Opera Branches Out: La Boheme

Opera branches out:

The Metropolitan Opera: La Boheme - NCM Event (2008): Fathom presents the excitement of The Metropolitan Opera Saturday Matinees - in HD on the Big Screen! The LIVE broadcast of Puccini's La Bohème will be shown for one day only on Saturday, April 5 at 1:30PM ET / 10:30AM PT in select theatres nationwide. A magnificent cast comes together for Franco Zeffirelli's iconic production of the Puccini favorite. The exciting young conductor Nicola Luisotti presides over a glorious vocal ensemble led by the mesmerizing Angela Gheorghiu, who sings Mimì at the Met for the first time in twelve years, opposite golden-toned tenor Ramón Vargas as her lover, Rodolfo...

This is not Mimi-the-ingenue we have here...

$20 a ticket x 325,000 tickets is $6M a year:

On Air & OnLine: The Met's experiment of merging film with live performance has created a new art form," said the Los Angeles Times of the groundbreaking series of live, high-definition performance transmissions to movie theaters around the world. The series enjoyed box office success, reaching an estimated audience of more than 325,000 viewers. In 2007-08, the Met offers its second season of international HD transmissions—this time with eight broadcasts, up from last year's six. Don't miss the chance to enjoy thrilling, world-class opera at your neighborhood theater!...

Henry Murger (1851), Bohemians of the Latin Quarter:

Today, as of old, every man who enters on an artistic career, without any other means of livelihood than his art itself, will be forced to walk in the paths of Bohemia. The greater number of our contemporaries who display the noblest blazonry of art have been Bohemians, and amidst their calm and prosperous glory they often recall, perhaps with regret, the time when, climbing the verdant slope of youth, they had no other fortune in the sunshine of their twenty years than courage, which is the virtue of the young, and hope, which is the wealth of the poor. For the uneasy reader, for the timorous citizen, for all those for whom an "i" can never be too plainly dotted in definition, we repeat as an axiom: "Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface to the Academy, the Hôtel Dieu, or the Morgue."

We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris.

We will begin with unknown Bohemians, the largest class. It is made up of the great family of poor artists, fatally condemned to the law of incognito, because they cannot or do not know how to obtain a scrap of publicity, to attest their existence in art, and by showing what they are already prove what they may some day become. They are the race of obstinate dreamers for whom art has remained a faith and not a profession; enthusiastic folk of strong convictions, whom the sight of a masterpiece is enough to throw into a fever, and whose loyal heart beats high in presence of all that is beautiful, without asking the name of the master and the school. This Bohemian is recruited from amongst those young fellows of whom it is said that they give great hopes, and from amongst those who realize the hopes given, but who, from carelessness, timidity, or ignorance of practical life, imagine that everything is done that can be when the work is completed, and wait for public admiration and fortune to break in on them by escalade and burglary. They live, so to say, on the outskirts of life, in isolation and inertia. Petrified in art, they accept to the very letter the symbolism of the academical dithyrambic, which places an aureola about the heads of poets, and, persuaded that they are gleaming in their obscurity, wait for others to come and seek them out. We used to know a small school composed of men of this type, so strange, that one finds it hard to believe in their existence; they styled themselves the disciples of art for art's sake. According to these simpletons, art for art's sake consisted of deifying one another, in abstaining from helping chance, who did not even know their address, and in waiting for pedestals to come of their own accord and place themselves under them.

It is, as one sees, the ridiculousness of stoicism. Well, then we again affirm, there exist in the heart of unknown Bohemia, similar beings whose poverty excites a sympathetic pity which common sense obliges you to go back on, for if you quietly remark to them that we live in the nineteenth century, that the five-franc piece is the empress of humanity, and that boots do not drop already blacked from heaven, they turn their backs on you and call you a tradesman.

For the rest, they are logical in their mad heroism, they utter neither cries nor complainings, and passively undergo the obscure and rigorous fate they make for themselves. They die for the most part, decimated by that disease to which science does not dare give its real name, want. If they would, however, many could escape from this fatal denouement which suddenly terminates their life at an age when ordinary life is only beginning. It would suffice for that for them to make a few concessions to the stern laws of necessity; for them to know how to duplicate their being, to have within themselves two natures, the poet ever dreaming on the lofty summits where the choir of inspired voices are warbling, and the man, worker-out of his life, able to knead his daily bread, but this duality which almost always exists among strongly tempered natures, of whom it is one of the distinctive characteristics, is not met with amongst the greater number of these young fellows, whom pride, a bastard pride, has rendered invulnerable to all the advice of reason. Thus they die young, leaving sometimes behind them a work which the world admires later on and which it would no doubt have applauded sooner if it had not remained invisible.

In artistic struggles it is almost the same as in war, the whole of the glory acquired falls to the leaders; the army shares as its reward the few lines in a dispatch. As to the soldiers struck down in battle, they are buried where they fall, and one epitaph serves for twenty thousand dead. So, too, the crowd, which always has its eyes fixed on the rising sun, never lowers its glance towards that underground world where the obscure workers are struggling; their existence finishes unknown and without sometimes even having had the consolation of smiling at an accomplished task, they depart from this life, enwrapped in a shroud of indifference...

