Puccini’s Sparrow: Longing and La Rondine

Abstract

If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through laughter and the promise of rebirth, the melodramatic sensibility is perhaps best characterized by longing and regret. In a world where future happiness is guaranteed by religious conviction, longing is abated—by prayer, the performance of good works, and the reassurance of heavenly reward. Regret instead is expunged via the sacrament of penance and the conviction to “sin no more”; as long as they live, believers inhabit the possibility of repentance, forgiveness, grace, and salvation.¹ In a secular world, minus such reassurances, longing and regret are but two sides of (modern) melancholia, melodramatic excess an attempt to signify the intensity of these affects. Brooks suggests that “melodrama represents both the urge toward resacralization and the impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms” (Melodramatic 16). Characters in melodrama often seek to challenge unjust social conventions or to battle with their own past and the way it has trapped them, but because their struggle is a personal one, they often fail. This is perhaps the most profound way in which melodrama speaks of the unfairness of life, for one’s fellow human beings can be unforgiving, dreams die, and justice does not always triumph.