The Swallow Goes South

La Rondine may not be the most obscure of Puccini’s operas (that distinction still goes to Edgar), but the reasons it is not performed as frequently as his other mature works are both numerous and obvious. Where Tosca offers a strangely magnetic cruelty and La Bohème, for all its unforgivable sentimentality, is at least unambiguous in its emotional manipulation, the dramatic content of La Rondine is highly problematic. As a tragedy it is profoundly unmoving, but it is neither entertaining nor light-hearted enough to be anything else. The implausibility of the characters in the first two acts is rendered all the more frustrating by a third act that – at least in the version performed on this evening – is perhaps the most sensitive treatment of a relationship ever conceived by the cynical Puccini.  The new production at the Deutsche Oper –…