EVERYBODY'S "LA BOHEME"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 6

EVERYBODY'S "LA BOHEME"

UCCINI’S La Bohéme is one of the best known and most popular of all operas, but there must always be many young people coming to it for the first time. No better introduction to the opera could be found, apart from a live performance, than the recording to be played.«in the main opera broadcast of the month from all YCs at 7.0 p.m. on Sunday, March 17. Conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, with the RCA Victor Orchestra and Chorus, the soloists-all New York Metropolitan Opera House stars-are Victoria de los Angeles as Mimi, Jussi Bjoerling as Rudolfo (a role he played in his first Met. appearance in 1938), Robert Merrill as Marcello, Giorgi Tozzi, one of the Met.’s most promising basses, as Colline, and Lucine Amara, a mewcomer to the Met., as Musetta. "I have done Bohéme over three hundred times and-a few years ago-I thought I had my last go at it. But I was tempted by the opportunity to do it here in the United states, where I had never recorded an opera before," says Beecham in an interview printed in the brochure accompanying the recordings. The recording "reflects Puccini’s desires about this score as of 1920," says Beecham. He describes how Puccini had "a positive mania" for going about and hearing his own operas, whether they were played in a town twenty miles away in Italy or in England, a thousand miles off. In 1920 Beecham was preparing a production of Puccini’s I/ Trittico, three short operas, in London, when Puccini, true to form, arrived on

the scene. Beecham asked the composer to go over the Bohéme score with him. "In almost every instance, Puccini confirmed my impression, gathered through many performances | of Bohéme, that something was lacking in one respect here, or incomplete there. So what I have undertaken to do in this recording represents-as Puccini indicated in my own score-his views of this earlier work not many years before he died (in 1924)." The first act of the opera is set in an attic flat in Paris, which is shared by some young Bohemian artists Two of Puccini’s most celebrated arias occur in this act-Rudolfo’s "Che Gelida Manina" ("Your Tiny Hand So Cold’) and Mimi’s "Mi Chiamano Mimi" ("I’m Known as Mimi’). Rudolfo and Mimi fall in love, but already we learn that Mimi is suffering from a grave illness. In the second act, amidst the colour of Montmartre we again meet the lovers, and also Musetta, a spirited and reckless charmer who is making life miserable for Marcello, Rudolfo’s painter friend. By the third act Mimi and Rudolfo have had the usual lover’s quarrels, but in the end they are reconciled. In the last act Rudolfo’s memories of Mimi are in- terrupted by the news that she is desperately ill. She is brought into the studio and placed on a bed where she lies dying. The other friends try to help; Colline the philosopher takes off his cloak to pawn it and so get medical help, but it is too late and the opera ends with Mimi’s death.