New: The ‘Other’ La Bohème by Leoncavallo
West Edge Opera continued its Doppelgänger season by presenting the ’other’ La Bohème, not Puccini’s but rather Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera of the same title. Based on the same play, Scenes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger, as was Puccini’s opera, Leoncavallo’s La Bohème was presented by West Edge Opera at two locations -- on Sunday, March 20 at Mills College and on Tuesday, March 22 at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse. I attended the latter performance, and never having heard Leoncavallo’s version of La Bohème before, I was curious to see how different his treatment of this story, musically and dramatically, was from Puccini’s much better known version. There are differences, to be sure; but the basic story remains the same. A group of young bohemian artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals live an impoverished existence in tiny, drafty apartments in Paris’s Quartier Latin. Rodolfo (or Rodolphe in French) falls in love with Mimi, and Marcello (or Marcel) falls in love with Mimi’s friend Musetta (or Musette). Both couples break up, then reunite at the end, only to see the tubercular Mimi die in Rodolfo’s arms. -more-