La boheme

I’m sure I can speak for everyone in Scottish Opera when I say how excited we all are to be performing live opera again – and, most importantly, how delighted we are to be welcoming audiences back to performances.

So, welcome to this very special performance of Puccini’s La bohème.

This is, of course, far from a conventional production, in the far from conventional times in which we’re currently living. But between them, the Company’s Music Director Stuart Stratford and Staff Director Roxana Haines have transformed the restrictions under which we’re currently living into creative challenges – as Roxana explains in her interview below. And they’ve created a La bohème that resonates directly with these challenging times, in its explorations of love in a time of illness, and of community bonds that have never felt more vital. Please be assured, too, that all of the current safety guidance has been incorporated into the production and its outdoor setting from its conception, to ensure safety at all times for performers, backstage crew and audiences.

We’re pleased to welcome two of today’s most exciting sopranos – Elizabeth Llewellyn as Mimì and Rhian Lois as Musetta – both of whom are making their debuts with Scottish Opera. Our cast also includes Samuel Sakker as Rodolfo and Roland Wood as Marcello, both making welcome returns to the Company, and Scottish Opera Emerging Artist 2019/20 Arthur Bruce sings Schaunard.

I'd like to extend my huge thanks to the team at Scottish Opera for their enthusiasm in embarking on this unusual journey with La bohème, in response to the challenging times in which we find ourselves. And of course we'd like to thank you, too, not only for trusting us to make your experience at today’s performance as safe as it is artistically fulfilling, but also for your patience with our necessary social distancing arrangements.

Scottish Opera remains hugely grateful to the Scottish Government for its ongoing core funding.

I hope you enjoy being immersed in Puccini’s celebration of love in all its varied forms.

Alex Reedijk
General Director

 Conductor
Stuart Stratford

Director
Roxana Haines

Designer
Anna Orton

Lighting
Andrew Burnside

Murals
artpistol Projects

ACT I – An attic, Christmas Eve

Marcello and Rodolfo, an artist and a writer, are trying to keep warm while they work. Their friend Colline, a philosopher, joins them, followed by Schaunard, a musician, who arrives with supplies and food to share.

With their new-gained wealth, everyone leaves to eat out at Café Momus – apart from Rodolfo, who stays to finish an article. He finds no inspiration, but there’s a knock at the door: it’s their neighbour, Mimì. Her candle has gone out and she needs help lighting it. Rodolfo duly obliges.

Mimì seems unwell, and realises she can’t find her key. As they both search for it, Rodolfo tells her about his life and writing. She in turn tells him about her life, her love of flowers and the first light of Spring. They soon confess their love for each other, and Mimì asks to go with him to Café Momus.

ACT II – Café Momus, later that evening

Rodolfo introduces Mimì to his friends. Musetta, Marcello’s former lover, appears with a rich man, Alcindoro. She spots Marcello and tries to get his attention – and to arouse his jealousy. When Marcello finally admits he still loves her, Musetta comes up with an excuse to send Alcindoro on an errand. The others use a passing marching band as a distraction while they escape, and Musetta leaves Alcindoro with the collective bill to pay.

ACT III – Dawn, a tavern, late February

Over the past month, Marcello and Musetta have been living in a tavern free of charge, in exchange for helping around the establishment.

Mimì arrives, looking for Marcello, and tells him that she’s worried by Rodolfo’s increasing jealousy. When Rodolfo appears, Mimì hides and listens. Rodolfo tells Marcello he can’t live with Mimì because she flirts with other men, but Marcello makes him reveal the truth: he’s desperately worried about her illness.

Mimì comes out of her hiding place. They try to separate, but agree to stay together until Spring. Meanwhile, Marcello and Musetta have their own problems.

ACT IV – An attic, Spring

Rodolfo and Marcello try to pretend they don’t miss Mimì and Musetta. Colline and Schaunard arrive with the meagre food they can afford, and pretend it’s much better than it is. Musetta arrives with Mimì, who is seriously ill. Mimì’s friends gradually leave to pawn their belongings in order to buy medicine, and gloves for her cold hands.

Finally left alone, Rodolfo and Mimì remember their happier times together. The others return, but it’s too late.

How do you tell a love story when your performers can’t even touch? Scottish Opera’s Staff Director reveals how she approached Puccini’s iconic opera in a time of illness

What does La bohème mean to you?
It’s an extraordinary piece, and I think everyone remembers the first time they saw it. As a director, and certainly as someone who trained in theatre, I really respect Puccini. His expertise on narrative and on character is really remarkable. Of course the opera is based on an existing play, and there’s something truly magical that happens when the composer is a match for the narrative. I worked as Assistant Director on Scottish Opera’s production of Tosca last Autumn, which has certainly deepened my respect for Puccini – I can see all kinds of similarities between the two operas.

