Opera Preview: OTSL's MIchael Gieleta on the modermism of Puccini's 'La Rondine'

Michael Gieleta
michaelgieleta.com

This Saturday, May 30th, Opera Theatre of St. Louis presents Puccini's rarely seen "lyrical comedy" "La Rondine" ("The Swallow") in the original 1917 version. The opera has only been seen once before on the OTSL stage—in 1996, when the company presented the American premiere of the third (1921) version. I interviewed stage director Michael Gieleta via email during the final week of rehearsals.

Chuck Lavazzi: Puccini famously left "La Rondine" in a bit of a mess when he died, with three different performing versions available. OTSL has decided on the original 1917 version, which seems to be a popular choice. What were the factors the led you and your collaborators to pick this one as opposed to the other two?

Michael Gieleta: I don't think Puccini's lateral takes on "La Rondine" are any different from his takes on "Madama Butterfly," or of many now-famous American musicals which, for different reasons, get written and rewritten before, during and after they reach Broadway/the West End. It's not untypical of the composers' creative process and of its response to the various kind of pressure from the publishers, producers and the initial press feedback. Lastly, there are the stars who demand an extra "number" (be it "Send in the Clowns" or "Una furtiva lagrima") before the final curtain. Does anyone ever perform the Berlin version of Ibsen's "Doll's House" at the end of which Nora decides to stay with the husband and the children in order to keep the family hearth alit?

OTSL considered the original, Monte Carlo-premiered version of "La Rondine" most immediate and straightforward and that was the version it was decided to go along with. It may mean that our male lead misses out on his "Parigi è una città dei desideri" Act One aria introduced in the later versions, but he more than makes up for it later in the opera!

"La Rondine" doesn't seem to get as much attention as Puccini's more famous operas. Why do you think that might be?

It's an interesting question that could be asked in reverse: why is it that "Tosca," "Butterfly," and "Bohème" have been more present in the repertoire than "Manon Lescaut," "The Girl of the Golden West," "Il Tabarro," "La Rondine" or even "Turandot"?

What makes "La Rondine"'s rare appearance in the rep even more particular is the fact that, unlike some of the titles above, "La Rondine" has a genuine "hit", "Qu'il bel sogno di Doretta". Furthermore, it is one of Puccini's most loved, performed and enduring arias. The biographical background of the premiere of the piece is an unusual one too; I've written about it at length in the programme note.

What is important is that some titles, some composers and some authors simply come in and out of fashion. It's up to each generation to find their sung or unsung heroes according to that generation's sensitivities towards beauty, drama and music. If you stand outside the famous Paris Opera House, you may as well ask what the busts of Spontini, Halévy, Meyerbeer and Auber are doing next to those of Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini.

As you write in your program note, "La Rondine" was often referred to (inaccurately and dismissively) as Puccini's "operetta," but that this is finally changing. Do you think the attitudes of the protagonist Magda might play a part in that? She seems a bit less inclined to play the victim than Puccini's more well-known heroines, which would make her more plausible to a contemporary audience.

As "La Rondine" is being reappreciated in the modern day, the contemporary audiences get a chance to directly experience this paradox: whatever monikers were applied to the opera in the past, they are not necessarily substantiated by the work itself.

Magda is no victim at all; she takes responsibility for her choices and she sticks to those choices. We are given minimal background information concerning the characters as if the piece was prompting the audience to figure the actual storyline out for themselves from the scraps of textual evidence. In that context, "La Rondine" is reminiscent of a good theatrical play in which the author renounces traditional omniscience and where the public free to interpret the scarcely narrated facts in their own way. To quote Puccini's contemporary playwright Luigi Pirandello: "it is so, (if you think so)". That's the spirit, I believe, in which Puccini and Adami were writing "La Rondine."

So it is, in some ways, a very modern work.

Last question: the last opera you directed here in St. Louis was Smetana's "The Kiss" back in 2013. At the time, I couldn't help noticing that the heroine, Vendulka, was a refreshingly independent-minded woman with attitudes toward the opposite sex and marriage that sounded very modern, given that the opera premiered in 1876. As a director, are you drawn to libretti that (unlike so much of 19th century opera) feature strong-willed heroines? Or am I just reading too much into this?

