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October 22, 2005
La bohème
Casting about for an opera to listen to during the Saturday purifications (oh, they're hardly that!), I settled on La bohème, but only after musing to Kathleen that this particular opera doesn't need any plugging from the likes of me. "What on earth would I say about it?" I asked. The answer - mine, alas - was: "Why don't I listen to it and find out?"
I love two operas by Giacomo Puccini, Turandot and La bohème. I love Turandot in spite of itself. When I was fourteen years old and crazy about classical music for the first time - but that's another story. Suffice it to say that it took years to get over, much less understand, the recording that Erich Leinsdorf made with Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi and Jussi Bjoerling. On the other hand, I fell in love with La bohème, uniquely, in the opera house. Specifically: Jones Hall in the early Seventies. The only thing that I remember about the very charming HGO production was that James Morris, then starting out on his august career, sang the part of Colline. (He was great.) Having a free pass, I went to three of the performances, and I got over my contempt-of-Puccini very quickly, if only privately. But I have listened to enough Puccini to know that I am never going to come out as a fan. That's another story, too.
Why is La bohème important? And it is important, or I wouldn't be bothering to write about it. On the surface, it's an anti-opera, a music drama about losers. (You don't think that Rodolfo is going to wind up in the Pléiade, do you?) What starts out so bright and promising ends up so badly that we have to ask whether there was anything really promising to begin with. And in truth there wasn't. So why do we love this opera? Don't say, "It's the music!" I can't think of a single opera that's popular because its music is so fantastic that we forget, not that the story is ridiculous but, that the characters are. The opera with great music and unattractive characters - well, that's a line that Richard Strauss patrolled in the works that we call "lesser." Opera fans may love great big gorgeous tunes, but they also insist upon great big lovable characters.
So what's to love, as we say here in Gotham, about the characters of La bohème? What's to love struck me soon enough after I'd written down "anti-opera" (I was taking notes while dusting). Rodolfo and Marcello and Musetta - and, possibly, in her quiet way, Mimi - are beset by the atherosclerotic self-importance of youth. They don't need to publish or to be rich: they're young, self-selecting candidates for fabulousness. They have come to the Big Salamander under their own steam. That few of their semblables will reach the goal is not the point. The point is simply to be young and to be full of it. The point is to fall totally in love with the girl you just met on the stairs; the point is to buy her a hat that you can't afford while you're out on your first date. The point is to "be in the present" - but in the Western, not the Buddhist, meaning of that phrase. The point, underlined by the title of the opera, is to be gloriously irresponsible.
Only in Turandot - and, possibly, in that "shabby little shocker," Tosca - did Puccini manage his material properly. With its happy opening acts and its totally dismal finale, La bohème ought to be a flop. Puccini is preposterously generous early on. The first act is positively Wagnerian in its willingness to drop "the well-made play" for the "total musical experience." First, Rodolfo sings "Che gelida manina." Then, with only a moment of silent embarrassment in the orchestra, Mimi begins "Mi chiamano Mimi." And only a few moments after she's through with that, we have the love duet, "O soave fanciulla." The sad truth is that, but for the end of Act III and Rodolfo's stricken cry, "Mimi!", one could walk out after the first act knowing everything there is to know about the beauties of La bohème.
Opera is on one interesting level a dialogue - a battle, of you prefer - between Italian contentment and German curiosity. All the great Italian composers, from Rossini to Puccini, have the "bad habit" - guess which side I'm on! - of doubling the grand melodic line in the strings. If you don't understand what I just said, don't worry; all it means is that the violins are playing the same notes that the singer is singing. Verdi and Puccini pulled away from this habit, but without abandoning it entirely. In Puccini's hands, doubling is an affirmation, at the high points, of operatic ardor. No German, from Mozart to Strauss, would have doubled; it meant wasting the opportunity to complement the vocal line with interesting harmonies. But that's what the Alps are all about. I used to hate Puccini for doubling. Now that I'm an on-the-verge old man, I think, rather, that doubling was right for what he was doing. He was actually rather sparing about it.
There is something youthful about the immense forgetfulness that dissolves the drama between the three last acts of La bohème. All sorts of things have happened offstage, but they're not important, because now is important. This opera was, after all, inspired by a a disjointed work called Scènes de la vie de bohème. True to the title, Puccini makes teenagers out of all of us - which is probably why I hated him when I was one. I wanted to be - well, listen to the opera!. Now that I'm almost sixty, I don't fight him.
Posted by pourover at October 22, 2005 11:46 PM
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