Chapter 11 - La rondine's Masquerades and Modernisms

Summary

Imagine an opera written for a Viennese theater, with waltzes, polkas and other dance tunes, four-square phrases and catchy melodies. It involves two sets of lovers (one of which is an older, more experienced woman who ultimately separates from a younger man). Moreover, no one dies and the older woman, who sings a song about the unfulfilled love of a woman long ago, has a maid who tries for a singing career and borrows her mistress's clothes to go out at night. A work by Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár, or Richard Strauss might spring to mind—but the work's true identity is, of course, Puccini's La rondine [The Swallow].

In October 1913, Puccini was at the Karlteater in Vienna to supervise the Austrian première of Fanciulla, when he was approached by Siegmund Eibenschütz and Emil Berte; they wanted to commission an operetta from him and offered a substantial sum of money. After he received the libretto, however, he immediately rejected it as being “the usual slovenly and banal operetta […] with parties and occasions to dance, without character study, without originality and finally without interest (the most serious thing).” He apparently found those missing qualities in a second proffered libretto, written by Alfred Willner and Heinz Reichert, which was sent to him in March 1914, and then reworked by Giuseppe Adami.

La rondine was destined to be an opera, not an operetta, yet in many ways, it still retains hallmarks of opera's more convivial cousin, as we shall see below. So, how are we to understand this work? Is it a comment on, or parody of, the operetta tradition, some new synthetic genre? An attempt to demonstrate to rivals his compositional versatility? A closer look at the score might reveal an answer.

masquerades

There is little doubt that La rondine owes much to Der Rosenkavalier (1911): we have explicit evidence that Strauss's work was on Puccini's mind during the period in which he composed the opera. As he wrote to Angelo Eisner, on 14 December 1913, “I shall never compose operetta: comic opera, yes, like Rosenkavalier, but more entertaining and more organic.” This statement is usually interpreted to mean that Puccini wanted to compose a work that was more entertaining and organic than operetta, which does make sense: a through-composed opera would certainly be more “organic” than a work in which closed numbers alternate with spoken dialogue.