Mimi and Rodolfo

I recently came across a video clip of the aria “Che Gelida Manina’ by the late Luciano Pavarotti from the 1979 La Scala, Milan production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera ‘La Boheme’. He appeared with Ileana Cotrubas as Mimi.

It made me think of little Mimi, daughter of my friend and ‘ancient’ classmate Randhir and his Filipina wife Vicki. Years ago when I visited them in Melbourne, Mimi was a pretty wide-eyed, hyper-active little girl. I remember telling her the story from the La Boheme opera, of her poor and sickly namesake with the ‘frozen little hands’ and how Rodolfo, the struggling painter and poet sang to her in his dark and cold moonlit room as Mimi came to borrow a candle from him to lit her equally dark and cold room. Little Mimi listened in awe, eyes all wide-opened. She must be a beautiful young lady now.

(Randhir if you are reading this I hope your back pain is not troubling you too much).

Back to 'Che Gelida Manina’ which means ‘what frozen little hands’, it has always been one of my favourite arias. Every time I hear it, I get a choking feeling and even had tears in my eyes once, watching a tv concert version of it by Pavarotti. The lyrics are not all that sad but it is the melody and the mood of the song, the ups and downs of the music, its soaring crescendo, and Paravotti reaching the high notes that really got me.

I am happy to have seen a couple of live productions of ‘La Boheme’. The one I like best was the 1990 Polish production in Warsaw just before the communist era came to an end. It was a very lush production and I loved the orchestral repetition of some bars of the music from ‘Che Gelida Manina’ being played throughout the opera. And what a finale – Rodolfo’s heart-wrenching scream of ‘Mimi.....!’ when she expired at the end of the opera. That and again the soaring crescendo literally makes your heart stop!

La Boheme tells the story of the bohemian lifestyle of struggling artists in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1930s. When I was in New York in 2000, there was a modern adaptation of the opera called RENT, a tale of struggling artists and their poverty in New York in the 1980s against the backdrop of rising homelessness and AIDs.

But it was just too raunchy and loud for me!