Let’s Try This Again

La Boheme deserves another look, another assessment. (And so does Puccini.) It’s one of the most popular operas in the world right now, and among the most frequently performed.

And here I am, month after month, expressing distaste and sarcasm – though universally applauded for soaring hilarity – a bit out in left field with a few other loners who don’t love Boheme.

The fact is, I’ve tried twice before to watch La Boheme, and once I even succeeded. But to me, it was an unpleasant project, a struggle against a tired and messy story, and baffling, unenjoyable music. Almost the whole world disagrees with me on this.

So come on, step off, heads up, buckle down, dive in, and move out for a live performance at Chicago’s Lyric. It’s 20 minutes away and there’s nothing to lose, and possibly much to gain. What were G. Puccini and his librettists trying to do here in 1895, and how can this reliable seat-filler be anything short of great?

Answer: It has to do with sample width, and pixelation. I’ll get back to that later.

The Stage Looks Fabulous

First, we have to talk about the work of Gerard Howland, Set Designer, because these are among the most detailed, pleasant, and cozy sets I have ever seen. Old Paris is clearly presented, and at a glance we can see rustic poverty, threateningly poor standards of life and health, and a risky lack of social distancing.

Overhead we have the moon, the sunrise, and the snow! The buildings are quaint and picturesque! Somebody did a lot of work here on the scenes, and it pays off.

La Boheme is shown with only three visual settings, and each of them, taken alone, communicates the timeframe, the living standards, and the right environment for this sad story. So you could say, cutting the scenery into these three parts, each is good on its own. Further, they fit together as a whole, so if you view the opera as a single unit, you get a solid consistent message. Very nice work.

Don’t Read It Too Closely

The story is a bit more confusing to me. Frankly, it lost me in the first few minutes, and never got me back.

I grant that if you look at the whole two hours, the trendline is there: the two lovers come together, meld as a wonderful and enviable couple, meant for each other in every way, and then part sadly. The poignant ending has them coming back together, but now it is too late: the grave healthcare situation in 1830’s Paris cuts off “happily ever after” in the worst way. And that is an extraordinarily touching ending to a beautiful story arc.

So, taking a sample width of two hours – the whole tale as a unit – it looks great. Even if you inspect the four acts, the main chunks of the story, as segments, we have to say “well done, Henri Murger and Théodore Barrière!” because these fellows created an early book, and then a play, with the story of Rodolpho and Mimi.

But let’s zoom in a bit more, for smaller sampling width, and better pixelation.

There’s the short clip at the beginning, where Mimi drops in on Rodolpho, and points out that she is his neighbor, maybe even living in the same building, but they don’t know each other at all. Wait a sec! Rod has three roommates, all socially active, randy and personable young guys, and they’ve been trying to pay their rent here for many months, but they’ve never noticed Mimi downstairs? Made me stop and wonder.

And then the two fall tenderly, desperately, permanently in love, and that takes about four minutes.

Even I can give a pass to Henri and Théodore – they have to move on to bigger matters (street parties, tuberculosis, and the like) – and these breaks from the realities of actual romance will be invisible if your viewing scope is set pretty wide. Mine’s not set wide enough; I’m sampling the plot every couple of minutes, and this blatant leaning on poetic license is annoying to me.

Next: the street party. I get it, they are happy, they are involved, they are more serious than their airy BFF Musetta. And they’re very poor, as stated, so they skip out on the bill. Points well made.

But why do we have all this detail, with the weird assortment of very specific items named by the street vendors, and the happy children clamoring for toys and singing an off-topic song about the toy-maker? Why is there a band of soldiers, waving national flags, coming down the street?

Once again, this builds a happy, contrasting mood, and the folks around me laughed and clapped at the hijinks. But really, this minutia is off-topic, too grand and too detailed for a love story about Rodolpho and Mimi, isn’t it? Feels like filler, when you examine closely.

All these distractions, taking up time, to no good purpose.  On the contrary, Act 3 shows Mimi out on the street alone, but why? And why, exactly, is her beloved Rodolpho deciding to reject her (and then recommitting, right away)? How did she connect with the rich Viscount who drew her away from Rod? Because I thought it was Rodolpho who initiated the breakup. Or who was it?

