N. B.: Owing to a technical glitch, today’s post was originally published with the wrong time stamp, and in a form that did not include corrections made in the final draft. These have now been corrected. My apologies for the confusion.

I could have entered this post in my “MIA” series, following La Forza del destino, Faust, and, in a  way, Don Giovanni—operas not in the seasonal repertory, but beckoning for one reason or another. In this case, though, it is I who am missing in action. The recent event that beckoned most fetchingly was the first New York appearance of Teodor Currentzis with his Musica Aeterna forces from Perm (see the Don Giovanni posts, 6/22/18 and 7/6/18), offering several repetitions of Verdi’s Manzoni Requiem over at The Shed, and at only $40 per ticket. But the dates refused to fit, and to judge from reports of projections and of acoustics that required some electronic boosting, I would probably have found plenty in the way of impediment to satisfaction. Then too, I’d meant to catch one in the recent series of La Bohème performances at the Met. But the last one slipped by at a very intensive work time, so I was once again, wistfully, AWOL. I’d heard tell of some better Puccini singing from this year’s cast; also, that the third-act scrim had been removed, to some acoustical advantage. That had me musing on how much I’d always loved that third act, and how the scrim had played some role in that, and how unlikely it seemed that any piffling difference in the sound would make up for the loss in the vintage-theatre atmospheric effect. They waited till Zeffirelli was dead, I thought. It probably tore, and they just didn’t feel like mending it. And now that this Bohème is the last trace left (at least for us here in New York) of Zeffirelli near the top of his game, there are some things to say about his contribution, and of course about the singers and conductors he collaborated with. Fortunately, we can stay in touch with his Bohème and some of its singers, though at a remove, via video.

First, though, I cannot resist a small homage to the opera itself. It is now the single most standard piece of the standard repertory, the most popular of all operas. Sir Thomas Beecham, who heard a great deal about the performance of Puccini straight from that horse’s mouth, and who conducted one of the most highly regarded recordings of Bohème, observed: “If you were to ask nine operagoers out of ten, in any country of the world, whose operas they like best, as I have done, the answer would be Puccini—not Wagner or Mozart or Verdi—but Puccini. I think it is because he speaks to us personally, in a way we understand. This is the opinion of waiters, hotel managers, taxi drivers, bus conductors, anybody you like.”^(I) I do wonder if Sir Thomas really got around to a minimum of ten mundanely employed operagoers “in any country of the world,” but I don’t challenge his findings.