The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (48 page)

CD: Mirella Freni (Manon); Placido Domingo (Des Grieux); Giuseppe Sinopoli (cond.).
DG 413 893 2

La
Bohème

Four acts. First performed Turin, 1896.

Libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa

Loosely based on Henri Murger’s novel and play
Scènes
de
la
vie
de
Bohème,
and Puccini’s recollections of his own student days.
Leoncavallo’s
La
Bohème,
with a plot line that gives more prominence to Marcello and Musetta, was written simultaneously, amid much rivalry and dissension between the two composers.
It had some initial success, but was soon thoroughly overshadowed by Puccini’s version.
Modern revivals, however, show that it has its own charms.

Plot

Rodolfo the poet, Marcello the painter, Colline the philosopher and Schaunard the musician live a cheerful but hand-to-mouth existence in a Parisian garret,
circa
1840.
On Christmas Eve, they are about to consume an unexpected feast, only to be interrupted by the landlord demanding rent.
The Bohemians humiliate him.
When his friends go out on the tiles, Rodolfo stays in to write.
There is a timid knock on the door – it is Mimi, an impoverished consumptive seamstress who lives in the apartment below and she has come in search of a light for her candle.
After some innocently scheming flirtation, Rodolfo tells Mimi about himself and she responds with an account of her own life.
Soon they are falling in love, and Rodolfo invites Mimi to join his friends at the Café Momus.
There they witness a rumpus, as Marcello’s former lover Musetta arrives with an elderly admirer, Alcindoro.
Eventually, Musetta and Marcello are reunited and as the party leaves to follow the Christmas celebrations, Alcindoro is left with a huge bill.

A couple of months later, on a cold winter’s morning, Mimi seeks out Marcello at the inn by the city gates where he is painting.
She begs him for help with Rodolfo, whose jealousy is becoming intolerable.
Mimi hides as Rodolfo appears and
gives his side of the story, followed by a lament for Mimi’s terrible physical condition.
Mimi emerges, and as Marcello begins another quarrel with Musetta, she and Rodolfo agree to stay together until spring.

Some weeks later, both couples have split up.
Rodolfo and Marcello try to work, but their thoughts turn to their lost loves.
They are joined by Colline and Schaunard in some horseplay.
Suddenly Musetta bursts in with the dying Mimi.
Musetta sells her earrings and Colline pawns his coat in order to pay for some medicine, but it is too late.
Mimi and Rodolfo briefly remember happier days, and then she quietly passes away, leaving Rodolfo desolate.

What to listen for

Act I contains the opera’s most famous music, in the shape of the charming sequence in which Mimi (soprano) and Rodolfo (tenor) become acquainted and fall precipitately in love: first comes Rodolfo’s aria ‘Che gelida manina’ (often transposed down a semitone for the sake of tenors frightened of its top C), answered by Mimi’s ‘Sì, mi chiamano Mimì’, and culminating in the ensuing duet ‘O soave fanciulla’.
Mimi’s final floated top C is easy enough to reach, so long as Puccini’s direction to sing it from off-stage is followed, allowing the soprano to attack it at an easier mezzo-forte which the audience should hear as an ethereal piano.
The soprano Mary Garden remembered how radiant a celebrated early Mimi, Dame Nellie Melba, could make the note: ‘it left Melba’s body, it left everything and came over like a star … and went out into the infinite’.

Musetta used to be cast with squeaky soubrettes, but the fashion now is to mark the contrast with Mimi’s lyric soprano by giving the role to a stronger voice with the heft to ride the din at the end of Act II.
Marcello (baritone), Schaunard (baritone) and Colline (bass) are all enticing and uncomplicated roles for young singers, with Colline’s haunting farewell to his old coat, ‘Vecchia Zimarra’, in Act IV winning him a moment of prominence late in the evening.

Nothing could demonstrate Puccini’s genius as a musical dramatist better than Act III, the scene at the city gates.
The music provides a seamlessly fluent twenty minutes which seems to move in a perfect curve, immaculately attuned to the wintry atmosphere and the emotions of the characters.
The end of the opera is perhaps too heavy with musical reminiscence of what has gone before, but the final effect should never be merely sentimental – there’s bitterness and anger in the stabbing chords which mark Mimi’s death, and one should remember that, historically speaking, these Bohemians would soon be manning the barricades of revolution.