Here, when I look closely, part of the story seems to be missing. I don’t need all the toys and soldiers, but I do need the central elements of the plotline. No matter how small my sampling frame, minute by minute, I’m not seeing what I want. Better to back off, and enjoy the larger, blurry pixelation.

Well, after that, the four boys are back at the apartment, cavorting in the side yard, and the message is: “happiness, before the horrors of fatal respiratory illness set in”. Good enough, at that level, but then one more time, here are five or ten minutes of these witty guys chatting about stuff, playing and miming, dancing and eating. All these details, more than sufficient, and rather distracting, to me.

I’m sure that if we all just sit back and relax and take the Mimi & Rodolpho story at rough face value, no details, it will look sweet, romantic, and touching to the heart.

There’s a problem here for those of us who watch too closely, narrowing the focus. For us, this story is unevenly paced, missing some parts, and filled too often with showy bits. Unfortunately, these oddities are enough to throw me off in Act 1 Scene 1, and I never engaged with the poor couple or their friends after that. I’d need to blur the script, summarize the dialogue, and check in only every ten minutes or so, because at high resolution, this story looks a bit messy.

What Am I Missing?

But that’s not Puccini -- that’s the story he composed for. What do we hear in his music, at the very end of the 19th century?

Setting aside his wonderfully immature Le Villi (the composer was 26 then), I note that I have seen five of Puccini’s mature and popular operas, and I’ve not been thrilled by any of them.

(Okay, I admire the sad, sad “Humming Chorus” in Butterfly, nice innovation. If you can’t beat Offenbach’s “Kissing Waltz”, then write a “Humming Chorus”!)

My sweet spot in the opera timeline is a wide one, but Puccini is way out on the edge of that: he’s moving quickly into the 20th century, and leaving me behind.

At this point, it would be conventional and convenient for the analyst to say “well, some people like bel canto, and others like something more modern, and that is the way it is.” Fair enough, end of story. I don’t like the sound of this opera, but I do like Barber and Traviata, and that is the variance in human nature.

Hold a minute. Here’s my question. What exactly is different with Puccini? What is it that I don’t like? Can we figure it out? I’m game -- I’ll take a shot at this one.

Because I sat there for the whole 2 hours, plus intermission, and then some, thinking: What is Puccini doing here, exactly, and what is bugging me?

Therefore, let’s focus on the music of La Boheme, as ably as we are qualified to listen, and see how it sounds from both the wide-array receiver and the stethoscope.

First: the big picture

What was the general impact of two hours of Puccini? Oh no! We’re already into the weeds! I’m afraid I walked out without any palpable sense of Puccini’s muse.

What did I just hear? A lot of sounds, yes, but NOT an evening of mournful melodies as in Traviata, NOT the happy energy of Don Pasquale, NOT the complex magic of Figaro. Not even the morose intonations of Flying Dutchman, which I dislike, but respect.

I’m sorry, but when I take a step back and regard the music-scape of Boheme, I cannot perceive anything complete or memorable. I’m not denying that it’s there – someone, maybe many people, may love this extended soundscape. But I can’t find it, myself, and that’s a pretty empty feeling, after an evening of time-honored music.

Second: Zooming In

Let’s cut this into smaller pieces, isolating the acts and the scenes, for better focus on the details – maybe that will reveal Puccini’s genius. I’m listening now for the arias, the duets, and the choruses that tie this thing together.

Better! Twenty minutes into Scene 1, Rodolpho explains in a coherent tenor aria “who he is, what he does, how he lives”. And then Mimi offers her own story, again in song. They end it with a duet (remember, they are deeply in love already!)

But what was the tune, the melody, the rhythm, of any of those pieces? I don’t know. As soon as they stopped for air, I’d forgotten everything but the gist of their stories.

Rather the same thing happens when we listen to Musetta sing about herself, when the kids chant in the street, and even when Rodolpho tries to explain why he’s moving on from Mimi. And there’s kind of a nice piece at the end where one of the cast members is dying beautifully (no spoilers here!), but I don’t think any of these segments provides me with something to sing on my way home. Frankly, I don’t remember a bit of any of them.

