La Boheme

By Temple Ligon

Opera, especially grand opera, is always a big deal. And the opera regulars are addicted to the art, that is, the combination of high drama and the great music. The problem among opera fans around here is that big cities are where the action is. Oh, occasionally you’ll get opera in the summer music festivals or on campus with an ambitious music program, but trips to New York City are usually the best way to hit a quota or to get your cultural fix.

Here in South Carolina we have sometimes an opera on the schedule at Spoleto, and USC’s opera productions always do well, and once in a while the Peace Center in Greenville might produce the real deal, but our only regular production outside the classroom is The Palmetto Opera.

In another week TPO will deliver its fifth grand opera production in as many years. It’s one performance in one production, but it is grand, after all. TPO began its full opera performances with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. The next year was La Traviata. Then there was Tosca, and the next year, Carmen. This year, February 28 in the Koger Center, we’re having La Boheme, also by Puccini. So Columbia gets the world’s five most popular operas, one a year and still under fifty bucks a seat, a bargain.

Last December I was threatening to treat myself to a trip to New York City, and my friend who puts me up and puts up with me, a saint, wanted to go to the Metropolitan Opera and sit down front in the central orchestra section, or the stalls as they call those seats at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I’m name-dropping here because that’s one of the reasons to sit for grand opera: You typically sit inside a truly grand work of architecture such as the Met or the ROH where Henry Higgins met Eliza Dolittle selling flowers in the courtyard.

Anyway, I did a little homework, and no sooner than you can say show me the money, we decided we didn’t want to spring for central orchestra seats. The two available Saturday night in early December on the front row looking up at the stage together cost $2,080. Now, the farther back you go to find seats, I have to assume, the cheaper the tickets. But $1,040 a seat can’t get too cheap no matter how far back you go.

Think of that: two for $2,080. The great gesture, though – and I have taken the great gesture – is way in the back on the first level where there are stand-up seats. Not seats, really, just arm rests and digital supertitles, all for the price of an opera seat at the Koger Center.

The average price for a seat at the Met, where they have a total of 3,800 seats, is usually reported as something short of $200. That down front business, though, is nuts.

La Boheme coming up on Saturday, February 28, is $45 for most of us and $25 for students and military.

Another successful production in the Koger Center and TPO might have to start considering the concept of a two-production season. Actually that’s what they already have, one opera concert and one full production of a grand opera. In the near future, though, TPO might kick in a second production of a grand opera. Charlotte and Atlanta put on three productions a year, but they run multiple performances of each production. Columbia will do well to work up to two operas and one concert, one performance each, which is only one Saturday night away from what they do already.

There’s no rush. Opera’s been around. Starting in 1589 in Florence as wedding reception entertainment, opera was an update on what an ancient Greek play might have been where the actors sang instead of talked. The idea caught on, and Henri IV and Maria de’ Medici had opera for their wedding guests at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1600. Taking the show out of the private homes and into a public auditorium began in Venice in 1636 in the world’s first opera house, the Teatro di San Cassiano.

In America the first opera performance was in a Charleston courthouse, where they also staged the first ballet in America, both in 1735. We were first, and we need to play on that. We need more opera and we need more ballet. It’s in our cultural DNA.

Fortunately for both ballet and opera, the best opera house makes the best ballet venue. The Paris Opera Ballet is in the Garnier Opera, around the corner from the Ritz. The Royal Ballet works and performs inside the ROH just up the hill from the Savoy. Great hotels can be found next to great opera houses. There’s something elegant about walking out of the hotel and into the opera house nearby, even if to see the ballet.

Columbia has three ballet companies and typically three Nutcrackers every December, but our opera offerings need to fill out a more ambitious schedule. Still, with a great opera house and a residential opera fan base, more of the touring troupes will come through.

Mayor Benjamin is looking at the homeless compound, Transitions, as a potential arts center, to include a 1,500-seat performing arts hall. Careful, Mayor, new opera houses are coming in over budget all over the world. It’s hard to get a good one built for less than $100,000 a seat. The most frightening figure is not even an opera house, which usually costs more than a symphony hall, but the Philharmonie de Paris with its 2,400-seat symphony hall and an arts center completion total of $455 million.

Careful: What do you have to charge on the first row in Paris just to service that debt?