The other element of mastery I’ll touch on is dramaturgical. La Bohème gave Puccini and his librettists (“book,” Luigi Illica; “lyrics,” Giuseppe Giacosa ) a passel of trouble in the creative process, and most of this seems to have come in fashioning a coherent narrative from Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème (“Scènes” being the operative word), whose characters and incidents had to be selected and sequenced. Thus, stretches of time elapse between Acts 2 and 3, and 3 and 4, during which much life is lived and intense relationships come and go, all of which we catch up on afterward, the facts coming out under heavy emotional pressure. The maxim “Show us, don’t tell us” is ignored. Yet as Mimì tells Marcello of Rodolfo’s treatment of her, or when Marcello pulls out of Rodolfo the truth of Mimì’s condition, or when Mimì tells Rodolfo to wrap up her bracelet and prayer book (“I’ll send the porter for them . . . and oh, under my pillow is the pink bonnet”), it’s as if we had been with them all along, or even as if we’d been them. The music, grounded in the procedure described above and in the highly personal melodic language referred to by Sir Thomas, fills all that in for us, leaving the creative team free to keep the libretto short and to touch only “the best moments [that are] tragic” of their narrative. So these four concise acts, cut loose from the unities like a sort of mini-epic, constitute the most economical of all full-length canonical operas. For myself, I find that La Bohème, which I’ve seen and heard at least as often as any other opera over a period of more than seventy years and under every imaginable performance condition, has only grown in its emotional power. Like all true art, it deepens with time, with us.

What always interested me the most about Franco Zeffirelli was the tension in his work between the verisimilitudinous and the decorative—or, if you wish, between realism and spectacle— which at times seemed to come down to a split between Z. as director (especially of “Personenregie“) and Z. as designer. Certainly he had extraordinary talent in both areas, strongly conditioned by his artistic coming of age in the immediate postwar flourishing of Neorealism in Italian film, led by Luchino Visconti, Vittorio de Sica, and Roberto Rossellini. Browsing through the several online interviews with him, I was slightly surprised to hear him say that, despite his early apprenticeship and close personal connection with Visconti, he actually loved more the films of de Sica, which he termed warmer—a part of his general preference for straight-to-the-heart artworks over more intellectualized and abstract varieties.^(I)