Our English word catharsis comes from the ancient Greek katharsis, which literally translates as “purification” or “purgation.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his work Poetics (335 BC), argues that the purpose of watching a tragedy is to purge negative emotions, such as terror and pity, in order to leave the venue with the balance of mind required to be a good citizen. So, too, does opera evoke great feeling in its spectators: from the pathos of the finale of Verdi’s La Traviata to the horror of the descent into hell in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to see an opera is to experience the collective outpouring of emotion. La Bohème at the Royal Opera House was a strong example of this. Glancing around the auditorium, I saw English gentlemen remove their glasses to wipe away a tear; I heard young women and venerable elderly chaps muffle sobs into their sleeves.
What brought about this outpouring of emotion among the usually reticent Britons? The setting by director Richard Jones is beautifully executed: we open with a 19th-century Parisian garret, the Haussmannian rooftop well articulated and the wooden beams of the ceiling providing a prop against which the characters—artists, poets, writers, the Parisian Bohème—to occasionally lean. Snow falls continually from the sky; snowflakes flutter down, illuminated by moonlight and shrouded in smoke billowing from chimneys. Yet it would be a mistake to think that 19th-century Paris was the idyllic picture postcard location that it is today. Underneath the spectacular Haussmannian facades, poverty was endemic and mortality rates high.
The French Revolution of 1789 had not brought with it the égalité that its instigators had dreamt of. Iinstead, most people lived short, desperate lives not unlike those described by Victor Hugo in his 1862 work Les Miserables. In a speech he gave to the National Legislative Assembly in 1849, Hugo gave an eye-opening summary of the realities of Paris at the time: “[In Paris] there are streets, houses, cesspools, where entire families live in a jumble of men, women, girls and children. They have no beds, no covers, no clothing, one is tempted to say, except filthy stacks of rotting rags, pulled out of the muck swept from the streets—urban manure piles where living creatures bury themselves alive to escape the winter cold.” To consider that these conditions were endured by people in the same city and at the same time that the Impressionists flourished—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne—is unthinkable, and yet it shows the polarizing extremes of the time.
It was in this world of beauty and of vice; of high culture and of putrid squalor that Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) set his opera La Bohème to a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. By the year of its composition, 1894, the old wooden buildings of medieval Paris had been demolished in order for architect Georges-Eugène Hausmann to build his iconic apartments in a grid formation that would come to be world famous. The idea for the work was based on French writer Henri Murger’s popular novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, published in 1893. Richard Jones’ La Bohème takes us from the artists’ impoverished garret in the Latin Quarter to the grand shopping galleries of Paris; from enchanting cafes with icing-pink walls and white tablecloths to barren outbuildings encrusted with snow. His protagonists—Rodolfo, a penniless writer with his head in the clouds and Mimì, an embroiderer and seamstress, small and slight with a tangible vulnerability to her—swiftly fall in love after meeting through chance looking for a key on the dusty garret corridor floor, as they are neighbors. “Che gelida manina,” Rodolfo sings in the famous aria to Mimì (“your tiny hand is frozen. Let me warm it into life”). “Italian men certainly work fast!” my neighbor quipped at the end of the first act.
A tempestuous affair follows—the bohemians include in their wider circle the feisty Musetta, flirtatious and bold, “the darling of the Latin Quarter,” who enjoys provoking men with her wiles—and it is not long before Mimì’s fatal illness begins to show its first terrible signs, a cough and splutter here, a fainting spell there. There’s no money to be had; in the opening scene of Act 1, the bohemians are considering breaking their last sticks of furniture to use as firewood to heat the stove, so cold is their space, and when Mimì needs medicine and a doctor they gather what they can to sell on the city streets to finance it. But Mimì is so very cold, so very weak and thin. Could the dream of love be over before it has really begun?
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Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska was phenomenal as the ill-fated Mimì—it was astounding that so magnificent a voice could emanate from so small a frame. Her movements, frail at times and birdlike, were fitting for those of a 19th-century seamstress, and Kulchynska’s eyes gleamed whenever she looked at Rodolfo, performed admirably by Samoan tenor Pene Pati. Pati was in very good voice, and his arias startled the audience into reverential breathlessness: indeed, I heard gasps at times during his endeavors. Egyptian-New Zealand soprano Amina Edris was a wonderful Musetta, buoyant in her self-confidence and sensuality, and enrapturing the audience with Musetta’s famous aria Quando me’n vo, even taking to walking across the tables of the cafe in her vibrant red dress in order to capture the attention of her erstwhile lover Marcello, performed handsomely by Russian baritone Mikhail Timoshenko. All were in good voice and performed their parts zealously and with passion, with a great theatricality that lent itself to the spectacle. The orchestra, being the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Speranza Scappucci, was in very fine form indeed, with the violins’ soaring melodies ringing beautifully throughout the auditorium.
La Bohème has never been absent from the repertory since the year of its first performance, in 1894: the sense of romance in the opera is truly transcendent, with the opera’s protagonists declaring their undying love against all odds and accompanied by Puccini’s melodies, which ring through the night air like the warm Tuscan breezes of the composer’s place of birth. The emotion of the opera is so very intense that often the subtitles are not necessary, even though the singing is, of course, in Italian: Puccini captures the universal feeling of love. To the fellow audience members who shed tears that night, moved by the music, I hope it brought you catharsis as it did for me. And to the cast: bravi tutti.