When his voice and Mimi’s lift in soaring tandem, it’s not so much a question of thinking as feeling, and nobody makes feeling feel as good as Puccini.Ĭharles Castronovo and Anita Hartig as Rodolfo and Mimi provided that pure emotionality, and even managed to couple it with some nuanced interpretation. Jumbles of musical lines -a children’s chorus, a lover’s quarrel, a regiment of soldiers’ drums-stack up upon each other as if daring the listener to doubt that Puccini will somehow make this cacophony beautiful (he will, of course he will).īeneath it all, the characters are lightly sketched to say the least, and the huge romantic crescendos that pull the opera from one emotional climax to another do not so much distract the listener from Rodolfo’s less than romantic behavior as allow them to never really consider it at all. Musically, Boheme itself similarly deploys a kind of excess that obliterates thought. In the production’s fortieth anniversary outing, this dazzling effect was broken neither by the cast’s beautiful singing nor by the unremarkable conducting of Eun Sun Kim, in her Met debut. The production itself seems, somehow, to defy critical engagement with nothing much to say about La Bohème but infinite ornament with which to say it, the Met’s Bohême forces both audience and performers into a state in which commenting on or engaging with the opera itself is all but impossible. Tellingly, many of the conversations that are had about the Zeffirelli Boheme are not really about the production itself, but about its deeply rooted place in the contested ground that is the Met Opera’s repertoire.
The production turns 40 this year, having premiered in 1981 (which was, incidentally, the year this reviewer’s parents graduated from high school) and at this point is considered, by both its devotees and its detractors, to be indelible-a New York City cultural institution, a fusty old war horse that cannot be gotten rid of.
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