Thursday night Kostis Protopapas, Tulsa Opera's artistic director, spoke about La Boheme at the Opera Guild meeting.
He asked the question "Why is La Boheme so emotionally touching?" and answered with three points:
1. The music is spectacularly emotive.
2. The story is uniquely resonant.
3. The realistic nature of the characters captures us.
It was a convincing argument, and I won't try to recapitulate his all of points, especially those from No. 1, which require someone who can sit at a grand piano and pound out motifs, which he can beautifully, and I can't at all.
I was especially attracted by an element of his second point, concerning the unique elements of the story. Generically, Boheme is a love tragedy, which is ubiquitous in the opera world, but two things distinguish it from all other operas, it's ability to capture the feeling of youth and the moment when youth turns to maturity.
The first point I had come to independently while watching the Met's live broadcast of Boheme earlier this year: Puccini is amazingly able to capture the vitality of youth in music. When the young artists are playing around with each other in the first two acts, it very much makes me remember my own life of two decades ago. It's a remarkable trick in music, to recreate an emotional state of exuberance.
Protopapas' second point was fresh to me, but convincing. He played Colline's short fourth act farewell aria to his beloved coat (being sold to buy medicine for a dying friend, one of the most powerful moment in any opera). The music is changing from the youthful power of the first two acts to one of maturity gained through pain.
The story itself captures youth, but, the remarkable thing about La Boheme is that the music does it too.