How have you found that you relate personally to the opera’s themes and characters?
This idea of artists struggling to survive, it’s a story that’s been told for many, many years, and it feels familiar to everyone. But it also feels like a world I’ve actually maybe lived in. When I was studying my Master's at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, some friends and I lived in a very shabby, run-down house in North London. At times, when one of us got paid, we’d come home and share it out between us – so a win for me was also a win for my friends. So the world described in La bohème really does exist. But we have to be careful, too, that we don’t simply romanticise it. The poverty in La bohème is heartbreaking, and ultimately, it’s that that makes Mimì’s fate so irreversible.

It’s one of the best-known and most loved operas in the repertoire. Does that mean you feel a particular sense of responsibility when you’re directing it?
I think a director feels a sense of responsibility to any work, to be honest. For me, the excitement is that La bohème feels so relevant to us now. And of course, no director is bearing all of that responsibility themselves. We’re very lucky to have such a wonderful cast, and of course I’m sharing the responsibility with them, and with my collaborators on the production – and with the audience too. A big part of this production is trusting that people will come to see it. And of course, with the parallels between La bohème and the current pandemic, I feel like I have a special responsibility for safety too – of course a director has that responsibility all the time, but now it feels much greater, and extends more to the audience. There’s a practical level of making sure that the cast, crew and audiences will all be safe, but also the bigger question of how you relate even the idea of performance in what are really quite different, unusual times.

Where did the idea come from to stage Jonathan Dove’s chamber arrangement of La bohème?
Early on during lockdown, I’d been discussing various ideas with Scottish Opera’s Music Director Stuart Stratford, and also how we might be able to make live performances work in our current circumstances. It was a question of looking at how we could transform the current restrictions into creative challenges. At some point, we were discussing La bohème, and Stuart pointed out that in the opera, Mimì dies from an unknown illness – it’s not actually specified in the opera, although we can make some judgements about what it must have been. But it’s clearly a respiratory condition, so the parallels with our current circumstances are clear. That’s both a blessing and a curse for a production. On the one hand, I don’t have to work very hard to point out the parallels, and the audience will already have those issues in their minds, because we’re all still living through this. But on the other, we need to make it subtle and integrated into the production’s world, without too much shoe-horning.

So how have you managed to deal with those parallels between La bohème and our current pandemic?
Early on I became interested in how La bohème, which is obviously a story about love and art, is also a story about love and illness. And how can we tell a story about illness and love when people literally cannot touch each other? That sounds like a really bold concept, and I wanted to try and tell La bohème as a story of proximity and tactility without either of those things being possible. When you take that as a core concept, you realise it’s universally relevant, and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with coronavirus. But I think our current situation nevertheless enables La bohème’s themes to come through even more strongly, and shines a different light on the opera.

Aside from the question of illness, what other parallels do you see between La bohème and our current times?
Let me go off on a tangent for a moment. At the beginning of lockdown, I applied to be a voluntary phone advisor at Glasgow Helps, where we’d connect people with charities and other organisations, or even local individuals, who could help them with things like pharmacy pick-ups, arranging food parcels, childcare, benefits, or even just offering a friendly voice. I can’t emphasise enough my respect for that organisation. More than that, the poverty that we see depicted in La bohème became very apparent to me from that experience. The feeling of community spirit that I experienced at Glasgow Helps is still here with us, and it’s never been stronger, I think. I’ve seen that myself in Glasgow, and I think our city and our country have both done a lot to support the wider community.

You’ve come up with quite an unconventional staging that brings the performers and audience members together in the same space. Where did that idea come from?
It’s been a bold move to make a site-specific, immersive La bohème in the car park of Scottish Opera’s Production Studios! The idea is that the characters are all working in the arts, and they’ve ransacked Scottish Opera to try and survive from what they’ve found. They’re living in trucks, but they’ve created their own space and their own community in the car park. Because of safety concerns, we can’t use a chorus in the production, let alone a chorus of children. And when you remove those choruses from La bohème, Act II becomes a bit strange. But if we perform Act II on a platform in the middle of the space, our audience members then become the other visitors to Café Momus. By inviting the audience to become part of the action, they’re helping us dramatically. And even before coronavirus, when would you be able to sit just five or six metres away from an opera singer in a performance? We’ve worked out a way to make it safe, of course, and we wouldn’t be doing it unless we had.

