La Bohème
At one of my favorite places
There are two long intermissions. People are eating their dinner/afternoon tea. I have no desire to get a drink when millions people are there.
La Bohème is composed by Puccini. I read somewhere that Puccini likes to write about little people and portrait the details of their ordinary life. La Bohème is a love story and a tragedy. So the ending is the best and mostly emotional. The story is set in Paris around 1830, talking about a few artists and their love stories. There are four scenes and is sung in Italian.
Lyrics are funny and sweet (it is so direct and makes me blush, Shakespeare has these kinds of direct love poems too). Quote some English translation below. Met has a good translation.
the paper will dissolve into ashes, and the spirit will ascend to the skies. A great loss menaces posterity … Rome is in peril! While our stove sits there idle, making no moves to do its duty, but just relaxing like some noble Lord. If it doesn't laugh and sparkle, love's feeble and gruff. She sings and smiles, and remorse assails me. I am the cause of this fatal malady that's killing her. In vain, in vain I try to hide my true torture.
Opera is a type of “weird” format of performing arts. The story is often coarse grained compared to the movies. The scenes and acting are simpler than Broadway shows, e.g., no choreography in most operas. The music including the vocal and orchestra are very important. It is almost like acting/visualize the symphony. For example, in La Bohème, the last part of music is very beautiful and splendid. I would never think that it describes the death of MiMi and the sadness of Rodolfo until I see the opera. Met operas are so high quality that you almost feel listening to a CD rather than a live version. Going to Met is such a close-heart experience. It is expensive, serious, so you don’t want to just pick up someone who know one day or two and have a party there. It is the place for your tears, your thoughts, your savorings …
BTW, my New York life is very dynamic besides the serious stuff 🙂 As an example, see this cute tea place I went this week. This tea is like some poison. At 2 am, I was still wide awake and tried to write some poem:
“I blame you crazy tea
Yabee yabee, I am drunk like a crazy foo” 😀
