May 1, 2020

Dear Osher Institute students and friends of Opera in Williamsburg,

We were hoping to be with you in Williamsburg now, rehearsing for Puccini’s La Bohème.  As you all know, we had to postpone it to May 2021, and we hope to see you there.  In the meantime, we would like to share with you some of the joy of exploring this masterpiece.

Maestro Jorge Parodi, our music director, is holding Zoom talks from his living room in New York about the music of La Bohème – the first two talks took place on April 15 and May 6, and we plan on holding more.

What I would like to explore in this presentation is the other aspects of putting this opera on the stage: everything other than the music-making, which is Maestro’s responsibility. 

La Bohème as a dramatic work is exceptionally engaging.  There are no villains and no enemies.  There are both deep emotions and merriment.  There are four guys – a poet, a painter, a musician, and a philosopher – who are trying to make a living by their arts, a challenge that was no less difficult in 19th Century Paris than it is nowadays.  The focus of the opera is the love of Rodolfo and Mimì, and the passionate relationship of Marcello and Musetta provides a dramatic contrast.  The characters may be lacking in money, but not in friendship or in joie de vivre.  

This warmth is no accident.  When we compare Puccini’s La Bohème to the collection of stories that it was based on and to the stage play that was based on them before the opera, we see that Puccini and his librettists made choices that encourage empathy and enhance the portrayal of camaraderie and love.  The guys are friends in Henri Murger’s stories, but it is Puccini who makes them roommates in the same garret – the space for their flights of fancy, their good-natured roughhousing and their sharing of meager resources.  Mimì has affairs with others than Rodolfo, but in the opera we never see them.  Even Musetta with her independence and willfulness is shown as a warm and caring person.   Puccini picks and chooses, trims and adds in ways that enhance empathy.

The story is simple: four young aspiring artists share a drafty garret in Paris in December.  They decide to go to their favorite café for Christmas Eve; Rodolfo stays behind for a short time, and meets a neighbor, Mimì, who comes to light her candle that had gone out.  The two fall in love, and join their friends at the café, where Musetta – Marcello’s former lover – rejoining him as well.  A couple of months later, Mimì comes to Marcello (who is now painting at an inn) to confide that Rodolfo tries to drive her away.  It turns out that Rodolfo fears for Mimì’s health and is tormented by the thought that she will die from cold and poverty if she stays with him.  The two decide to separate in the spring.  Several months later, the four guys are again in their garret, when Musetta brings Mimì back, at death’s door – Mimì wishes to return to Rodolfo, her love, before she passes away. 

The stage director, then, has to imagine and create the place and the manner in which this empathy-arousing action takes place.  Some details are required by the storyline: we need some heating apparatus that our poet can burn his manuscript in for warmth for himself and his friends, we need two candles that can go out or be blown out, a chair that can be offered to a guest, some wine and a cup to pour it into, a pink bonnet, a bed or a sofa, a muff.  The time cannot really be earlier than the 1830s, the time of the original stories, but it can be any period after that:  from the 1860s of the stage play to the 1890s of Puccini himself or any time after, with minimal adaptations (candles are unlikely to be required in the later 20th Century).  The original story is set in Paris, but could equally convincingly take place in New York or London – any city with a lively bohemian life and a cold winter.

Within any time and place, there are details to be determined – including the degree of details.  There are three spaces in the story, one of them used twice:  the guys’ place, Café Momus and its surroundings, and a lonely winter outdoors.  One can create a detailed setting of each space, or create spare evocative expanses with the minimum that’s needed for the action.  Any of them can be welcoming and lyrical, enhancing the warmth of their inhabitants, or forbidding and cold, foreshadowing the tragic end. 

Thanks to YouTube, one can find and compare scores of productions of La Bohème from the comfort of one’s home.  Pictures illustrate better than words – here is a selection of a few productions to compare.

First, a production that sets the story in the 1830s – the period of the original stories – with a detailed set.  The voices cannot be better: Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni, two childhood neighbors, both of whom knew the roles inside-out.  You can watch it at  https://youtu.be/H_1OtRt0_ho  (the subtitles are in Italian).  In this take, the artists’ garret is fairly well furnished with solid pieces.  The guys are poor, but not destitute:

Act I:  the garret; Mimì comes in and faints after climbing the stairs – we see a detailed background of life in the garret

At the Café Momus

Act III: a desolate, realistic snowy street

Act IV: life is back to normal at the garret, until Mimì comes back to die

The Zeffirelli production of La Bohème is particularly lavish and rich in period details, with warm coloring.  It was and still is used in many major theaters around the world including the Metropolitan Opera – this recording is from La Scala: https://youtu.be/cSuL4u3bOpg  

 Leaving the garret (showing the detailed set);                             Musetta arriving at Café Momus:

Musetta, surrounded by admirers, singing her aria – the bright red dress dominates the scene: 

Act III in the snow:

Act IV, back in the detailed garret – this time not in winter:

A very different approach in the details and the amount details, but similar in spirit (with costumes closer to Puccini’s own period in the 1880s and 1890s), in a major open-air production from France with Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu as Rodolfo and Mimì (the subtitles are in French):  https://youtu.be/aOXKuTcEYkU

