Stefan Herheim's La boheme on DVD: A Review Portfolio

Abstract

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?