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Least staged and most patronised of Puccini’s mature music-dramas, La rondine defies categorisation. Too light-hearted for a full-blown opera; too serious for an operetta; too Italian for a musical. So we have been told. The distinctions between such categories melt away when La rondine is taken on its own terms, as it was in this production as part of the Bucharest Opera Festival. Both singing and staging made the case for it as an experimental piece of music theatre, no less psychologically acute than Turandot and Il trittico, and forming with them a kind of ‘super-trilogy’ of late Puccini.

By this stage in his career, rich and world-famous, Puccini had nothing to prove to anyone, and no one to impress, except himself. Cudgelling his brains over the disparate elements of Il trittico as the clouds of war gathered over Europe, his spirits were lifted by the invitation to write a Viennese operetta. World war put paid to that idea, and La rondine had its star-studded premiere in Monaco in 1917. Ever sensitive to criticism, Puccini revised it twice thereafter, perhaps stung in particular by his publisher Ricordi’s dismissal as ‘bad Lehár’.

Yolanda Covacinschi (Magda de Civry) | Photo credit: Andrei Grigore/Bucharest National Opera 

Demonstrating that La rondine is not bad Lehár, but great Puccini, takes more than a sympathetic conductor and a diva fit to sing the central role of Magda. In the event, the Cluj-Napoca company fielded both those elements anyway. József Horváth’s conducting laid a subtle stress on the American accents of the score while drawing authentically Viennese sweetness from his strings. As directed by Ferenc Anger, this staging was first put on in 2019 – only the opera’s second-ever production in Romania – but for this one-off performance in Bucharest, Yolanda Covachinschi was making her debut as Magda. She brings off all the requisite glamour of the role in both voice and bearing, while hinting in the first two acts that her self-assurance is only skin deep. ‘Ch’il bel sogno di Doretta’ was as playful and even understated, as her later first-act set-piece commanded the space and filled the theatre.

Covachinschi was also well matched by her Ruggero, Adorján Pataki. Making his diffident arrival before curtain up established Ruggero as anything but the confident, archetypal tenor-hero, yet Pataki’s full middle register complements a strong top, enabling him to cut through the orchestra despite a stage set-up unduly recessed from the proscenium. In fact all the leads effectively assembled a tight-knit cast where every character lives off their talents to get by, their confidence only skin deep. As the poet Prunier, Tony Bardon dropped hints of a Puccinian self-portrait in his check suit and easy manner. He also struck sparks off Lívia Antal as Lisette, Magda’s maid and his partner as the pair of ‘lesser’ lovers, Magic-Flute style. Vocally speaking, Antal almost stole the show from Covachinschi with her diamantine soubrette.

Yolanda Covacinschi (Magda de Civry) and Adorján Pataki (Ruggero Lastouc) | Photo credit: Andrei Grigore/Bucharest National Opera 

Their complementary colours fitted into a stage design drawn as tight as a drum by Anger and his colleagues. He understands that Rondine is more than an updated Bohème, or a ‘What if…’ scenario for Traviata, but those elements are still there. In the middle of the second-act party scene at Café Momus Bullier, the chorus ladies formed a tricolore, Busby Berkeley-style. The pianist for Doretta’s song in Act 1 became a running joke, treated as a waiter and a clothes horse (‘I’m just the pianist, don’t mind me’). One rare miscalculation came at the end of the second act, when the suspended bouquets fell to the stage with thudding symbolism as Magda sat alone, contemplating life-choices.

When it came, though, in front of a dead apple-tree, Magda’s departure and the end was as quick and as devastating as any Puccini denouement, with the mysterious Rambaldo (Sándor Balla) waiting to take her back, his motives and their relationship as enigmatic as it had been back in Act 1, when his gift of a pearl necklace was handed over by Magda (to the pianist, naturally) to check its authenticity. In Puccini as in life, few things are as simple as they appear.

La rondine will be revived by the Hungarian Opera of Cluj-Napoca in November. The Bucharest Opera Festival continues until 16 June with performances of Il trittico, La bohème and Tosca. A full report on the festival will appear in a later edition of Opera Now.