be. And it has been a controversial opera from the very outset: it was commissioned by the impresarios of Vienna’s Karltheater, then war broke out. Italy on one side, Austria on the other, and Puccini, who had signed a contract with Vienna, found himself accused of pro-Austrian sympathies. The most Italian of composers, suspected of being not Italian enough.
As you can see, I didn’t make up the controversy.
If I were to give this work a subtitle, it would be this: La Rondine, or of Remembrance. A memory that stirs nostalgia. Let’s take a look at the three acts together.
Act One. Magda, who is supported by the wealthy banker Rambaldo, tells her friends and the poet Prunier — a caricature of D’Annunzio, and that alone is worth the price of admission — about an episode from her adolescence: one evening she had run away from her elderly aunt, dashed off to Bar Bullier, and there she had met a young man with whom she had fallen in love. A fling lasting just a few hours, but one she has never forgotten.
Magda remembers.
Act Two. Magda runs away again. This time, not from her aunt: from Rambaldo. And where does she go? To the Bar Bullier. Just as she did so many years earlier. There she meets Ruggero, a boy from the provinces on his first evening in Paris. She falls for him. And she asks him — listen carefully — to re-enact the very same things from that long-ago episode. The same table, the same gestures. She isn’t experiencing a new moment: she is reconstructing a moment from the past.
Magda remembers.
Act Three. The two lovers, far from Paris, on the Côte d’Azur. And what are they singing about? The memory of their first meeting.
Magda remembers. Always. Only.
This is Magda’s curse: she has a dream — the same dream as Doretta’s, the one from the famous aria — but she cannot project it into the future. She cannot even live in the present. She knows only how to dwell in her memories, and the more she dwells in them, the more they fade away.
And who knows, perhaps there is an autobiographical element here. For in 1917, Puccini, too, was bidding farewell to something: his old style. With A Girl from the West He has already started to move away from it; he is looking for a new path. La Rondine, or On Detachment.
Operetta or not an operetta?
The question everyone asks. Let’s answer it as musicians, not as fans. Strictly speaking, no: it isn’t an operetta. There are no set numbers, and there is no spoken dialogue. It is a lyrical comedy.
But… There’s a ‘but’ as big as the Carltheater in Vienna. This opera is full of stylistic elements borrowed from operetta: waltzes, polkas, and even the foxtrot, the dance in vogue at the time. In 1917, Puccini included the foxtrot in his score. It would be as if, today, an opera composer were to write to a reggaeton rhythm — and I can assure you it would cause exactly the same scandal.
But this is Puccini: being rooted in the contemporary, drawing on other genres, giving a nod to forms and languages outside the Italian tradition – whilst, however, keeping its structure intact. An international style with thoroughly Italian roots. This is not a betrayal of Puccini’s style; it is, in fact, the very essence of Puccini’s style.
And now we come to the waltz, which in this work is not a dance. It is a poetic expression.
There is one composer who used the waltz in exactly the same way: Tchaikovsky. And the similarities between the two are far greater than one might think, including the obsessive precision of the orchestral writing, which leaves no doubt as to the composer’s intentions, as if both were telling us: “Do exactly as it is written, and it will be right.” Take it from a conductor: it’s true. For Tchaikovsky, the waltz is a party viewed through a window, from outside, in the distance, or it is the memory of a happy time (once again, a memory): the joy of the dance is conveyed through the sadness in the heart of someone who cannot take part in the party.
In La Rondine the same thing happens. The joie de vivre It is fictional; you realise this from the very first bars. The entire soundscape is imbued with a poetic sensibility that heightens the drama of the little things. And there’s more. Listen to the grand choral fresco of the second act: that triple metre that goes round and round and round. In those same years, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, other composers used triple metre in this way: Mahler in the Whistle Sermon, Ravel in La Valse. The number three is no longer dance: it is the noise of the world, the bustle of the world, the chaotic whirlwind of existence in which we are all immersed and within which we cannot truly choose our own direction.
Magda is caught up in that whirlwind. She is gripped by a longing for love and freedom that she cannot control, by the desire to break free from her gilded cage — rather like Manon — and to take flight, to migrate «Across the sea, towards a bright, dreamlike land… towards the sun, towards Love». This is the disorientation of modern man, and Puccini portrays it in a down-to-earth opera, steeped in cynicism and pragmatism, where every aspiration towards lofty ideals ultimately clashes with the harshness of reality.
Magda, 1917
Let’s pause for a moment to consider this woman.
Magda is an extremely modern woman, considering she was born in 1917. She is a free woman who takes control of her own destiny and accepts the responsibilities that come with it. She doesn’t ask for permission. She doesn’t ask for forgiveness.
She shares, at least in part, the fate of Puccini’s other heroines: being condemned from the outset by her very nature. Puccini’s naturalism leaves no one any escape, not even a swallow, however hard it may strive to fly far away.
And with that we come to the enigmatic ending. The prevailing interpretation of the ending by a large number of directors goes like this: Magda, defeated, returns to Paris to the wealthy banker. The journey ends; la rondine returns to its cage. But I am not at all convinced by this because, in the 1917 score, Magda does indeed leave Ruggero, but we never see where she goes. Her return to Rambaldo is not written into the score: it is our own inference, not Puccini’s. That ending never ceased to torment even its author. Puccini revised the opera and the ending a further two times (in total we have three versions: 1917, 1920, 1921), even going so far as to reverse the ending: in the second version, it is Ruggero who abandons Magda, following an anonymous letter that reveals her past to him.
Puccini died without having made a choice. The finale of La Rondine It remained open because the very person who didn’t know how to close it was the author himself.
So I like to think something else. That Magda — a pragmatic woman, yes, but not a cynical one; a modern-day Carmen who boldly proclaims her freedom — does not turn back at all; that she simply sets off again, to follow her own path, to seek out her own nest.
That’s what swallows do. They fly away. And just because we can’t see them any more doesn’t mean they’ve gone back into their old cage.
It simply means that the sky is vast.
Beatrice Venezi