You talked about transforming limitations into creative challenges – how do you feel you’ve gone about doing that?
I’ve had to turn things on their head, and say to myself that it’s me who’s decided on these restrictions. So, what rules do I want to impose? I want to see what happens if singers are three metres apart when singing, or two metres apart when not, and with no physical contact. And what happens if props cannot be shared? How does Mimì ask Rodolfo to light her candle, for example? How does he even know if her tiny hand is frozen? When you start considering these issues, you find there are solutions. And I’m very grateful to our Production Manager Amy Wilson and our Health and Safety Adviser Andrew Evans – it’s been a real collaboration between the three of us. Amy and Andrew have ended up playing a similar role to that of a fight director or a choreographer – if we have a moment that we think might be particularly risky, we’ll all risk assess it together. It’s just a new way of working. And it might even set a template for a way of collaborating that becomes very relevant over the next few months.

Disease leads to the cathartic demise of several key opera characters – but what do their ailments reveal about contemporary attitudes towards illness? David Kettle investigates

Opera is, as we know, obsessed with death. From Tosca to Dido and Aeneas, Kátya Kabanová to Madama Butterfly, Eugene Onegin to Wozzeck, the end of a life often represents the climax in an opera’s drama, a moment of both catharsis and – strange though it may sound – profound emotional satisfaction, when the tragic event that’s sometimes been signalled and anticipated from the opera’s very beginning finally comes to pass.

Among the three main causes of operatic deaths – murder (occasionally execution), suicide and illness – it might be surprising to learn that illness is the least common, though it still accounts for a sizeable minority of demises in the opera house. This small but significant proportion of operatic downfalls, however, has led to a whole sub-genre of research and insight, one that combines opera and medicine, often carried out by individuals who are equally passionate about both. Spouses Linda and Michael Hutcheon – she a professor of English, he a professor of medicine, both opera experts – collaborated on the deeply informative book Opera: Desire, Disease, Death, for example. And long-time Scottish Opera supporter, Board member and former Friends Chairman Dr J Ian S Robertson, better known as an eminent professor of medicine, produced two detailed volumes on the subject – Doctors in Opera and Doctors, Diseases and Opera – both published by the Company and still available.

Our current Covid-obsessed times might feel like a peculiarly inappropriate moment to dwell on illness in opera. And you’d be forgiven for hoping for something lighter, something to distract you from the dangers and illness that are present among us. But what’s opera about if not catharsis? By staring these questions in the face – as we unavoidably must with an opera like La bohème – we confront them, examine them, and hopefully transcend them. At least that’s the theory.

An unholy trinity
For an illness to find its way onto the opera stage, however, it needs strong cultural connotations. It’s hard to think of an opera that revolves around influenza, for example, so widespread and general are its associations. Accordingly, the unholy trinity of operatic diseases are cholera, syphilis and (dark king of them all) tuberculosis. And all three often seem – certainly in the world of opera, if not within culture more broadly – to be cast as forms of punishment for the supposed misdemeanours of their victims.

Tuberculosis – otherwise known as consumption, or white death, or by its ancient name of phthisis – stalks 18th- and 19th-century art like – well, like a plague. As the 18th century became the 19th, it was estimated that tuberculosis accounted for a quarter of all deaths in most European nations. Today, it still kills around two million annually, including several thousand in the UK.

It’s the disease that has had by far the greatest impact right across the arts, both in content and production. Mimì’s fatal condition is never directly identified by any of those names in La bohème, but from the symptoms we witness, it’s clearly tuberculosis that kills her. Furthermore, Mimì lines up against a lengthy roster of consumptive figures across the arts. Just think of poor abandoned Fantine in Victor Hugo’s Les misérables, who faithfully raises her illegitimate child Cosette yet ultimately succumbs to the disease. Or of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Sick Child (below). That image could have been a form of self-portrait: Munch himself almost died of the disease as an infant.

Indeed, the roll-call of 19th- and 20th-century artists who did die, usually at tragically young ages, from tuberculosis is truly breathtaking: from Keats and Shelley to Weber, Chopin and Szymanowski, as well as the Brontës (Emily, Anne, Charlotte and Branwell), Thoreau, Whitman, Kafka, Orwell and countless others. Robert Louis Stevenson’s TB pursued him on his travels across the world, from Marseilles to New York, San Francisco to Sydney, and finally to Upolu in what’s now Western Samoa, where he finally died – probably, ironically, from a cerebral haemorrhage – at the age of 44.

