La Boheme Last Night

Opera Season opened for us last night.  It was La Boheme.  Very beautiful.  One of the most performed Operas in the world.  I've seen it many times.  Don't tire of it.

 

Some observations.  Great Tenor playing Rudolpho.  Not really great Soprano playing Mimi. 

 

This is a story of hot blooded love.  Anger, heat, passion, jealousy, rejection, tears, restoration and a hundred other love and love lost emotions.

 

I reflected how much better and richer love of 41 years is.  Not comfortable.  Not taking for granted.  Appreciative, reflective, connected, stable.  Neither huge highs nor devastating lows. 

Oh we have moments but they are not to the edge of the cliff.  I miss the passion but I don't miss the anger that can go with all that.

 

Kevin had lived with a friend in Minneapolis who had a parrot.  In La Boheme Schaunard, who is a musician, plays for a rich person to quiet a noisy parrot.  Without luck, he and the maid feed the parrot Parsley and the parrot dies.  Kevin thought seriously about the vegetable aisle during his stay in MPLS.

 

In the Libretto is a funny exchange between the young bohemians and the landlord Benoit who comes to get the rent.  They tease him (an old frail man) about being out on the town with wild women.  He buys into the tease.  He waxes eloquently about how wonderful full plump women are, Not moonfaced he says, not too fat, just not scrawny (like his wife).  They accuse him and send him on his way.

 

I laughed and thought how like most men Benoit the landlord is.  Men are not nearly as impressed with skinny women as women have been convinced they are.  I'm not.  I'm like Benoit.  I have never understood the skinny on why women are obsessed with being skinny.  A woman should look like a woman.  Skinny women don't.  Movie stars who have starved themselves into oblivion are not attractive. 

 

The music was beautiful of course.  But, there are so many times I hear Madam Butterfly, Tosca and Turandot in the musical colors.  I am not offended.  They are all beautiful.  It's just that composers develop a musical pattern and keep composing the same music over and over again.  Sometimes it's just a few notes, sometimes it's a whole motif. 

 

But then the famed Nessun Dorma comes from Puccini so I'll cut him some slack if he repeats himself sometimes.

 

I'm really glad Opera Season is on again.