Comments

[Pedro]

Der lang anhaltende Machtkampf um das Gebiet Tibet, wobei es meiner Ansicht nach um die einseitige Macht Chinas geht

und auf der anderen Seite ein repressionsfreies und anerkanntes Nebenherleben (lt. dem Dalai Lama), spitzt sich

angesichts der bevorstehenden Olympischen Spiele weiter zu.

[Neal]

Try it--it's great!!

I went to them last year. It was a significant improvement on sitting way back in the cheap seats ($50+) where binoculars are required to see the elephants. The sound was fabulous, the seats were comfortable--and popcorn too!

Smart move, but the opera snobs are probably dismayed.

I repeat--TRY IT!! A little surreal, but fabulous.

[Harold]

As a derogatorily so-called "opera snob" -- I will only say than amplified sound does not fully capture the harmonics/resonances of the voices and instruments.

On the other hand, some of my best opera experiences have been listening at home with the libretto on my lap (preferably the large, readable, old LP booklets).

The sets of fashionable productions are often a distraction that contradict the words of the plot! And the supertitles (although a good idea as far as they go) don't allow you to know what is going on in the original language, in case you understand some (or all of it). Puccini's librettists, Iliaca and Giacosa, were wonderfully poetic writers -- As was Boito, who wrote for Verdi. Not to mention Mozart's witty and roguish Da Ponte.

Still, I love the cheap seats up in the top balcony. They are still pretty cheap if you buy them in advance.

[Harold]

Thank you so much, Brad, for the wonderful excerpt from Murger.

[Barbara]

I don't know how opera snobs feel, but opera lovers really like this. My mother goes to see live opera when she can and has been listening to the radio at home for more than 60 years. The opportunity to see a performance on the screen gives her a different way to enjoy opera, without lessening her desire to see a few in person when she can. She has gone to nearly every screening of a live performance that she can.

[Neal]

By the way, "opera snob" was a reference to those to whom the opera is a social event that must be accompanied by mink coats and a diamonds, and anything less than a $200 seat is disgraceful.

Yes, nothing can replace the voice and music in person, but it sure detracts from the event when I am jammed shoulder to shoulder, knee to back of seat in the auditorium where the Met comes to my city. And given that the opera is more than it's music, it is good to be able to pick up the subtler portions of the performance where the performer is not seen from the equivalent of a football field away.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

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The only things I know about opera are the result of times spent in bed with Elizabeth "No, I don't sing opera I do imitations, that was Schwarztkopf" Rubin. I did a minor with a young lady whom I won't name, who did a lot of the brainless Kiri Te Kanawa's stuff. Is it real or is it Memorex? No, we just needed to get somebody into the studio who could sing.

One of the best sayings of all time -- and I think it might have come from Maria Callas -- is the put-down "He is no more capable of a love affair than he is of a grand opera." Since modern multi-media was essentially established by three people, Mason Williams, Bill Graham, and your humble correspondent -- and since I have had several great love affairs in my life already, with another one possibly brewing right now -- I sit here chortling.

Unfinished business: I'm still trying to make a patter-song out of the blood scene at the end of Macbeth: "Edgardo!!!" where the bodies are about eight deep.

The main man in the CIA in the worst stuff of the seventies and eighties was, guess: Edgar.





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[harold]

Yes, it's true. But I don't mind the cramped seats. What I do mind is the fact that subway runs less frequently and less predictably after 11PM (express trains become locals) and what with two twenty minute intermissions, one doesn't get home until 1am or later -- plus -- somewhat paradoxically, everyone rushes home and there is no where to get a coffee or something and socialize with friends, after the opera or a concert -- if one happens to go with friends or visitors from out of town. NYC sort of shuts down, as though it were Philadelphia, no offense meant to Philadelphia -- but Barcelona it is not.

But still --- I am so glad to have seen Gluck's Iphegenia in Taurus this year (fantastic and evocative) and I Puritani last year. Othello was pretty good also. Flemming was superb. Even where they fall down in this or that respect, memorable opera and concert performances constitute some of the peak moments of one's life.

[Gene O'Grady]

I find it most peculiar in an era when Phil Knight and thousands of bums like him use huge public subsidies to build stadiums and arenas with luxury boxes to keep the riffraff out that people are still talking about opera snobs.

Two counterexamples -- I once wandered into fancy dress night at the Rome opera and found myself in conversation (in my very bad Italian nonetheless) with an exquisitely dressed guy in the finest evening clothes I have ever seen; he didn't seem to mind that I was wearing a sweater over a pullover shirt.

And once at the San Francisco opera I got into a conversation with elegantly dressed older gentleman, whom I took as an insurance executive, who told me all about his memories of Muzio on the original opening night. I've certainly found more companions than snobs.

Perhaps the ultimate opera snob was my then three year old daughter who, when confronted with another standee (who had been physically rude to her) applauding at the end of the prologue to Pagliacci between "andiam'" and "incomminciate!" (in other words, not only was the orchestra still playing the singer had a phrase left) got a look of horror on her face, shushed her with her finger to her lips, and told her to keep quiet until the music was over. I was laughing too hard to intervene.