So strong were TB’s apparent connections with artistic genius, however, that it was even suggested that the disease’s ‘infecting organism’ generated a toxin that stimulated mental activity and creativity. TB produced delicate, pale, fragile individuals with shining eyes, a ghostly pallor and flushed, burning cheeks – just the same attributes thought to be possessed by an ardent lover, or by an archetypal Romantic artist, teetering between life and death, doomed but magically gifted with heightened artistic sensibilities.

A fashion for consumption
Under such conditions, it’s hardly surprising – though perhaps somewhat shocking in today’s pandemic world – that the consumptive look became downright fashionable, even something to actively aspire to. Alexandre Dumas fils, author of the book that inspired La traviata (which we’re coming onto), wrote: ‘It was the fashion to suffer from the lungs; everybody was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after any emotion that was at all sensational, and to die before reaching the age of 30.’ Lord Byron reportedly told a friend he’d like to fade away from consumption because of the attention it would gain him from the opposite sex: ‘The ladies would all say: Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!’ Similarly, we may wonder why Rodolfo falls quite so quickly for Mimì. By the time of La bohème’s premiere, the trope of the frail, fragile, consumptive beauty had become so embedded – and, indeed, so widely admired – that we might suggest, perhaps a little callously, that he’s simply following fashion.

We’ve already mentioned Verdi’s La traviata, one of the three key operatic works to feature consumptive heroines. The 1853 opera opens with a ball celebrating high-class courtesan Violetta’s apparent recovery from her unnamed illness – though in his hushed, hesitant opening Prelude, the composer leaves us in no doubt as to Violetta’s still fragile state. And accordingly, her tuberculosis returns with full force to consume her at the end of the opera.

Four decades later, Puccini’s Mimì both continued and refreshed the image of the archetypal consumptive heroine. It’s significant, however, that the defining feature of her illness in La bohème – her ice-cold hand – is mentioned in neither of the opera’s source works, Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème or the play made of it by Théodore Barrière. That famous hand was a new addition to the opera by Puccini’s librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Giacosa was a close friend of prominent Italian actor Eleonora Duse, and spent much time with her while she herself was convalescing from TB. We can only assume that he added this memorable detail to the opera’s libretto from personal experience of the specific symptoms of Duse’s condition.

In the third of the three operas, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann (premiered in 1881), it’s poor Antonia in Act II whose remarkable vocal talents must remain silent lest she aggravate the condition she inherited from her mother, and follow her parent to an early grave. It’s only when demonic quack Dr Miracle persuades Antonia to give full flow to her innate capabilities that she sings – with predictable consequences. It’s probable, in fact, that Offenbach’s Dr Miracle, and the ETA Hoffmann character on which he’s based, were intended as a satire on medical incompetence in the face of a disease that doctors neither understood nor were able to treat. It’s ironic, then, that Berlin microbiologist Robert Koch revealed his groundbreaking discovery of mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB, just a year after The Tales of Hoffmann’s premiere.

Scientific breakthrough
Koch made his announcement on 24 March 1882. By that time, however, the disease had spread so widely within the general population, particularly in environments of squalour and poverty, that it had lost many of its Romantic connotations. Koch’s discovery came after the premieres of The Tales of Hoffmann and La traviata, with their implicit notions that TB is caused by heredity or a decadent lifestyle, but before the first performance of La bohème, where the disease thrives among the poor in a overcrowded city. If it seems like Puccini might have been out to reflect the latest medical insights, we should remember that La bohème is based on a play and a novel that were created well before Koch’s discovery. But when Rodolfo admits that it’s fear that drives his desire to break up with Mimì in Act III, might there be a suggestion that, rather than dread of Mimì’s inevitable death, it may be terror that he himself will become infected if he remains with her?

Anush Hovhannisyan (Violetta) in Sir David McVicar's production of La traviata, Scottish Opera 2017

Leaving Offenbach’s waif-like Antonia aside, there are clear similarities, too, between Violetta and Mimì’s cases of consumption. We might argue that both are being somehow punished by the disease for their lifestyles – more obviously in the case of Violetta’s supposed decadence and debauchery, but also perhaps in the case of Mimì’s choice of a bohemian, artistic lifestyle, and the poverty associated with it. Both women also renounce romantic relationships shortly before finally giving into their tuberculosis. It’s as if in giving up their fights for love, both Violetta and Mimì also give up their fights for life.

In this romanticised perspective on the illness, tuberculosis is something that those with the condition should take up arms against, wage war on, battle with until they gain victory over it. This notion of ‘fighting’ a disease is something that has caused alarm, too, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. If Covid patients haven’t ‘battled’ the virus sufficiently hard, the often used metaphor goes, they’ll ‘lose the fight’ against the disease – and suffer the fatal consequences. Surviving illness thereby becomes a matter of personal character, even choice. Those with sufficient strength of will survive and recover, but those without – well, we know what happens to them.

