Problem Piece
Michael Tanner
La Rondine Royal Opera House Semele Coliseum T ike many artists, Puccini seems happi..1—iest when creating beings whom he can proceed to subject to torture, while encouraging compassion and grief on the part of spectators. In this respect he is most like the God whom he had been brought up to believe in. Happiness, for him, is always the temporary condition which makes pain more vivid. He is good at creating fleeting comedy, so that when the mood darkens we sense how much deeper he is being. In Gianni Schicchi he makes us laugh all the way to the end only because of an omnipresent corpse, so that the piece is macabre as much as it's merry. That all means that Puccini was not ideally placed to write an operetta, in which no one takes anything seriously and they all dance through the night and don't have a daytime life to speak of.
No wonder he had even more trouble than usual knocking La Rondine into shape, and not only because of the advent of the collapse of the civilisation he knew while he was writing it. His basic problem was the matter of tone, and the main interest the work has is that he never solved it, so the piece remains a problem for listeners, too: how much should we care about these characters? The one who has the toughest luck is the hero Ruggero, an innocent who comes to Paris, sings a song in the city's honour, falls in love with one of its typically flighty female inhabitants, and loses her because she is ashamed of her past. Puccini wasn't able to give this figure any character we can grasp or care about, which means a hole in the centre of La Rondine.
The Swallow herself is more fully drawn, fully enough in fact for her renunciation of Rugger() on grounds of her unworthiness to seem absurd, but not more fully than that. The obligatory contrasting pair of lovers, traditionally more lightweight than the central pair, can't be more lightweight than this central pair, so end up as mere sound-producing organisms.
Yet there are charms in La Rondine, just enough to warrant its occasional revival, and the Royal Opera has actually scored its biggest success of the season so far with it. It's somewhat better now than when it was unveiled in 2002. Emmanuel Villaume's conducting is more relaxed, less insistently dazzling than Antonio Pappano's was. He is just as supportive of his singers, and his cast is almost ideal.
Angela Gheorghiu has never been in finer form, and her singing of Doretta's song is enchanting, while she manages to make the phoney end of the opera as momentarily convincing as it could ever be. Her stage presence is the most radiant of any contemporary operatic star. But close behind is Jonas Kaufmann as Rugger°, giving his first fully staged performance in the UK, and showing that he is as gifted a singing actor as he is a Lieder recitalist. Naturally graceful, he contrives in this role to be awkward and a grateful recipient of Magda's lessons in love, only to have his teacher brusquely announce that their classes are over, leaving him curled up and sobbing; it won't be long before he recovers, we are bound to feel. Among the rest of the cast Robert Lloyd is commanding as Rambaldo, Magda's 'protector'; the only annoyance is Annamaria Dell'Oste's Lisette, making a tiresome part insufferable. The evening left me thinking, though that can't have been anyone's intention.
Simultaneously at the Coliseum, ENO has scored its first unequivocal triumph of the season with the first revival of Robert Carsen's production of Semele. Both London opera houses have winning productions of Handel's highly pleasurable warning about the perils of hedonism. The Royal Opera's is 3-D Watteau, all billowing satin and naughty glimpses. At the Coliseum Carolyn Sampson, the marvellous Semele, allows us only one naughty glimpse, a full posterior view, and it is her only mistake of the evening. Otherwise, to look at, to hear, and to see act she is a sheer delight, and reaches peaks of virtuosity which precisely delineate Semele's self-intoxication. If I can't feel so enthusiastic about either of her suitors — yet enjoyed myself so much — it only shows how completely Handel focuses on his heroine.
Robin Blaze's Athamas is weedy beyond the call of counter-tenordom, while Ian Bostridge is simply miscast as Jupiter. However humanly disguised the father of the gods may be, he must still be impressive, and Bostridge doesn't seem much of an improvement in powerful virility on Blaze: he croons his way through Where'er you walk' with soporific rather than seductive effect, and in general seems no different from his usual lank self. Despite which the balance in the piece between mischief, eroticism and stunned awareness of the sharp limitations of humanity is surely maintained. It is one of Handel's most enigmatic works, in large part thanks to Congreve's masterly libretto.
However much passionate Handelians may revel in almost all his operas, they must admit that in this one the straightforwardness of the action, the elegance of the verse, and the penetration of the psycholog both inspire uniquely apt music — give the music something to be apt to — and also make wonderfully satisfying dramatic sense.
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