I'm very flattered, Chuck, that you have noticed the parallel. I see myself as a storyteller and an interpreter of the material left over by the composer and the librettist. It's Smetana and Puccini (and countless others) who put strong-willed women at the centre of their works. "La Rondine" is quite unusual in Puccini's cannon as it does not have a pre-existing literary source. But that gives both the artists and the audience a wider scope for unbiased interpretation. There's much less play-like realism in "La Rondine" (as opposed to such intricately crafted theatrical set-ups as those found in "Tosca" or "Butterfly," based respectively on plays by Sardou and Belasco); such absence of narrative certainties makes my job all the more demanding, it enriches the rehearsal process and prompts us all in the rehearsal room to stretch our imagination beyond the factual succinctness of the stage directions in the score.

Ticket information for "La Rondine," the season's other operas, and information on the entire OTSL experience (including picnic suppers on the lawn before the shows) is available at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

This article originally appeared at 88.1 KDHX, where Chuck Lavazzi is the senior performing arts critic.

Opera Preview: 'Porgy and Bess' at the Muny

Photo: Michael J. Lutch

Although George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" is now widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century opera, it took (to quote one of the opera's lyrics) "a long pull to get there".

With a book by DuBose Heyward (based on his own original novel and play) and music and lyrics by the Brothers Gershwin, the original 1935 Theatre Guild production was a financial failure, and critical reaction was mixed and, from a contemporary standpoint, clueless. New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson dismissed it out of hand, and the paper's music critic, Olin Downes, found the mix of vernacular musical elements and sophisticated symphonic form completely baffling (a position which he would later recant).

Despite revivals of interest in the 1940s and 1950s, Porgy and Bess remained an essentially marginal work until a 1976 production of the complete score by the Houston Grand Opera (which played the Muny in 1977)—one that restored nearly an hour of music that had been cut from earlier productions—demonstrated conclusively that Gershwin's crowning achievement was also a great work of musical art. "Seen alongside the humanity in the music and text of Porgy and Bess", wrote Leighton Kerner in 1989, "other American operas seem slight".

Photo: Michael J. Lutch

That said, the piece is still a major challenge for any opera company. The cast is large, the music complex, and the demands of the staging can be daunting. Low voices—bass/baritones and baritones—dominate the leading male roles, making projection a potential issue, as does Gershwin's penchant for polyphonic choral writing. Add in the fact that the opera runs, in its original uncut version, over three and one-half hours with intermission (closer to four if you do it in three acts), and you have a project guaranteed to give any producer nightmares.

Some have dealt with the opera's challenges by simply re-writing it. Before the Houston production reclaimed "Porgy" for the operatic world, it was routinely sliced and diced in ways that made it look more like a conventional Broadway musical—usually by replacing Gershwin's recitatives with spoken dialog and cutting scenes and characters. The co-production by Union Avenue Opera and the Black Rep back in 2007, for example, used an edited version, although they did at least retains some of Gershwin's more innovative ideas, most notably the Act II "storm" sequence in which six completely independent vocal lines slowly merge with the chorus to produce the spiritual "Oh, de Lawd shake the Heavens".

Photo: Michael J. Lutch

The "Porgy and Bess" at the Muny this week is not a local production but rather a national tour of a musical titled "The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess" that was originally directed by Diane Paulus for the American Repertory Theatre and then moved to Broadway in 2011. "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" takes revision "one step beyond," with wholesale re-writes of Hayward's libretto by playwright Susan-Lori Parks and similar radical surgery on Gershwin's music by cellist/composer Deidre Murray. New scenes have been added, including backstories for the characters that were not part of the original work. All of which means that, although prepared with the cooperation of the Gershwin and Hayward estates, "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess," might (as Stephen Sondheim observed in a caustic letter to the New York Times) more accurately be called "Diane Paulus's Porgy and Bess."

Will it work? I haven't seen it yet, so your guess is as good as mine. The New York premiere certainly stirred up some strong feelings, both pro and con. Writing in the New Yorker, for example, Hilton Als defended the revisions as "politically radical and dramaturgically original" and suggested that Mr. Sondheim was just being racially insensitive. "[T]he stories he tells involve white characters", wrote Mr. Als, "and his professional world is a white one." Ben Brantley, in his New York Times review, struck something of a middle ground, praising Audra McDonald's Bess more than the show itself. "Ms. McDonald's Bess," he wrote, "is — in a word — great; the show in which she appears is, at best, just pretty good."

The only way to know who's right, of course, is to see the show yourself. "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" is certainly shorter than the original opera (which hasn't been seen on the Muny stage since 1988), clocking in at around two and one-half hours, so if you go you'll be on your way home before 11 PM. Performances begin at 8:15 PM through Sunday, July 13, on the outdoor stage in Forest Park. For more information: muny.com.