Today is the 114th birthday of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” the second-most performed opera in America. (“Madama Butterfly” is the first.) You can learn a bit about it here:
The Teatro Regio Torino (Turin), the theater of its debut, no longer exists in the form it had then. It burned in 1937, and was rebuilt years later to look like a smaller version of the Met, at least inside.
“La Boheme” is an opera everyone should see at least once in their lifetime.
As a conductor friend of mine once put it, no matter what the quality of the preceding performance, the last page of “La Boheme” always shows how musical sounds can change a person’s life. I’m glad we’ll be presenting it next year. Until then, here are a few excerpts:
First, some TV history from 1956: The Rodolpho and Mimi Act I arias complete, introduced by a relaxed Charles Laughton, from a show called (if memory serves) “Producer’s Cavalcade”. The singers are Jussi Bjoerling and Renata
Tebaldi. Bjoerling takes the aria down a half-step, for those of you keeping score. About 8 minutes into the excerpt below, one gets an idea of what Tebaldi was all about. Even though we can’t get an idea of how the voice sounded in the hall–the ability it had to fill very large spaces with beautiful sounds–we get an idea of the power of opera at its best:
And here they are at the end of Act I, “O soave fanciulla.” Again, everything’s there but the feel of these glorious voices in the room:
Here is a great clip from the Met’s 25th anniversary gala in 1991: the Act IV Duet “O Mimi tu piu non torni” sung by Luciano Pavarotti (THE Rodolpho of the last 40 years) and none other than Placido Domingo (another great Rodolpho, but here singing the BARITONE role of Marcello, and sounding a bit like Ettore Bastianini). Levine’s conducting the marvellous Met orchestra.
This particular performance came in the context of Act II of FLEDERMAUS in the gala, with Luciano and Placido being among the special “guests.”
Now, here’s the “La Boheme” portion of the movie “Moonstruck”, which preserves a New York that doesn’t exist anymore, alas. The portion in question begins about 1’30” into the clip and lasts until about the 4’00” mark. The recorded voices, btw, are Tebaldi and Bergonzi from the commercial Decca performance–my personal favorite.
Finally, a “Lucky Strike extra” related to Bjoerling, and having nothing to do with “Boheme.” Here he is, singing a few bars from a song in Swedish, from 1953, three years earlier than the “Boheme” performance. I never saw Bjoerling live, but I’ll bet that the experience was something like this:
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