The majority of Puccini’s operas illustrate a theme defined in Il tabarro: “Chi ha vissuto per amore, per amore si morì” (“He who has lived for love, has died for love”). The music always emerges from the words, indissolubly bound to their meaning and to the images they evoke. All speak the same refined and limpid musical language of the orchestra that creates the subtle play of thematic reminiscences.
These mature works each tell a moving love story, one that centers entirely on the feminine protagonist and ends in a tragic resolution. This is typical of Puccini's golden age operas, in particular La Boheme, Tosca and Butterfly, all composed one after the other, with 4 years in between and by the team of Puccini, Luigi Illica (book) and Giuseppe Giacosa (lyrics). In less than 2 hours one really feels like one knows these people and that you have really witnessed their whole relationship up to their heartbreaking farewell. Why is La Bohème so popular? It might be because the music is beautiful, the characters are endearing and the story is bittersweet. Completing their circle of friends are the musician Shaunard, and the philosopher Colline. Also in the opera we watch the relationship between Rodolfo’s friend, Marcello, a painter, and his on-and-off girlfriend, Musetta, a singer.
Mimi meets Rodolfo on Christmas Eve and they have a passionate but short relationship, they decide to break up in late winter and she dies, probably of tuberculosis, in early spring.
They lived the romanticized bohemian life in mid XIX century Paris (similar to the romanticized life of artists in early XX Century Paris that included Picasso, Cocteau, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Satie). La Bohème is the love story of Mimi, a seamstress (which was often a euphemism for a kept woman) and Rodolfo, a starving poet. Maestro Jorge Parodi's Zoom talk about La Bohème, April 15, 2020, at 2 PM EDT
0 kommentar(er)
