LA OMEN

We're living in strange times indeed. Sitting in a local cinema in the heart of the Cotswolds, watching an event being transmitted three and a half thousand miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, somehow only reinforced to me the fact that the PVC screen itself denies the experience from being authentic in that inimitable way you immediately feel when you take your seat in an actual opera house. You just can't beat that sense of being surrounded by fellow audience members as the house lights dim, the red velvet curtains go up, and the occasional cough from some late arrival provides the measure of your sensitised focus on the event at hand.

Watching a live relay of La Bohème from the New York Metropolitan Opera House on Saturday night, I had a sort of internal, middle-class version of Michael Douglas’s William “D-Fens” Foster breakdown in Falling Down—when something in his brain snaps after being stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam on a Los Angeles highway.

Only for me, my breaking point was a little more of a luxury issue, I guess. Watching the Bloomberg-sponsored event boasting of its satellite technology bringing great art to screens across the world, it was amusing at first to find—only seconds before curtain up—that the image and sound were skipping like a needle with dust mice jumping across the grooves of a dirty record, creating a digitally fragmented broadcast.

I had tried to ignore the glitching throughout the initial shenanigans of the Bohemians in their Paris apartment in Act One, but once poor Mimì arrived halfway through the act, looking all wan and in search of a light for her candle, my tolerance for this technological issue grew shorter and shorter. Hadn’t she already suffered enough? And then, no sooner had Rodolfo opened his mouth to sing the tender opening notes of his famous aria “Che gelida manina” than he was suddenly belting a high C at full volume at the very end of it. My nerves were set on edge. What would Mimì’s Act IV “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” death scene be like with this faulty, hiccupy issue?

Part of me felt inclined to get up and shout, in a Peter Finch–in–Network sort of way, in front of the screen: “Is this what we’ve become? Can you not see? We’re making it all worse! We have to go back, just like the meme says.”

In theory, the idea of a live broadcast is all well and good. But when you’ve schlepped out to make an effort to go and watch it at a cinema—and it more closely resembles watching a World Cup football match on an old flickering television in a South American favela while you hold the antenna closer to the window to try and get a clearer picture—you have to ask yourself: what are we doing here?

Not surprisingly, live radio broadcasts rarely have this problem. For decades, Radio 3 has provided consistent, unbroken transmissions live from the New York Met. In fact, I used to love listening to the halftime quiz hosted by Father Owen Lee (one of the great writers on opera) and often closed my eyes and imagined myself sitting in a plush red seat in Lincoln Center while I drifted in and out of sleep on my couch, occasionally finding a small patch of drool on the cushion I rested on as the end-of-act applause roused me from my light slumber.

Perhaps it pained me also because I remember actually watching this same Zeffirelli production at the Met back in 2003, and can recall how cosy and familiar it all felt in that place—a rare example where reality matched my previously imagined idea of it.

Now it’s 2025, and I’m watching Rodolfo—pixelated and garbled like the rudimentary graphics of an early video game—and wondering where it all went wrong, more La Omen than La Bohème.