The Met– The New York Metropolitan Opera– has been offering selections from their current season in selected movie theatres as live HD transmissions. Saturday morning, my wife and I attended the latest one: Puccini’s La Bohème, Produced for the Met by Franco Zeffirelli.

It was something we had intended to do for a while. On New Year’s Day we went so see some umpty-ump movie (maybe Walk Hard) and we poked our heads into the auditorium where the Met was transmitting the English language production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. (Not the Humperdinck who sang 1976’s “After The Lovin’;” The early 20th century German operatic composer. Easy mistake.) Anyway, the few minutes of what we saw were mesmerizing, which is why we attended this Saturday’s performance.

It was, all in all, a remarkable experience, which is of course why I’m remarking on it here. A few observations:

• The High Culture represented by such entertainment forms as grand opera and Common Entertainment such as Hollywood movies rarely interact, and part of the frisson of the thing was walking past the cheesy posters and standees for Speed Racer and Kung Fu Panda and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay to get to the auditorium. All in all, the Met in HD is an entirely new and wonderful reason to caution a trip to the multiplex.

• There is little I can say here to add to the experience of attending The Met, even if electronically. The New York Metropolitan Opera is the best opera company in the world, which is reflected in all aspects of the production: sets, lighting, costumes, orchestra, even the scads of singing extras and children cavorting on the immense Lincoln Center stage. The singers are also the best in the world: La Bohème featured Ramón Vargas as Rodolfo and Angela Gheorghiu as Mimì, and they and the whole singing cast were fantastic.

(The Met is also the last bastion of traditionally staged Grand Opera left in the world. Europe has fallen under the questionable influence of the regietheater movement, where star directors are allowed to interpret operas into nihilistic shock theater. For more on this depressing phenomenon, check out Heather MacDonald’s famous column in the City Journal.)

• I will opine on the libretto of the original, though. I’ve never seen La Bohème all the way though, beginning to end. I was surprised at how slight the story was. It was a personal, emotional story of love and loss explored through song, strangely at odds with the spectacle, costumes and enormous sets of Grand Opera.

Jonathan Larson’s Rent, the 1996 rock opera (and crummy Chris Columbus movie adaptation) based on Puccini’s La Bohème, has at least eight times as much story as the original. And yet strangely enough it carries about one-eighth of the emotional power and artistry of Puccini’s work.

• It costs $22 a ticket. Not sure why. Everything about The Met is underwritten by East Coast swells– even the HD transmissions (via a generous grant from the Neubauer Family Foundation: The particular perfomance we saw was underwritten by Toll Brothers, the leading builders of McMansions). Maybe it’s to keep the riffraff out.

• We were the youngest people in the auditorium. That never happens anymore. I saw some representative youngn’s later , In the lobby as we left, madly texting each other. Maybe I was lucky.

• Opera is sort of dismissive word when applied to movies. Horse Opera, Space Opera, Soap Opera: The terms have a slightly disdainful note about them. Perhaps the heightened emotionalism of most operatic works has always made folks a little uncomfortable.

This is odd, because I believe modern mainstream motion pictures owe much to the traditions of Grand Opera, much more than to legitimate theater. Hollywood movies ARE operas: spectacular productions integrating grand settings, accomplished performers, artistic lighting, all coordinated to integrally composed music. Smaller films, Indies and such, are more in line with the traditions of prose theater. Lord of the Rings is Der Ring des Nibelungen; Juno is a one-act, off-broadway production.

The Met in HD has one performance left in the season (La Fille du Régiment, by Gaetano Donizetti), and they’re going to transmit even more next season. Catch it. Force your family to go. Hijack a busload of strangers on the way. You will all be enriched by the experience.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under General, Long Tail, Motion Pictures, Music, Stage, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.