Yesterday was yet another High-Definition simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera and this time around they were presenting a little ditty called “La Boheme.” What an amazing opera this is, with such power to reach right into your soul and wrench it into submission. I’ve seen it live several times at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, including a most memorable performance featuring one of the great Mimi’s of the twentieth century, Mirella Freni, who was past her 60th birthday at the time but looked and sounded ageless. There have also been extraordinary performances of this opera on television and I just calculated that I own five versions of it on video. (Can one ever have enough?) So this performance had a lot of others with which it was competing for my approval, but this one was as good as any I’ve seen. . . and probably no other performance of Boheme has emptied my tear ducts like this one did.
Not that there weren’t some hiccups along the way. The Renaissance Cinema in Racine has had technical troubles with the last three simulcasts- with poor sync between picture and sound, and in two of the three multiple blackouts or freezes in the visual image. (The worst blackout during Boheme was at the end of act one, when the screen went blank for about two minutes.) There was also an interesting problem during act three- which in most productions including this one is set during a snowy evening – because a couple of the fake snowflakes seemed to attach themselves to the lens of the camera and were clearly visible whenever that particular camera was being used. Of course, telecasting a live opera performance is always fraught with potential problems and it’s probably a wonder that more things don’t go wrong. Still, this has been a far more problem-plagued season than last year, which doesn’t make sense. But the fact that these performances have managed to surmount their technical blemishes is a testament to how wonderful the actual musical and dramatic work has been. The fact that yesterday’s Boheme could move me to tears even with bad sync and four picture blackouts speaks volumes for how beautifully Angela Gheoghiu and Ramon Vargas performed.
It was nice to have several Carthage students there, a couple of whom are music theater majors who probably came more than anything to see the opera upon which the musical “Rent” was based. I told one of them that La Boheme is Rent without the Rock Music. Marshall, not missing a beat, chimed in “Rent is La Boheme without music!” La Boheme did of course come first – and the opera premiered over 110 years ago – but it’s incredible what staying power both this story and its music have. As one of the performers said during an intermission interview, all of us want what these characters want – Love.
What made me sad was that in looking over the audience, there appeared to be four Carthage students, one couple in their thirties, Marshall and I in are forties, and everyone else in their fifties, sixties, seventies and up. . . while everyone twenty and under at the Renaissance was busy watching cops chasing robbers or young musclemen beating each other up. I would love to have seen some high schoolers in those seats, watching this amazing opera. And it made me all the more determined that when next season’s simulcasts come around, I am going to get some opera neophytes there, one way or another. I may even offer to watch a month of American Idol if a certain relative of mine tries his first opera (fair’s fair).
pictured: Ramon Vargas and Angela Gheorghiu in the last act of La Boheme, not long before Mimi dies in one of opera’s supreme tragic endings.