Revisiting the “Bohemians” at SFO

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with the San Francisco Opera (SFO) production of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. Casting was the same as on opening night with tenor Pene Pati in the role of Rodolfo, Lucas Meachem as Marcello, and Karen Chia-ling Ho as Mimi. Ramón Tebar returned to the orchestra pit to serve as conductor.

It would be fair to say that, over the course of the preceding five performances, all the members of the cast had settled into the characters they were performing. The overall narrative involves Rodolfo’s initial meeting with Mimi and the romance that ensues, only to be obliterated by her tragic death from the ill health that never left her since the time of that first encounter. This is then embellished by the rockier relationship between Marcello and Musetta and the setting of the rich and raucous “bohemian life” in the Latin Quarter.

Pene Pati as Rodolfo and Karen Chia-ling Ho as Mimi in their last moments together in the final act of La Bohème (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

From a narrative point of view, the “journey” is Rodolfo’s. He is a struggling poet; and, while the narrative never suggests the Mimi becomes his muse, it is clear from the narrative (not to mention the music) that she quickly becomes a source of inspiration. However, as might be expected, a rapid and passionate ascent leads to a steep downturn.

There is a danger that Mimi’s illness in the fourth act runs the risk of wallowing in the maudlin. However, the staging by John Caird found just the right way to keep the delivery of the libretto text from that wallow. Ho and Pati could therefore sing their way through both the excitement of discovery and the ultimate tragedy of loss. Similarly, that tragedy seems also to lead both Marcello and Musetta down a more sobering path, one that might even lead them to a graceful entry to older age.

To some extent Bohème is the opera that led the way into vérité rhetoric. Mind you, the libretto clearly steers its way to avoid the mundanity of everyday life. Nevertheless, there is a context of flesh-and-blood that transcends the more idealized characters found in so many of the nineteenth-century operas. (Giuseppe Verdi, of course, significantly initiated that transition; but Puccini took it to a new level.) Bohème transported opera out into the everyday streets of Paris, and the ways in which Caird captured the essence of those mundane aspects was just as important as his development of the characters in Puccini’s libretto.