This kind of characterisation has been widely condemned during the coronavirus pandemic, and rightly so. But it’s nothing new. Cultural commentator Susan Sontag explored it in depth in her 1978 essay Illness as Metaphor – written, though she doesn’t mention it in the text, while she herself was being treated for breast cancer. In the essay, she singles out La bohème and La traviata for special mention, as works that tie together notions of character and illness, associating tuberculosis with particular psychological traits. By conceptualising disease in this way, Sontag argues, and by using the language of warfare, we implicitly blame the victim for their own affliction. If this seems far-fetched, consider that Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor at a time when there was a particular fad for psychotherapeutical cures for cancer, as though by changing their own personality, the sufferer could indeed win the ‘war’ against the disease.

Plagues and punishments
In the real world, tuberculosis affects men and woman equally, but in opera, it’s invariably women who are the sufferers. Operatic syphilis sufferers, however, are almost exclusively men – though, inevitably, it’s (almost) always women who infect them. And syphilis’s cultural associations with sexual transgression, of course, could not be clearer.

The opera that arguably deals most overtly with syphilis adds to its moral condemnation a hefty dose of religion. The gaping, suppurating, never healing wound in Amfortas’s side – in Wagner’s Parsifal – offers a clear parallel with intensely painful gummas or lesions caused by late-stage syphilis, as numerous commentators have pointed out. The King of the Grail Knights received the wound, we discover late in the opera, after falling for the seductive charms of the beautiful Kundry, who’s now reduced to a half-mad crone who seems unable to leave him alone. Indeed, despite its aura of Christian mysticism, Parsifal is stuffed full of sexual shenanigans, from Klingsor’s self-castration to avoid his own seduction, to the semi-seduction of Parsifal himself by Kundry. If we see the opera as lining up risky sexual freedom against wholesome, God-fearing obedience, it’s natural that the incurable affliction at the centre of it all should be an STD.

Turning to the third in our trio of operatic afflictions, there’s surely no more powerful operatic evocation of cholera than in Britten’s Death in Venice. Again, the disease is a punishment, in this case an unstoppable plague sweeping in from the East (now, where have we heard that before?) to smite down the writer Aschenbach for his forbidden love for the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio. Indeed, Britten’s vivid evocations of Venice itself capture its uncanny mix of spectacular, breathtaking beauty and alienating decay, as the disease descends on the city apparently as a punishment for its own excesses. In the end, however, it’s Aschenbach himself who abandons himself to both his taboo desires and his disease-ridden downfall, after dream-like philosophical debates between Apollo (embodying control) and Dionysus (characterising wild abandon). Not for nothing was the plague seen in ancient Greece as a brutal intervention by the gods, a way to upend all natural laws.

Tuberculosis, syphilis and cholera are very much still with us, of course, even if they can now be treated and controlled – in rich Western countries, at least. If we have a more contemporary equivalent, it might be AIDS – which was again seen as an apparently unstoppable scourge in the 1980s and 1990s, but is now largely controllable with medication (even if no vaccine has been found for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus despite decades of research). AIDS hardly made it into the opera house. One notable exception, however, is Peter Eötvös’s 2004 Angels in America, which distills Tony Kushner’s seven-hour magic realist epic theatrical masterpiece down to a mere 180 minutes, dispensing with much of the play’s richness and wild flamboyance in the process.

Opera in Covid times
It’s hardly an easy time to face the issue of illness as depicted in opera. But perhaps that also makes it the best time: when these issues are vivid in our minds, we can see these themes in opera with a new freshness and immediacy. Indeed, if something of lasting value can emerge from our current circumstances, it’s possibly in terms of awareness. In 2019, for example, British Columbia’s Centre for Disease Control sent nurses to take part in panel discussions alongside Vancouver Opera’s production of La bohème – to raise awareness that it’s a disease that’s still very much among us, and one of many.

There’s a major question, of course, about how opera companies might contemplate staging these disease-themed operas while the reality of disease and death is all too apparent around us. The conundrum is made all the more difficult, and relevant, by the fact that the Covid pandemic has made the very existence of arts organisations themselves all the more precarious. Nonetheless, like this unconventional production of La bohème, surely the solution is to use these opportunities to explore abiding ideas of vulnerability and compassion, love and community – questions that have never been more relevant than in our pandemic times.

David Kettle is Scottish Opera’s Programme Editor. He is also a music critic for The Scotsman and The Daily Telegraph, and has written about music for a broad range of publications including Classical Music, The Strad, The List, The Times and BBC Music Magazine.