Spring 2006:
Giacomo Pucchini's La Bohème
Press:
"La Bohème?" Try "LaBelievable." In the opera world, good acting is as rare as cheap seats. But in Tuesday's polished production, the charismatic and skilled cast created nuanced characters the audience could laugh and cry with.
Sarah Henning,
Duluth News-Tribune
Production:
Presented by University of Minnesota Opera Theatre and UM Duluth Department of Music
APRIL 6, 7, 8, 9: Ted Mann Concert Hall
APRIL 18, 19, 20: Duluth Entertainment Convention Center
DAVID WALSH, director
JEAN R. PERRAULT, conductor
JIM WENTING, lighting & set design
JULIE ANN RITHALER, costume & hair design
Photos
The Opera:
Like The Turn of the Screw, Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème was born out of articles serialized in a magazine—Henri Murger’s “Scenes de la Vie de Boheme” (Scenes of Bohemian Life). Although Puccini and his librettists Illica and Giacosa reduced and combined Murger’s many scenes into just a few brief acts, they succeeded admirably in capturing the episodic rather than narrative style of the original.
In approaching La Bohème, therefore, it is important to realize that the existence, rather than the plot, is the theme. Furthermore, there is no attempt to idealize the “bohemian” existence—these artists, students and outcasts by choice who lived on the fringe of respectable society. It was a life, indeed, that was lived at the extremes—there was no middle ground between wealth and poverty, poetic delicacy and grotesque vulgarity, elation and despair. The young men dream of greatness but have neither the talent nor the character to achieve it. Their lovers, knowing this truth, fall back on wealthy patrons in order to make life tolerable. All of them despise respectable society yet long to be part of it. Murger himself put it succinctly—“it was a gay life, yet a terrible one!”
When Puccini wrote his version of La Bohème in 1896, he had never visited Paris. He admitted that his depiction of life in the city had resulted from recollections of the sensations and adventures from his student days in Milan, as well as his literary and artistic impression of Murger’s book. Nevertheless, although an authentic Parisian atmosphere is absent from the opera, Puccini’s extraordinarily beautiful music, some of the most memorable in all of opera, combined with a story of searing emotional intensity, have never failed to convey the existence of life in this bohemian and existentialist world to generations of admirers.