I've seen La Boheme many times. It's a crowd-pleasing opera by Giacomo Puccini with glorious music and florid, ultra-expressive tenor arias. There's a big chorus scene in Act Two that provides a nice work-out for the supernumeraries. The plot is an example of verismo -- you don't need elephants or rainbow bridges to stage the work. La Boheme's narrative is simple to the point of inanity: a starving poet meets a poor seamstress with a racking cough. They fall in love and the girl dies. There are some minor complications: the starving artist is jealous and quarrels with the girl and she leaves him for a callous viscount who ultimately discards the woman when she is in extremis. The seamstress, turned briefly courtesan, returns to her starving poet lover and dies in his arms. The opera ends on a note of stark horror -- suddenly, the fun has all evaporated and, when the curtain goes down, the audience is stunned. They don't know if they should applaud the poor girl's death or leave the performance in shocked silence. (Inevitably someone cries "Bravo!" and rises for a standing ovation and the opera-goers elect for applause over mournful stillness.) Unlike Wagner or, even, Verdi, the show is relatively short -- in fact, the action has to be padded with the choral numbers in Act 2 to get the running time longer than two hours. This is also a "sweet spot" for modern opera fans.
The older I get, the more sentimental I am and, so, I am moved by La Boheme notwithstanding its rather simple-minded libretto based on Henri Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, Puccini is reliably inspired by death and the change of seasons (this is an important motif in Madame Butterfly and Turandot). Here his love theme is a Liebestod complete with swooning late Romantic harmonies and trills of bird song. For Puccini, love equals death and death is signified by the changing of the seasons. La Boheme is set in a wintry Paris where it seems to be always cold and snowing. Mimi, the poor seamstress, and Rodolfo, the starving poet, vow to stay together until the Spring -- but the hope of Spring is also the arrival of death. Puccini signifies the demise of his heroine with four majestic chords, hammer-blows of fate no less impressive than the Beethoven's motif of the same sort in his Fifth Symphony. "To be alone in Winter is like dying," one of the lovers says despite Mimi's apparent dalliance a callous Viscount -- this element of the plot, triggering some jealous outbursts from Marcello, is mostly suppressed in the Minnesota Opera version. The fact that Mimi's seduction by Marcello (if that's what it is) converts her briefly (and off-stage) into some sort of courtesan like the flamboyant Musetta isn't really developed in this show. Musetta, who is full-blown party-girl, alternately quarrels and makes love with Marcello (an artist) and one of Rodolfo's buddies in the demi-monde of the Parisian bohemians. As in Shakespearian comedies. the bawdy and flamboyant Musetta contrasts with the "simple and happy" seamstress and the prostitute's erotic battles with the hedonistic Marcello are intended as counterpoint with the more dignified and ennobling love between the consumptive seamstress and the poet.
The 2024 version of the opera that I saw at the Ordway Theater is set in the Belle Epoch -- that is, more or less, when the piece was composed (it was premiered in 1896). Rodolfo's garret is a bare square space with rounded curved corners -- it looks like the entry to an Art Nouveau subway station on the Paris Metropol. Cafe Momus where the big chorus scene occurs in the second act involves Dickensian street tableaux and art nouveau styling defining the sinuous contours of the restaurant. A contemporary note is injected into the opera when a procession of protesters, the so-called gilles jaunes (yellow vests) marches onto the crowded stage -- replacing I think a battalion of singing soldier who appear in the original libretto. The third scene is ordinarily baffling to modern audiences -- it's one of Puccini's luminous dawn scenes with a chorus of singers in the shadows greeting the rising sun. The scene is set at a control point or tariff station locked against the farmers who are bringing produce into the city. Because of unrest in Paris, the city was apparently divided into sectors walled-off from one another so that the town could be more readily defended and controlled. This setting makes no sense to an audience without knowledge of the spasms of civil unrest and violence periodically afflicting Paris and it's hard to understand why there is a sort of Berlin Wall running through the middle of the City. The 2024 Minnesota Opera production solves this problem by imagining the checkpoint as a discoteque with reddish opaque windows, a surly doorman keeping out the hoi polloi and the shadows of people cavorting inside in this erstwhile Studio 54 showing through the windows. Marcello, who is waiting for Musetta plying her trade, in the place installs a sign on the blood red facade where the dancers inside are shown to writhe in scarlet light like the damned in Hell; the name of the place spelled in cursive neon is Couer Fou ("the Mad Heart"). I thought this was a brilliant innovation and very effective. Puccini's heart is always in the right place. In the last Act, one of the Bohemians has to pawn his coat to buy money for the dying Mimi. The man sings an aria to his old brown coat, noting that "he never bent his back to the rich or powerful" and that "poets and philosophers lived in his pockets." Puccini probably penned the piece for a low voice, a bass, to create some diversity in the scoring of the opera -- it's most for high voices. But the bass aria is wonderfully written and pitched, almost Shakespearian in the way it efficiently evokes the man's character.
Of course, we all know that the popular Broadway musical Rent is based on La Boheme, updating the story of starving poets and painters to NYC's Soho or Chelsea in the midst of the AIDS crisis. (AIDS substitutes for consumption.) People used to pride themselves on pointing out the parallels between Puccini's source material and Rent. The equation is now reversed and I have the sense that this version of La Boheme is, in fact, influenced by Rent and, in some ways, alludes to that show. There's a wonderful scene in which a bearded transvestite comes out of club to smoke a cigarette -- Mimi approaches the transvestite and asks "Kind Madam, have you seen Rodolfo?" The staging of the Third Act with the disco backdrop also seems to invoke Rent.
You harden your heart against this stuff and defend yourself against being moved, but, in vain: I'm old now and the follies of this opera have come to appeal to me. I see my mortality in Puccini's rhapsodic music -- will I live to see another iteration of this opera? When Death arrives will it come like Spring complete with the songs of birds in their nests trilling in the dawn?
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