Our English word catharsis comes from the ancient Greek katharsis, which literally translates as “cleansing” or “cleansing.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book Poetics (335 BC), says that the purpose of viewing a tragedy is to purge negative emotions, such as fear and pity, to leave room and mental balance necessary for good. citizen. So, too, does opera evoke a positive feeling in its spectators: from the lines of Verdi's finale La Traviata in fear of descending into Mozart's hell Don Giovannito see an opera is to experience a collective outpouring of emotion. Here Bohemian The Royal Opera House was a strong example of this. As I glanced around the hall, I saw English gentlemen removing their glasses and wiping their tears; I heard young women and venerable old women weeping into their sleeves.
What caused this outpouring of emotion among the normally skeptical British public? The setting of the director Richard Jones is well used: it opens with a 19th-century Parisian garret, the Haussmannian ceilings are well-defined and the wooden beams of the ceiling provide a base on which the characters – musicians, poets, writers, Parisian Bohème – occasionally lean. Snow always falls from the sky; snowflakes falling, illuminated by the moonlight and covered by smoke from the chimney. Yet it would be a mistake to think that 19th-century Paris was the postcard-perfect place it is today. Beneath the imposing Haussmannian facade, poverty was common and the death rate high.
The French Revolution of 1789 did not bring the égalité that its instigators had dreamed of. Instead, most people live short, desperate lives not unlike those described by Victor Hugo in his 1862 work. Les Misérables. In a speech 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, dirty ponds, where whole families live in a crowd of men, women, girls and children. They have no beds, and coverings, and clothing, one is tempted to say, except the filthy piles of rotting rags, swept from the mud swept from the streets—heaps of urban dung where living creatures bury themselves alive to escape the winter cold.” To imagine that these conditions were tolerated by people from the same city and at the same time as the Impressionists who flourished—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne—is improbable, but telling. the polarizing extremes of the time.
It was in this world of good and evil; high culture and the rotten squalor in which the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) set his opera. La Bohème in freetto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. In the year of its creation, 1894, the old medieval wooden buildings of Paris had been demolished so that the architect Georges-Eugène Hausmann could build his shadowy apartments in a grid construction that would become famous throughout the world. The idea for this project was based on a famous novel by the French writer Henri Murger Scènes de la vie de bohème, was published in 1893. Richard Jones' La Bohème it takes us from the garret of poor artists in the Latin Quarter to the galleries of the great shops of Paris; from beautiful cafes with pink walls and white tablecloths to desert buildings covered in snow. His characters—Rodolfo, a penniless writer with his head in the clouds and Mimì, an embroiderer and seamstress, younger and younger with a visible danger to him—fall in love quickly after meeting by chance in search of a key in a dirt tunnel. , as they are neighbors. “No, it's a shame, women,” Rodolfo sings in the famous Mimì aria (“your little hand is frozen. Let me warm it to life”). “Italian men work fast!” my neighbor laughed at the end of the first act.
A whirlwind affair ensues—the bohemians in their wide circle include the violent, flirtatious and daring Musetta, the “lover of the Latin Quarter,” who delights in annoying men with her tricks—and it's not long before Mimì's illness begins to show. the first bad symptoms, a cough and a slutter here, a faint there. You don't have to have any money; in the opening scene of Act 1, the bohemians are thinking of breaking up their last pieces of furniture to use as firewood for the stove, it is too cold for them, and when Mimi needs medicine and the doctor collects what they can sell from the stove. city streets to finance it. But Mimi is very cold, very weak and thin. Can the dream of love end before it really begins?
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Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska was amazing as Mimì—amazing that such a beautiful voice could come from such a small frame. Her movements, sometimes weak and bird-like, were befitting of a 19th-century tailor, and Kulchynska's eyes sparkled every time she looked at Rodolfo, played to the credit of Samoan singer Pene Pati. Pati had an excellent voice, and her arias startled the audience into reverent breaths: indeed, I could hear the breath at times during her efforts. Egyptian-New Zealand soprano Amina Edris was a wonderful Musetta, vivacious in her confidence and sensual demeanor, and delighted the audience with Musetta's famous aria. Thank youshe even walks through the store tables in her bright red dress to attract the attention of her ex-lover Marcello, played beautifully by Russian baritone Mikhail Timoshenko.. They were all in good voice and performed their parts with passion and enthusiasm, with great theater that came out to the kingdom. The orchestra, the Royal Opera House Orchestra, conducted by Speranza Scappucci, was in excellent form, with the violins ringing beautifully throughout the hall.
La Bohème it has never been absent from the repertory since the year of its first performance, in 1894: the feeling of love in the opera is really extreme, with the characters of the opera declaring their undying love against all odds and accompanied by Puccini's songs, which are heard musically. night air like the hot Tuscan air of the composer's birthplace. The emotion of the opera is so intense that subtitles are often not needed, although the singing is, of course, in Italian: Puccini captures the universal romantic feeling. For the other listeners who shed tears that night, touched by the music, I hope it brought catharsis to you as it did to me. And to the cast: bravi tutti.
