Ok, I’m ridiculous. I decided to use the Coronation weekend to go to Paris. I’ve said on many occasions that I don’t love Paris but I like it more as I get to explore on my own terms and it’s a very quick hop over from Southampton Airport and quite honestly, I was never going to sit in front of the TV all day Saturday and watch the big party and it’s just about the only four days I’ve got completely empty until July. But having figured that out, what do I do? Go up the Eiffel Tower again? I’m drawn to that thing. I can never resist it. The usual circuit of tourist traps? A do-over at Sainte-Chapelle, definitely. For the rest of the weekend, I applied Google to the question and one thing Google suggested was the opera.
I’m not the opera type. I’ve been in an opera but I’ve never been to the opera. Never wanted to. But suddenly, it was an option and once it was an option, the urge to go began to build and build. There were two operas on the weekend I was there – La Boheme at the Opera Bastille and Ariodante at the Palais Garnier. Now, I’ve never heard of Ariodante but it’s nearly four hours long and there were no tickets available anyway. I have heard of La Boheme and that’s only two hours and there were tickets available. And it’s not just La Boheme. It’s La Boheme on a space station. Garnier tickets appear to range from €25 to €210, Bastille from €15 to €170. The catch is that the lowest-priced tickets are only available from the physical box office and it seems the lowest couple of categories either, understandably, sell out really quickly or don’t get put on sale until the last minute. I don’t know.
My original plan was to turn up on the day and try to get a €15 La Boheme ticket and if there weren’t any, so be it. But after two weeks, I discovered that I had my heart set on going to the opera and I couldn’t just turn up on the day and then not be able to go. Not after all this. Not after two solid weeks of refreshing the website three times a day in the hopes that the category 7-9 tickets might be available. So I bought the cheapest available online, category 6. Now, I don’t love paying €70 for a ticket to something I don’t even actively like but I suppose it’s not a terrible price to see an opera in Paris. Considering my thoughts tend to head Disney-wards when I think about Paris – followed swiftly by “you hate just about everything about Disneyland!” – I began to feel like quite a sophisticated lady.
What to wear, though? Well, it turns out there’s no dress code beyond “proper attire is required”. I dithered between a gorgeous floor-length purple gown with opera gloves and a simpler LBD with tights. The little black dress fits better in my one carry-on bag and my reading suggests people tend towards the more business-casual end of the “proper attire” spectrum and that most people don’t bother with dinner jackets and gowns. I mean, what’s more Parisian than a little black dress, anyway?
And then it was time to pack my suitcase and jump on a plane.
I was a bit taken aback to arrive at Place de la Bastille, via a 13-minute walk to the nearest metro and two trains, to discover that it was a hot sunny evening. Besides the LBD, I’d hauled a kind of black cloak-poncho thing all the way to Paris and it was far too hot for it. I went through a metal detector to get in, carrying the cloak; my phone and bag were given the most cursory “no alarm clock and sticks of dynamite sitting on top” check and I was in. Then you queue at either end of downstairs, depending on whether your door is an odd or even one. Mine was door 10, so to the right and then up two flights of stairs to the first balcony. It was hot so I went to the bar, where they had cans of Coke but when I went to sit in my seat, drink it, cool down, get into opera mode, I was told I couldn’t bring it into the auditorium. My French has deteriorated a little, so I couldn’t quite catch why glasses of champagne could go in but cans of Coke in a glass couldn’t. Anyway, no point in arguing so I sat out in the hall and took my time drinking it. I was early enough to not stress about it. Then I gathered my cloak and went back in.
The nice usher was dealing with someone else, so I found my own seat. He found me, gave me a card listing the credits, apologised – inexplicably suddenly in English – “about the drink” and approved my skill in finding my seat. Now I could settle. It wasn’t a bad view. I could see both stage and orchestra just fine and there was an LCD display above my head, on the bottom of the second balcony, which would give subtitles in French for this Italian-language opera about bohemian life in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
What I hadn’t reckoned with, in all my wrestlings with ticket categories, was that there would be empty seats and that people would upgrade themselves by moving forward. The people in front of me, in row 7, dived for seats in rows 3 and 4. I should have moved there and then into their vacated seats. I did after the interval.
Anyway. La Bohème on a space station. The four male leads in colour-coded spacesuits. Mimi, appearing out of nowhere in a red dress. This is where the weird and wonderful setting breaks down. On the streets of Paris, she can just walk round the corner. On a space station: where has she come from? How did she get there? Is she there? Act 1 I could cope with. I followed about 50% of the French subtitles, I gathered that we were introducing our main couple and if I missed literally all the details, so be it.
But Act 2? Suddenly there’s a cafe and acrobats and a circus ringleader-type and a woman in a capsule and a fringed dress doing a mini cabaret show and just what?? Again, this makes perfect sense on the streets of Paris! Here? Is this their imagination? Hallucination? Is Mimi really there? What am I watching??
In the interval, I studied my programme. I read the synopses of Acts 3 & 4. I skimmed through the French translation of the… well, libretto, I think is the correct opera term. I had an idea of the themes, at least, of what was coming. And as I mentioned, I moved forward a row. It turned out in row 7 I could see all the subtitles above the stage. They’re bigger, better and clearer than my overhead ones. I’d been able to see them from row 8 if I craned my neck. Now I made an amazing discovery. Over the stage, above the French subtitles, are English subtitles.
Oh, it didn’t make the opera as a whole make more sense. It’s still a bit insane – Acts 3 & 4 are set on a dusty moon-like planet where it’s snowing, the surviving men are picking their way across the hills and hummocks in spacesuits in slow-motion and there’s Mimi still in her red dress. Act 4 pulled a tinsel curtain halfway across and brought back some of the cafe/circus/cabaret themes but with one of the astronauts sprawled dead on the hill just off to the side and when Mimi died, she continued to walk ever so delicately across the hills, now in a white dress.
OK. What did I make of it? I enjoyed it! I think there was an element of “this is insane!” that kept it feeling like I was watching something new and special. There was no OTT glass-shattering warble-shrieking like there was on the recording I listened to on Spotify. In fact, it was just like watching any other musical, except it’s a different, more old-fashioned style of music. I thought of something an old colleague once said on watching, I think, the BBC adaptation of Les Mis: “they just never stopped singing!”. She was amazed that, in a musical there was no ordinary speech. I wasn’t amazed that the opera was all singing, bit in a way, I was surprised at how… mundane some of it is. I guess I’d figured every song was a performance, the musical equivalent of a Hamlet soliloquy. It’s not. It’s actually conversations in song. I know so little of musicals that all I can compare it to is For The First Time In Forever (Reprise) from Frozen. Actually, we’re not / What do you mean you’re not? / I get the feeling you don’t know / What do I not know? is exactly the kind of conversation put awkwardly into song that La Bohème is full of. Not big set pieces like Let It Go.
Didn’t I say I felt like a proper sophisticated grown-up for going to the opera instead of Disneyland? Look at me now.
Yeah. I don’t think I’ll make a habit of it but I really wasn’t sure that I wasn’t going to hate the opera after all I’d thought about it and I didn’t. Dependent on ticket prices, I really want to go and see Rhinegold in London in September. I already pretty much know the story. Sadly, Rhinegold is only part 1 of the Ring Cycle. Part two, the Valkyrie, is where everyone’s favourite Ride of the Valkyries, makes it appearance but maybe it’ll be my life’s work to see the entire Ring Cycle. I can absolutely be the sort of person who goes to the opera.
And it was cool and rainy by the time I left. I got to wear the cloak.