IF YOU SLIGHTLY close your eyes through all the frippery and flappery of the first act of Puccini’s La Rondine, you might believe yourself to have been magically transported into an Aubrey Beardsley painting, with all its Art Deco glissandos and arches, gold leaf and quirky feathery headdresses. In many ways, this light-hearted essay of love which was first performed while the world was at war in 1917, is about existing in a bubble, where the biggest concerns are whether you are seen by your madam in an after hours context, and whether the new love of your life knows your torrid past. La Rondine is screened by Met Opera at Cinema Nouveau around South Africa until 11 June 2024.

And seeing the work for its delicacy and somewhat flippant play on values, it is refreshing and pretty. Angel Blue – who you may have seen as Micaela in the MetOpera’s magnificent production of Bizet’s Carmen a few months ago – takes the lead, Magda. She’s a courtesan, but one not embittered by the vagaries of life. Not yet, that is. Blue is an extraordinary performer, with an astonishing vocal range and a presence of immense dignity.

Enter Ruggero (Jonathan Tetelman), with his beautiful eyebrows if slightly wooden presence, and the die is cast for a love story of its time. It may seem odd that all the women in this piece are prostitutes in with their cigarette holders and sense of society as cynically in place as it should be for women in this field. But the men are either wealthy brigands — such as baritone Alfred Walker as Rambaldo — with ownership rights over ‘their’ women or rather sheltered and oddly innocent individuals who bow under the authority of their parents. But that too, reeks of the currents that fed some of the veneer of 1920s theatrical society and their narratives.

That said, it is the magnificence of the set and the costumes that win first prize in this work. There are idiosyncrasies of colour and patterning that brush up against one another in the architecture of the piece and mood it creates that speaks of the wise frivolity of the period and the gorgeous way in which the texture of pattern is allowed to blend line work and caryatid figures drawn into the walls and pillars covered in mosaic.

The staging of ensemble scenes is also handled deftly and with a strong eye for mood and focus. Sadly, the full – and very large – ensemble cast is not listed individually by the Met’s website or even imdb.com. Here, there are moments of ribald choreography and cameos of drama that punctuate an otherwise very low-key piece.

It’s a fairly lengthy screening, weighing in at just under three hours. This includes several very informative and interesting interviews with members of the cast as well as glances into the mechanics of set changing, during the intervals between the three acts.

The traditional narrative of grand opera mostly finds a corpse passionately splayed at the work’s denouement, covered in blood and regrets; you won’t find that in La Rondine, which is elegant and refined and tragic in that the story ends in heartbreak rather than grand moments of suicide or murder. In short, it doesn’t fray at the edges of being. The loveliest of all the performers is Emily Pogorele, in her debut at the Met. She plays Lisette the maid, and she’s the absolute reason you need to see the piece.

Lisette has strong opinions of her own, she’s the feisty love interest of the poet Prunier (Bekhozod Davronov) and the foil to Magda’s sense of properness, but most of all, she injects life and soul into a work which could easily have crumbled under the effects of feeling cloyingly dated.

• La Rondine was composed by Giacomo Puccini to libretti by Giuseppe Adami. Directed for the Metropolitan Opera in New York by Gary Halvorson, it features set design by Ezio Frigerio and costumes by Franca Squarciapino. Conducted by Speranza Scappucci, it is performed by Angel Blue, Bekhozod Dayronov, Emily Pogorele and Jonathan Tetelman and is being screened by MetOpera live at selected Art Nouveau movie theatres in South Africa, until 11 June 2024.