The last production of Opera Santa Barbara’s 2016-17 season will be Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine, libretto by Giuseppe Adami, which was first performed just over a century ago on March 27, 1917, at the Opéra of Monte Carlo.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 30, in the Granada Theater, 1214 State St.
OSB Artistic Director Kostis Protopapas will conduct the musical forces, Tara Faircloth directs the stage action.
The production stars soprano Karin Wolverton in the role of Magda, with tenor Adam Diegel as Ruggiero, baritone Peter Lindskoog as Rambaldo, tenor James Callon as Prunier; and soprano Elizabeth Kelsay as Lisette.
In late summer 1913, the Vienna Carltheater approached Puccini about writing a Viennese operetta.
Assured that a comic opera would be acceptable — i.e., with no spoken dialogue, in the manner of Richard Strauss‘s Der Rosenkavalier (“only more entertaining and more organic”) — Puccini took the commission and set to work.
The operetta caused him rather more trouble than he planned, and La Rondine was not ready to premiere until early 1917.
By that time, of course, World War I was underway, Italy and Austria were on opposite sides, and a Viennese performance was out of the question.
So the venue was switched to the tiny principality of Monaco, in the theater of the famous Monte Carlo Casino.
Among Puccini’s great operas, La Rondine finds herself in the position of a Cinderella with no ugly sisters.
Yet, though it is one of the least performed of Puccini’s stage works, it is a lively and sensuous delight, full of pretty tunes and gorgeous orchestral writing.
Set in Paris and the Riviera, the Viennese flavor is maintained by frequent recourse to three-four time and glittering balls.
(“I cannot ask you to kiss me while you are still married to the Church,” says Romy Schneider to Tom Tryon, in The Cardinal, “but, in Vienna, even for a married man, it is a sin not to dance a waltz!”)
Despite the spectre of Der Rosenkavalier invoked at its inception, La Rondine actually anticipates, by a quarter century, some of the personal and philosophical themes of another Strauss opera, also produced in wartime, Capriccio — one of the most uneventful theater pieces ever produced.
And, while it might be debatable if La Rondine is “more entertaining” than Der Rosenkavalier, it has Capriccio beat cold.
Tickets to La Rondine are $29-$204, and can be purchased at the Granada box office, by phone at 899-2222, or on line at www.granadasb.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.