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Steve Metcalf has been writing about the musical life of this region, and the wider world, for more than 30 years. For 21 of those years, he was the full-time staff music critic of The Hartford Courant. During that period, via the L.A. Times/Washington Post news service, his reviews, profiles and feature stories appeared in 400 newspapers worldwide.He is also the former assistant dean and director of instrumental music at The Hartt School, where he founded and curated the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series. He is currently Director of the Presidents' College at the University of Hartford. Steve is also keyboardist emeritus of the needlessly loud rock band Duke and the Esoterics.Reach him at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

The Enduring Spell of La Boheme

"La Boheme" performed by DuPage Opera Theatre.
Creative Commons
"La Boheme" performed by DuPage Opera Theatre.
What makes this opera the most irresistible piece of music theater the world has ever known?

One spring afternoon, maybe 20 years ago, I found myself having lunch with some guys who were all big supporters of Connecticut Opera. They were talking about ways that the company might increase its audience and thereby stabilize its finances. Various strategies were proposed.

Finally one of the guys said, “Look, if we’re really going to make any progress, we should just do ‘La Boheme’ every single season.”

This was a company that did a total of three of four productions a year.

I laughed and congratulated the guy on making a good joke.

He said, “I’m not joking. I’m serious.”

Looking back, the guy may have had a point. Every time the company presented “Boheme” – which in practice was more like every three or four years, it sold out. For the record, whatever alternate strategies were eventually tried, they didn’t work: the company folded in 2009.

I’ve remembered this story (although I’ve forgotten the names of the participants) because it was the first time that I – who came to appreciate opera rather late in my life – began to understand the unique place that this single opera holds in the culture.

I’m thinking about “Boheme” because over the next couple of weeks, Connecticut Lyric Opera, the enterprising company based in New Britain, will present four performances in four different locations around central Connecticut. The first of these will be May 1. For all the dates and locations, visit the opera company's performance web page.

More than a century after its premiere in 1896, “Boheme” maintains its hold on us. The 1987 Cher/Nick Cage movie “Moonstruck” is constructed (quite resourcefully) around the opera, and uses its musical themes – both unadulterated and, with the help of the great DickHyman, modernized – to tell its layered, thoroughly contemporary story. Jonathan Larson’s rock musical “Rent” recasts the story to a 1990s New York City, replete with references to AIDS and drugs. The Australian director BazLuhrmann successfully brought his downsized but stylish production to Broadway in 2003.

And the beat goes on. A couple of years ago, the most recent season for which statistics are available, there were roughly 500 productions of  “Boheme” around the world.

Credit Michael Cooper / Creative Commons
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Creative Commons
A scene from the Canadian Opera Company production of La Bohem.

What makes this opera – with its almost comically modest story of the frail, doomed little seamstress Mimi, and her impecunious poet-boyfriend Rodolfo and their bohemian friends – the most irresistible piece of music theater the world has ever known?

Some people say that Puccini simply continued the Italian opera line, the line that included Bellini and Donizetti and, quintessentially, Verdi. That’s obviously true at one level, but I don’t think it gives Puccini enough credit for his musical originality.

Though we tend to think of him today as a conservative, he was in many ways a man ahead of his time.

One quick example: Musetta’s Waltz (“quando m’en vo”), the lilting ¾ time ditty with which Musetta – the former girlfriend of Marcello, one of the bohemians -- taunts her ex as he sits at a nearby cafe table, brooding.

It’s a simple enough little tune, but when you really look at it, it’s an almost radically modern piece of composition for 1896. By which I mean: The melody is possibly the first in Western music to partake of a device that ultimately became a compositional fixture: the stepwise descending from do (the tonic of the scale), down to ti (the seventh step) down again to la, the sixth step. This humble pattern, often ingeniously disguised and embroidered, has been used in literally hundreds if not thousands of songs and licks in the intervening years. Among them: “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Around the World in 80 Days,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Again,” “Fascination,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “Smile” “Sunny Came Home,” “Be Our Guest” “This is My Song,” “Charmaine,” “A Well Respected Man,” “Two Sleepy People,” “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” not to mention several Beatles tunes including “Something” and “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

It was even extruded note for note into a pop ballad, called “Don’t You Know,” that became a hit in 1959 for Della Reese.

In another realm, it forms the outline of the famous “Swan Hymn” at the end of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. And just to bring things full circle, it also is the melodic basis for a subsequent Puccini aria, “Un bel di” from “Madame Butterfly.”

Puccini was, in some very specific ways, a groundbreaking composer.

What is it about this simple scalewise pattern that is so compelling? That’s probably not ultimately an answerable question, although some people have suggested that its effectiveness derives from its resemblance to a human sigh – the direction of which, pitchwise, is always downward.

But in any case, Puccini knew he had come up with something special with this lick. So a few minutes after Musetta sings it as a solo, he brings it back at the end of the act, now with Marcello and his comrades singing in multiple-part harmony, with full orchestra wailing. And as if that weren’t enough, he brings it back again – now nostalgically slowed down and wordless – at the beginning of the third act, which takes place several weeks later. Like all great composers for the stage, Puccini knew the value, even the necessity, of repeating his most compelling material.

It may be something of a stretch, but I think there’s a kind of veiled, tragic reprise of Musetta’s tune in the final moments of the opera. Mimi, now dying, sings “Sonoadati,” a tender recollection of happier days. Musically, it, too, is a slow descent down the scale, again beginning on do, but this time in a minor key. When Rodolfo realizes that Mimi has expired, a few moments later, the orchestra sings out this plaintive melody at full volume, until the very end, when it fades, like the life of our heroine, to silence. Curtain.

My point is simply that Puccini – derided in some circles as being cheesy and a hack – was, in some very specific ways, a groundbreaking composer. Popularity might not be the sole criterion of greatness in music, but you don’t get 500 productions a year if you’re a hack.

Another New Music Director

Earlier this month, we learned thatCarolyn Kuanhad re-upped for a six-year extension as music director of the Hartford Symphony.

Credit Ertan Sener / Twitter
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Twitter
Ertan Sener.

Another music director deal has also been announced: Ertan Sener has just been named the permanent conductor and music director of the venerable New Britain Symphony.

Sener’s first concert in his new capacity will be May 3 at Welte Hall

Sener, a resident of Simsbury, is a graduate of the Hartt School, with a degree in conducting. He has been on the Hartt Community Division faculty since 1992 where he teaches music history, theory, ear training and percussion performance. He also serves as Music Director of the Simsbury Community Band and performs with the Steel Sunrise Steel Drum Band. His conducting engagements include performances throughout Connecticut and in Maryland and Ankara, Turkey.

Many area residents also know Ertan as the discerning wine expert at West Side Wines and Spirits in West Hartford.

Congratulations, maestro.

?Steve Metcalf was The Hartford Courant’s fulltime classical music critic and reporter for over 20 years, beginning in 1982. He is currently the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School. He can be reached at spmetcalf55@gmail.com.

Steve Metcalf is an administrator, critic, journalist, arts consultant and composer. He writes the weekly Metcalf on Music blog for WNPR.org, and is the curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series at The Hartt School.

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