Note: Maybe just for this production, but the appealing chorus of the morning street-sweepers, just after intermission, did not occur in the Chicago production. I had hoped they’d deliver on that, at least, but they skipped it. (I’m not sure there were any significant ensemble choruses at all – certainly none that I remember.)

For me, a lack of memorable music strikes an opera just as fatally as consumption might strike a young person in love. To my mind, and my preferences, if you cannot set the tone for the opera, or the scenes, or even the people, by using music, then an opportunity has been lost, and you are playing fast and loose with my definition of an opera.

Third and Final Step: Micro-Music

Here is where it’s at, I’m afraid. Let’s tune the sample width down to about 30 seconds, maybe 10, and listen to one of those tiny scraps.

Yes! There it is! When Rodolpho sings that he’s unhappy, the orchestra works its way downward in pitch and volume. When Mimi holds out her words hopefully, the high strings support that hope with a little trill, a quick build, or a pleasantly-harmonized arpeggio. It fits!

Here’s Musetta singing about assertive management of her love life, and there’s Marcello saying he’s not sure how to help his friends. In each case, their individual words and phrases are, very briefly, matched by several seconds of sound, usually delivered by the entire orchestra. It’s not simple – it’s fully-orchestrated (but tiny) emotive phrases, and that is what Puccini has brought us.

Make no mistake: this is not like funny program music that runs along behind TV cartoons. You know, when the rabbit gets surprised, there’s a squeak; when the coyote rolls down a hill, fingers run down the keyboard.

No! Here, the whole orchestra pit is involved – and it’s very ornate, and very well-matched to the scenes and the people. This composer has clearly scrutinized what emotional color he wants to paint, for every statement of every character, and has scored complicated orchestral passages to convey and emphasize their utterances.

And that is what I deduced during that evening in the opera house, and into the night and early morning of the next day. Now, I think I know what Puccini is up to. Eager to listen to more of his work, and see where I have it right, or wrong. It’s time, at last, for La Fanciulla del West, which came along a few years after Boheme.

How Could You Like This Opera?

Here’s my best guess: La Boheme is a wonderful love story if you take it in from a very wide view, ignoring the specifics. It takes a huge sampling width – no fine pixelation at all – to see the poignant story of love and loss. I can easily understand how one could leave the opera house in tears.

On the other hand, this music will be beautiful if you listen for just a few seconds at a time – a narrow sampling width – because those little snips of orchestral virtuosity are magnificent. That’s beautiful composing, and even I can admire how Puccini mastered the expression of emotions through music, bit by bit, through his entire opera.

For me, personally, though, this kind of story-telling is flawed and bumpy in its details, and I cannot ignore that – the narrative feels like it needs a few more edits. (As an aside, this is not the place to gripe about the banal wording, the short vapid phrases that Puccini accepts for a libretto. I don’t insist on a florid Monteverdi / Busenello script, but to me, Puccini’s writers didn’t even come close.)

But my greatest discomfort in listening to Boheme is that I cannot find the musical themes; I am still searching for an emotional whole, which exceeds the sum of the miniscule parts. Boheme has no overture, which might outline his path. It has too few cohesive songs, and only a rare extended chorus. To my ear, it sounds like a lot of tiny little compositions, with very fine pixelation, and that doesn’t seem to do much for me.

Of course, most of my heroes lived between Haydn and Verdi. This is my crew – the guys (and rarely the gals) who composed introductory overtures; extended arias, duets and more; and multi-voice choruses with tunes that convey the emotion of the character or scene or even the whole opera. To me, those are the compositions that leave me in a better place, with a song in my heart, as I head out after the applause dies down.

That sort of opera seems to have fallen out of style in the late 1800’s, displaced by something I cannot relate to, and cannot enjoy. Fair enough: move ahead, innovate and prosper, but if Puccini has turned a corner into the 20th century, I’m still back a few years, with the more accessible, tuneful offerings of Mozart, Rossini, and Bellini. I want a song, not a brief lilting phrase; I want music I can enjoy in samples of 5 minutes, or 20, or the whole two hours.

I just can’t find it in La Boheme.