Puccini's La rondine – the final 1921 version

Thank you very much.

In our previous episode, we were talking about Puccini's later operas in general, including La rondine.

But for anyone who hasn't had a chance yet to listen to that episode, um, give us a quick recap on what we need to know about La rondine before we get to the version we're going to be mainly focusing on today.

So La rondine comes at a really interesting moment in Puccini's career.

He's back off the success of La fanciulla del West in New York, which was a huge success with the public, a little bit more of a mixed reaction with critics.

But he's then looking for a new project, and this has been a bit of a theme for his career basically since, um, he finished writing Ma- Madame Butterfly.

It always took him longer to come up with a new project, and he'd been playing around with a few ideas at this point.

And in 1913 in October, he goes to Vienna to supervise the production of one of his operas, and he is given an offer he can't refuse, which is to write an operetta for the Carl Theater in Vienna, which is the main theater operetta.

And he thinks about it for a little while, and he comes back and says, "Yes, I'll do it.

It's a great offer, but I do need control over the libretto." And so what happens essentially is that he's then given this very unusual chance to actually finally write a piece that's going to have spoken dialogue, something that Puccini had never done before in his career.

And obviously, it marks a real turning stone that he'd obviously written works.

At this point in his career, he'd engaged with comedy in various ways, but he's now going to write something with dialogue that's obviously going to have a really comic aspect to it.

Okay, amazing.

Incredible.

What is this opera about? And I'm sorry to ask you this.

It's always the hardest question to answer.

But give us a quick sense of who are the main characters, and what's the plot of the opera?

So our story in La rondine is really about Magda, who is a kept woman in Paris.

We are in Second Empire, Paris, and she's kept by a man called Rambaldo.

Um, and we very quickly learn that she's a woman who is full of, of nostalgia and passion and who has made, um, some compromises at an earlier stage in her life that she's now starting to regret.

And she's dreaming of the intensity of love that she once experienced when she was younger but which seems to be gone from her her life.

And lo and behold, um, very soon, a, a young man comes to visit, Ruggero, who is, uh, con- broadly connected to Rambaldo, and immediately she strikes up an interest in him.

And so the story essentially takes us that she goes off with him.

They meet i- in act two.

They go to a nightclub, Bouillon, Paris, and she decides in a slightly spur of the moment way to abandon the life she has with Rambaldo and actually to pursue this new life with Ruggero.