Relatable ‘La Boheme’ holds up mirror to loves and parties of the past

There’s widespread appeal in seeing ourselves on stage as we once were: hopeful, in love, probably at a party.

And that’s the beauty of “La Boheme,” the reason the story is worth telling again and again.

It’s entirely relatable.

“La Boheme” holds up a mirror to younger audiences and offers older opera-goers a sense of rose-colored nostalgia for the hopes, loves and parties of the past. It also reminds us that the good old days maybe weren’t so great.

We might have been young and optimistic. But we were poor.

If only we had been young and poor in a moonlit, attic apartment in Paris, writing and philosophizing and falling in love against a soundtrack composed by Giacomo Puccini.

“From top to bottom, it is gorgeous,” said Spokane Symphony music director Eckart Preu, who will conduct the beloved opera for the first time this weekend. “It has a lot of humanity in it. The topics – love, death and finding each other and struggling with each other – are things everybody goes through. I’m super-excited for it.”

Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, Opera Coeur d’Alene and the Spokane Symphony are collaborating to present two semi-staged performances of the achingly beautiful “La Boheme,” one of the world’s most frequently performed operas. Set in France, the opera is sung in the Italian and captioned in English with projected supertitles.

Both performances are preceded by a free opera lecture one hour before curtain time.

“This is a really special project for the area. This is not a typical happening. This is huge,” said Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, artistic and general director of Opera CdA. “It’s really a massive show and a great opportunity for the Inland Northwest to see a ‘Boheme’ of this caliber. I hope it sells out.”

While this is the third collaboration between Opera CdA and Preu, it’s the first with Opera CdA and the entire orchestra, Nicholson said. “We’ve never done anything like this before.”

An opera in four acts, “La Boheme” tells the story of love and loss and life on the Left Bank. It’s based on the 1851 book by Henri Murger, “The Vie de Boheme,” set in the 1830s. But some elements mirror Puccini’s own life as a young man and music student in Milan in the early 1880s, when he sometimes had to pawn his possessions for rent money – or, as Preu put it, “when you have your student days and you live in some hotel and the high point of the week is when someone brings a bottle of wine.”

Preu can relate, too. As a music student in his late teens and early 20s in Weimar, Germany, in the early 1990s, Preu lived in a room “with a mattress on the floor. And it was really fine.

“When you start out and you just try to make ends meet somehow, you really don’t need much to live,” Preu said. “You don’t need any luxury. We just need good friends and a purpose. If we were freezing and still having fun and enjoying the little things in life, we were fine.”

‘They call me Mimi’

“La Boheme” is a portrait of artists as young men and women, when food and heat and candlelight were hard to come by and consumption was a catch-all term for any fatal wasting disease. It débuted in Turin, Italy, in 1896.

By then, comsumption typically referred to tuberculosis. Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, the disease ran rampant among the urban poor in cities throughout Europe.

Mimi starts coughing in Act I.

Soprano Leah Partridge, a regular Metropolitan and Berlin Opera artist, sings the starring role of the delicate seamstress. Her neighbor Rodolfo, the poet, sung by tenor Eric Margiore, falls in love with her before the start of her first aria, when she sings her famous line, “They call me Mimi,” or, in Italian, “Mi chiamano Mimi.”

Mimi’s a flirt. Rodolfo gets jealous. Mimi gets sicker.

Their young love, of course, is doomed. This is opera, after all. The tragically lovely “La Boheme” isn’t just about young love. As Preu pointed out, it’s about death, too.

“All of a sudden, it’s boom and everything’s just shattered,” Preu said. “That literally happens in seconds. Those moments happen in life sometimes, too. It makes the art transcend its art form and makes it real. It makes it truly shocking and truly touching.”

Audience members can can expect “a good weep,” he said. “They’re also guaranteed to laugh.”

Meantime, Mimi and Rodolfo go to a café in the Latin Quarter, where Musetta, sung by soprano Elizabeth Caballero, sticks her rich, old admirer with the young bohemians’ bar tab and reignites her love for the painter, Marcello, sung by baritone Mark Walters.

Alcindoro, Musetta’s patron, is sung by bass Stephen Eisenhard, who also sings the role of Benoit, the landlord. Rounding out the cast is Schaunard the musician, sung by baritone Ryan Christopher Bede, and Colline, the philosopher, sung by bass Matthew Treviño.

Nicholson sets this production in Paris in modern times. But audience members might recognize Spokane in the backdrop. Video of local landmarks – the Davenport Hotel, a tavern or two – helps set the scene.

“It doesn’t really matter when or where it is. It can be any time and any place and you can find this group of people somewhere, probably in your neighborhood,” Preu said. “No matter if it’s Italy” – or France – “or Spokane, you will find all of these characters somehow familiar. This is about true human beings. Pretty much all the characters in this piece are in one way or another lovable and relatable.”

Still, “I don’t look at this piece in terms of characters,” he said. “I look at this piece in terms of who’s got the best music. Even the smaller roles of some of the bohemians have good tunes. I think the best part, for me, are the duets, when two people sing together. There are some absolutely gorgeous moments in there.”

Collaboration

The pit at the art deco Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, built in 1931, isn’t big enough for the approximately 80 members of the Spokane Symphony. So orchestra members will play on stage – not in the pit with a reduced number of musicians as is traditional for opera – at both performances.

“It brings a different dimension to the show. I think it’s going to be very interesting to watch, more so than if the orchestra was buried in the pit,” Preu said. “There’s a lot of movement. We’re using the entire space. It’s like a river bed; there’s always something happening.”

When all performers are on stage at the same time, there are nearly 200 people, including about 20 children, 10 opera singers and 60 members from the Spokane Symphony Chorale.

Performers won’t stay on stage. “In order to make room, I’ve incorporated the entire theater as part of the production,” Nicholson said. “There’s a little bit of interaction.”

Daily, five-hour rehearsals started two weeks ago. Rehearsals with the orchestra – five of them in blocks of 2 ½ to 3 hours – began Monday.

“It’s a collaboration – figuring out what the singer is going to do next, how can we support the singer,” Preu said. “There’s not a single minute when there’s a single tempo. The tempo always fluctuates.”

He recommends “La Boheme” for opera lovers and novices alike, but especially those who might have shied away from the art form because of how highly stylized it often appears.

“I think this production will bridge that artificiality and make it something very real,” Preu said. “It can be a very memorable experience because of the emotional impact of the music and, of course, the story, too.”