Boheme

The miseducation of....

A Photo
Rodolfo and Mimi

A Musing
Passion, Poverty and Puccini


Tonight we went to the opera, well live from the Royal Opera House at the locally comfy cinema.
 
Not all opera ends badly, but I find it helps.
You soon learn that a slight cough in between the dynamically projected voice of the soprano in Act I is a prelude to death from consumption at the end, and I ask you, what’s not to love about that?
So here the star-crossed lovers have only just met, having knocked on his door looking for someone to light her candle (yes opera can have all the subtley of a Carry on Film), Mimi the seamstress drops her key, which he secretly pockets, the candle goes out and they have to fumble around looking for or pretending to look for the key.  
Rodolfo the poet then breaks out into song, as you do when you’re falling in love and Italian. Singing to Mimi “Your tiny hand is frozen”, which admittedly sounds much sexier in Italian – Che gelida manina, let me warm it for you.
I'm sat in my seat, at once wanting to shout out, Rodolfo don't do it, she's going to die in 2 hours, and falling in love hopelessly and helplessly myself again with Mimi holding the tension of love full of hope and despair. When she starts her first aria, People call me mimi, my real name is Lucia, I'm a seamstress, Rodolfo, me, the whole audience have lost it, head over heals in love and trying not to hear her coughing.


The performance was fantastic Sonya Yoncheva was outstanding she had me from her first cough - off stage. The relationship between the flat share bohemian boys also moved me.

I first saw La Boehme in the roman amphitheatre in Pompeii one summer evening. I was captivated, from this aria through to Mimi’s death bed scene where the whole audience was at both her bedside and the death bedsides of our own lives, knowing that at the end nothing can warm the cold tiny hand. Every time I’ve seen it I know the ending, we all know the ending, now before that cough in Act I, but every time it gets me at the end.

Tonight though as despair threatened to overtake me at the end, a memory of somethings my late father in law would say came to mind and brought be back.
It's not the cough that carried her off, but coffin they carried her of in

A Tune


Che gelida marina sung by LP himself.

Who am I? I am a poet.
What do I do? I write.
And how do I live? I live.
In my carefree poverty
I squander rhymes
and love songs like a lord.
When it comes to dreams and visions
and castles in the air,
I've the soul of a millionaire.
From time to time two thieves
steal all the jewels
out of my safe, two pretty eyes.
They came in with you just now,
and my customary dreams
my lovely dreams,

melted at once into thin air! 


Dont do it Rodolfo, don't do it!