In performance

An absolutely fail-safe piece, which can survive any mauling or incompetence but which works best when played by a good-looking young cast in a smallish house.
Today, it is frequently updated – Jonathan Miller (at the Opéra Bastille) took it into the 1930s; both Baz Luhrmann (for Australian Opera) and Phyllida Lloyd (for Opera North) have successfully translated it to the Paris of 1950s; while David McVicar (for Glyndebourne) gave it a modern American flavour and even showed the Bohemians snorting cocaine.
Several productions of the 1980s and 1990s suggested that Mimi was a victim of AIDS; others have presented Mimi as Murger did – a rather more tough, knowing and sexually assertive creature than Puccini shows.
But modern settings can’t easily convey the sense of young people resourcefully having a good time even though they are cold, hungry and penniless – and sometimes one can forget that
La
Bohème
is basically a romantic comedy with a sudden tragic ending.

Recordings

CD: Victoria de Los Angeles (Mimi); Jussi Björling (Rodolfo); Thomas Beecham (cond.).
EMI CDS7 47235 8

Angela Gheorghiu (Mimi); Roberto Alagna (Rodolfo): Riccardo Chailly (cond.) Decca 466 070 2

Video: Cheryl Barker (Mimi); Julian Smith (cond.).
Directed by Baz Luhrmann.
Decca 071 176 3

Tosca

Three acts. First performed Rome, 1900.

Libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa

Victorien Sardou’s melodrama
La
Tosca
was a hugely popular vehicle for the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt.
Puccini’s adaptation strips away much of the play’s extraneous detail, and focuses on strong characterization and dramatic impetus.
Sophisticated opera-goers have little time for
Tosca
: Joseph Kerman notoriously described it as ‘a shabby little shocker’, and Benjamin Britten was appalled by ‘its cheapness and emptiness’, but this remains an opera which has held its huge popularity with the broader public for over a century – and however glib and nasty it looks on the page, it seldom fails to work in the theatre.

Plot

Rome, 1800, in the repressive era during which the Bourbon regime opposed the Napoleonic onslaught.
Angelotti, an escaped prisoner, takes refuge in a chapel of the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle.
Angelotti’s friend and fellow freedom-fighter, the painter Cavaradossi, is working on a painting of Mary Magdalene – inspired by both Angelotti’s sister, the Marchesa Attavanti, and Cavaradossi’s lover, the glamorous but temperamental prima donna, Floria Tosca.
Angelotti asks Cavaradossi for help, but their plans are interrupted by the sound of Tosca calling from outside the church.
Irrationally jealous of Cavaradossi’s interest in the Marchesa, she is furious when she detects the latter’s presence in his painting.
Cavaradossi reassures her and, after she leaves, accompanies Angelotti to his villa outside Rome.
The Chief of Police, Baron Scarpia, enters the church, looking for Angelotti.
Tosca returns to find Cavaradossi and is distraught to spot a fan belonging to her rival, the Marchesa, by his easel.
The lecherous Scarpia plays on Tosca’s vulnerabilities, hoping both to snare Angelotti and win Tosca for
himself.
False news has come that Napoleon has been defeated at Marengo, and there is fervent singing of a victory
Te
Deum,
led by Scarpia.

Cavaradossi is arrested and brought for interrogation in Scarpia’s rooms in the Palazzo Farnese.
Denying all knowledge of Angelotti’s hiding-place, he is taken off to be tortured. Tosca appears after singing at a concert.
Horrified by Cavaradossi’s screams of agony, she reveals Angelotti’s whereabouts to Scarpia.
Scarpia summons Cavaradossi back to humiliate him with Tosca’s betrayal, when news is brought that Napoleon has triumphed after all.
Cavaradossi exults at Scarpia’s discomfiture and is then dragged back to prison.
Alone together, Scarpia plays with Tosca, promising that in return for her sexual favours, Cavaradossi will go free after a mock-execution at dawn.
As he writes out a safe-conduct for her and Cavaradossi, Tosca spots a table knife.
She uses it to stab him to death.

Cavaradossi awaits execution on the ramparts of the fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo.
Tosca appears and explains what has happened, assuring him that the firing squad’s cartridges will be blank.
But Scarpia has tricked her: when Cavaradossi is shot, he falls dead.
As Scarpia’s body is discovered and soldiers rush to arrest her, Tosca proclaims that she will meet Scarpia before God and flings herself from the ramparts to her death.