Lost in the Excitement of PucciniPalooza

Saturday's La Bohème performance by the Metropolitan Opera was the most fun I've had at the opera in a long time. I've blogged about attending their performances broadcast Live in HD at my local movie theater before, here at the regular blog and here in this music blog. They are Saturday afternoon fantasylands, the best escapist entertainment ever, and I don't have to worry about train schedules, parking, or uncomfortable seats as I snack on popcorn or contraband snacks brought from home. Since I teach (music classes) on some Saturday mornings and run from that to the theater, I sometimes end up in what I refer to as the "opera slums," the first few rows in front of the giant screen where casual and curious end up because they are unaware that you must arrive at the theater an hour before curtain to get a good seat. I've noticed that these folks do a lot more chatting and candy-wrapper rustling during the performance than the hard-core audience in the upper rows. The La Bohème crowd was proving me wrong until that guy's ringtone went off obnoxiously, and he answered it!

Nevertheless, I was expecting to land in the front seats and I didn't much mind this time because friends of mine were attending the same performance in New York and I was going to entertain myself before the show trying to find them. The HD cameras sweep around the New York audience and usually focus on younger folks (as if to prove opera is cool!). My friends qualify for this label in this context (it is all relative) but it turned out they had an even younger person seated in front of them that the camera really liked. I found them once, twice, 3, 4, and 5 times, even from the back once I triangulated their seat location. So that was fun, but what I'm really interested in is what accommodations the New York Met performance has to make for the Live in HD transmission. My friends were warned that the lighting would be different, and I wondered if the intermissions were extra long for them because we in the movie theater are treated to interviews of key singers and backstage secrets.

Vittorio Grigolo and Kristine Opolais as Rodolfo and Mimi in La Bohème April 5, 2014

What I wasn't expecting was the drama that had played out Saturday morning in New York. Our Mimi, Anita Hartig, fell ill and the Met management had to scramble to come up with a replacement. You'll never guess who they asked: Kristine Opolais who had sung the title role in Madame Butterfly the evening before! Well, she did a bellissimo job in my humble opinion, and yes she was interviewed in the first intermission with her Rodolfo, Vittorio Grigolo. She was so wired after singing Puccini's other showstopper Madame Butterfly the evening before FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE MET, that she didn't go to sleep until 5:30am. Then she got the call asking her to sing Mimi FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE MET at 7:30am. Imagine that! And so a career and a legend are made. Funny story: in their interview, Grigolo and Opolais told host Joyce DiDonato that they had met earlier in the week and agreed it would be fun to perform together.

It's all really quite dramatic and exciting, but beyond that, the performance was terrific, too. The sets were gorgeous, and we got to see backstage where workers were employing all three "stage trains." Each scene, Rodolfo's garret, Cafe Momus, and the snow scene, were put together on huge floors that wheel out during intermissions. Usually operas don't use all three of these "stage trains," but this Franco Zeffirelli production is especially lavish.

Puccini is emerging as my favorite opera creator. (The above book sits on my shelf beckoning  to be read.) He led a dramatic life and wrote dramatic, heart-wrenching operas. I cannot even imagine how Ms. Opolais turned on the Madame Butterfly performance, died a violent and dramatic Butterfly death, snoozed for a couple of hours, transformed into Mimi, and died again as a tubercular Mimi! I wonder, are those fabulous Puccini melodies still swimming around in Ms. Opolais's head as they are in mine?

La Tosca

Tosca is the opera I savored Saturday at the movie theater, brought to me live in high-definition by the Metropolitan Opera. I've posted about these broadcasts before--I look forward to every one and try not to miss any. I was especially looking forward to Tosca. This opera has a reputation as a shocker, and some critics think even gratuitously shocking. It's an emotional roller coaster in high art with deception, an almost-rape, a suicide, and a murder or two. The music is delicious with two famous arias ("Vissi d'arte" and "Recondito armonia") and a big production number in the "Te Deum."

The opera Tosca is based on a play named La Tosca by the Parisian Victorien Sardou. The Tosca character is a mature, independent opera singer, not the usual innocent ingenue we often find in operas. That Puccini kept the racy (for 1900) realism of the play in his opera is no surprise. The man led a very interesting life with wives, mistresses, and two sons with the same name. The details are still being sorted out.

Back to the opera, Patricia Racette sang the title role Saturday, radiant in that red dress, cloak, and gloves in Act II.

Her "Vissi d'arte" would stop traffic, and I think that's the idea since the plot at that point has Tosca being tortured and we're expecting she won't be able to avoid getting raped by the villainous Scarpia. Our diva-hero does wriggle out of that situation ultimately, the story moves on, and she gets to wear a stunning blue dress in Act III. Years ago, this was Maria Callas's signature role.

Tosca's boyfriend is Cavaradossi, an artist who we first meet as he paints a portrait of Mary Magdalene on a wall of the interior of the Church of Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome. In Saturday's performance, this part was sung by Roberto Alagna. Here is R.A. singing his big aria, "Recondito Armonia" in another production:

I'm going to restrain myself from writing an entire post on Roberto Alagna's smile, and I'm not even going to mention it. Oops, I guess I did. Well, he gave us a fine performance Saturday of a part he has sung many times before in many other productions. During his intermission interview with Renee Fleming, he mentioned that Cavaradossi in the play La Tosca was Italo-French just like him. He was born to sing this part, I guess.

The third main character is the Baron Scarpia, a very mean man who was Rome's police chief. No one likes him. He tried to extort certain favors from Tosca in exchange for pardoning her beau Cavaradossi. He's the kind of character that gets booed at his curtain call, not because the performance was bad, but because the portrayal of the character was so believably evil. This opera story has a political perspective which involves the hated Napoleon Bonaparte just before he was exiled. Scarpia was a Napoleon follower, reason enough for the other characters to hate him even before they fall victim to his evil and creepy personality.

I left the theater in a state of operatic euphoria, feeling that I had just seen a killer AH-per-ah. Literally 'killer,' as few of our characters survived the story. Go see it. And, by the way, if you are interested in learning more about Puccini's roller-coaster passionate life and his operas which define the genre for so many opera lovers, I feel comfortable recommending this book even though I haven't finished reading it:

Berger, William. Puccini without Excuses: A Refreshing Reassessment of the World's Most Popular Composer. NY: Vintage, 2005.