- Stefan Herheim’s La bohème on DVD: A Review PortfolioBohème-scapes, Then and Now
Around the time when Puccini’s La bohème was coming into being, another urban entertainment—one more explicitly concerned with its own modernity than ever opera was—enjoyed a significant and well-nigh global revival. The panorama had been invented approximately a century earlier; its principal innovation had been its industrial-scale exploitation of a new and newly vast audience, one that could be concentrated in large, purpose-built edifices that placed its pioneering viewers in an equally novel relationship to the artistic object before them. In the early days, these panoramas often featured vistas of the very urban sites in which they were located. An object of both wonder and instruction, they were the cutting edge of visual technology made available to the growing bourgeois market. When represented in this new visual medium, the nineteenth-century city seemed suddenly, differently legible: it could become the object of aesthetic contemplation, its multitude of details and relationship to the surrounding countryside emerging in fresh configurations. In this context, the coincidence of panoramic revivals and the appearance of Puccini’s new work is hardly surprising: La bohème, in common with several other operas of the period, is obsessively concerned with its urban setting; indeed, it might be as close as opera gets to a celebration of the modern city. But this very celebration—and its quasi-panoramic tendencies—has made it a challenging case for recent opera directors. How can we renew Puccini and his bohemian figures, who seem so comprehensively embedded in their historical present, not to mention in those famous accoutrements so redolent of the period: the stove, the muff, the overcoat, the bonnet, the doctor’s cordial?
The opera DVD, our own century’s visual technology for mass consumption, offers various possibilities in this regard. Just as did the panorama for visual representation, the emergence of the DVD has, after all, changed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways the manner in which we consume opera, making some aspects more readily appreciated, more readily legible than others, not to mention upsetting a previously traditional hierarchy among its creative collaborators. It has, to mention one of the most obvious alterations, notably facilitated the collection and analysis (in short, the canonization) of the achievements of another relatively recent invention: the opera director. In one sense, this journal’s decision to invite multiple reviews of a single DVD is an illustration of precisely such a development. The [End Page 156] Bohème here under consideration—one had better admit it straight out—is in many respects far from competitive in an increasingly crowded international market. But in one respect it shines forth. It was released and marketed (and, lest we forget, granted this uncommon degree of scholarly attention) primarily because its director, Stefan Herheim, has been trumpeted as a powerful and innovative new voice in opera direction.
It is at risk of wilful indirection, then, that we start, as surely someone must, with a word or two about the musical performance. The Norwegian National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Eivind Gullberg Jensen, accompanies a cast of mostly young singers. Among these, the best is Marita Sølberg, whose Mimì is sung with accuracy and clarity of diction and is acted out with—in the circumstances—uncommon dignity. Jennifer Rowley’s Musetta is also convincing both vocally and in person. The bohemians are a mixed bunch. Vasilij Ladjuk (Marcello) and Espen Langvik (Schaunard) equip themselves well enough; Giovanni Battista Parodi is wobbly and overparted (as Colline!). The Rodolfo, Mexican tenor Diego Torre, has a fine voice, but his diction is occluded and his acting sadly inept. Svein Erik Sagbråten, who does triple duty as Benoit, Alcindoro, and Parpignol, is—to put it gently—long past his vocal best. The DVD booklet tells us that Herheim insisted on “young, gifted singers,” which suggests he was pursuing realism of a kind. But the musical interpretation is resolutely “traditional,” even old-fashioned, with funereal tempos for some of the famous numbers (again, Sølberg is a virtuous exception here) and...