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  • Stefan Herheim’s La bohème on DVD: A Review PortfolioContemporary Death; Postmodern Opera
  • Alexandra Wilson (bio)

Imagine the following familiar scenario. You spend an afternoon in the city with friends, perhaps shopping or visiting a museum. You eat dinner and catch up on gossip, sharing the petty frustrations of your week at work before heading to the opera. It’s La bohème again: familiar, comforting, reliably cathartic, even though you suspect you may be suffering from a mild case of Bohème fatigue. You allow the music to wash over you and applaud enthusiastically at the end, although you have an eye on being first in the queue at the cloakroom and wonder if you’ll make the 10:30 train. You idly think about the production as you travel home, but then, the next day, it’s gone, forgotten: back to normal life. But somebody, even if only a fictionalized somebody, has died here—and it is almost easy to forget, so anesthetized have we become to nineteenth-century operas in all their overfamiliarity. Of course we all know that Mimì is destined to die from the outset, and yet somehow we hardly give it a thought, at least until act 3. Now Stefan Herheim, in his recent production for the Norwegian National Opera, has reminded us what the plot of La bohème is really about and forced us to reflect both upon the opera’s ugly realities and upon our own blindness to it.

In this radically interventionist production, Herheim fundamentally reworks the narrative of Puccini’s opera. Here, “Mimì” (Marita Sølberg) dies of cancer in a hospital ward before the conductor has so much as raised his baton. The entire action of the opera itself is played as a sort of flashback in the imagination of “Rodolfo” (an affecting Diego Torre), although nothing is quite that literal, since there is a chronological disjunction between the present-day hospital and the nineteenth-century setting of the opera proper. Death hangs over this production from start to finish. In the opening scene the hospital ward may segue seamlessly into the Parisian garret, but the hospital bed and medical equipment—so mechanical, so mundane—remain present on the stage, while even the customarily carefree patrons of the Café Momus in act 2 are revealed to be suffering from cancer. Herheim seeks to disorientate and also to distress: this is a La bohème that leaves you not only with a tear in the eye but a sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. His message, which might as well be spelled out in capital letters, is a brutally bleak one: we are all going to die, and some of us are going to die young. [End Page 168]

It might be tempting to dismiss this as mere shock tactics, a cheap attempt to stand out from the crowd in an operatic world in which a small core of old favorites are wheeled out repeatedly in order to cross-subsidize more adventurous but less marketable repertory, with La bohèmes and La traviatas ever more ubiquitous. Certainly, Herheim’s production has succeeded in garnering a great deal of critical attention and Internet chatter by virtue of its sheer novelty (although we might observe that certain seemingly innovative aspects of the production are in fact indicative of broader contemporary trends in the staging of opera). What is particularly interesting, however, is not the shock factor but what Herheim achieves on a meta-critical level. In addition to forcing us to engage with La bohème in a more intense way than we might have done otherwise, he simultaneously encourages us to step back from the opera’s subject matter and reflect upon the broader implications of this manner of operatic production. Herheim’s Bohème therefore offers a commentary upon opera in a more general sense, inviting us to think deeply about how opera functions both as drama and as social commentary; about our motivations for watching it and the pleasure we derive from it; and about the different approaches that might be taken to staging it. In the latter regard, Herheim highlights the growing impossibility...

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