The garret studio in Act I shows only the minimal furniture needed for the storyline, plus several beds to show us that the guys are all sharing this living space:

 Café Momus in Act II becomes a large open-air scene:

 Act III does not require much – it is still a bare snowy scene:            

 And back at the garret in Act IV – note that the entry is a hatch in the floor.  The almost-bare stage focuses attention on the tragic end:

A production from Rome from the Baths of Caracala, also with a fairly bare stage, is using changing projections as backgrounds – some of the projections are realistic, others follow the characters’ thoughts and imaginations.  This production combines realistic historical costumes with surrealistic backgrounds:  https://youtu.be/LDK6uspEHkM

The guys in the garret in Act I, with a background view of roofs of Paris with winter smoke:

Mimì and Rodolfo in the almost empty space of the garret, with a few broken pieces of furniture;
the couple’s flights of imagination turn the space into a fantasy of light and air, courtesy of Van Gogh:

Café Momus is a fairly dark and surrealistic space, and Musetta stands out in acting but less so in costume:

 The Virginia Opera production from 2015 (that is being broadcast on Facebook and YouTube now through May 7, 2020) is a realistic production that sets the story in Paris in 1939, right before World War II – some of the pictures below are publicity pictures, as distinct from screenshots taken from the video recording, like most of the pictures in this paper:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4A0R08T0s   

The garret is a ruin with peeling walls, the sparse furniture fits the period, the costumes fit the time and social positions:

Café Momus – the bright atmosphere is created by the white tablecloths and by Musetta’s dress; and the final act in the almost-empty garret.

A different period, a different use of projections, and a different and more edgy approach to the story can be found in a production of the Komische Oper Berlin.  In this case, the story is set in the 1950s.  This is another production that goes for a fairly bare stage with few set pieces.  The door to the garret, again, is set in the floor.  Rodolfo is given a camera rather than a pen, and the men’s costumes veer a bit in the direction of the bizarre, though not outside the limits of excess of fashion of the time.  The full production is available on YouTube with English subtitles: https://youtu.be/I1OeE3nZLBc

Café Momus is both more crowded and less bright than in some other productions.  The background is taken up by a somewhat grotesque group of humans – definitely not a group of friendly families in this production. Musetta’s lime-green dress stands out, and is appropriate to the character, but does not cheer up the scene the way that a bright red dress would:

 In Act III, rather than a lyrical snow-covered scene, this Komische Oper Berlin production has a dark street scene with a dreary set of buildings that drift in and out of view:

The abrupt transition in Act IV from the manic fooling around of the guys to tragedy with the appearance of Musetta and Mimì (through the hatch in the floor) is particularly effective:

A production that I have seen, but have not been able to find good pictures of, was at the Israeli Opera in 2017, where the story was moved to the 1950s and placed in a grimy and questionable neighborhood.  The sets were realistic and intentionally drab, bringing the unsavory street into the action whenever possible.

A production from the Salzburg Festival in 2012 with Piotr Beczala and Anna Netrebko takes a step farther, and reimagines La Bohème as happening to a group of homeless young guys under a bridge at the end of the 20th Century.  Some aspects of the story are translatable – Mimì comes to re-light her cigarette, rather than her candle. 

Other details fare less well: the burning of Rodolfo’s manuscript is far less of a sacrifice when it is a computer printout, and presumably can be reprinted.  An interesting effect is the very bright colors that can be used realistically in such a setting.   The full production is available on YouTube with English subtitles at https://youtu.be/GC4RO2VM1BI

Café Momus was reimagined in this production as a surrealistic space – it would have been too jarring to bring homeless vagabonds like the re-imagined characters in a decent café.  Musetta, though, is dressed realistically in a bright green dress:

The snow scene of Act III becomes a coffee stand where early-rising workers come before work; but then the action moves surrealistically into a Paris subway platform for the scene with the two couples:

Mimì’s last moments, while desolate, are certainly eye-catching with color in this production:

Finally, the most bizarre take on this very realistic opera that I have encountered must be the current Paris production, which reimagines the action entirely as the hallucinations of spacemen in a stranded spaceship, who are running out of oxygen.  You can find parts of it at https://youtu.be/Sg1nct9Ow4U and https://youtu.be/NjEcE93BRl4

What will Opera in Williamsburg’s La Bohème look like in May 2021?  We promise that it will be well worth coming to, even to opera-lovers who have seen La Bohème many times.  We do not expect to set the story either in outer space or under a bridge.  We have a superb stage director, Marco Nisticò, who is a singer himself and who knows and loves the opera deeply.  We have a magnificent cast of singers-actors lined up, some who are valued veterans of Opera in Williamsburg and others who are very much looking forward to performing on the stage of the Kimball for the first time.  Eric Lamp, our costume designer, will create his usual magic according to Marco’s vision.  Please stay safe and in good health, and please come and join us to see L’Elisir d’Amore in September 2020 and La Bohème in May 2021.  No broadcast can compare to the beauty of excellent live opera.

With many thanks,

Naama Zahavi-Ely, Artistic and General Director
Opera in Williamsburg, Virginia
www.operainwilliamsburg.org
Naama@OperainWilliamsburg.org
757-544-9461