By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH


At the end of “La Boheme,” as Puccini envisioned the opera, the frail seamstress Mimi dies in bed in a garret overlooking the rooftops of Paris . As seen live on Swiss television in September, she boarded an empty bus from a curb outside a shopping mall . Then the bus pulled away, pursued for a time by her stricken lover Rodolfo until he collapsed on the pavement.

Saimir Pirgu, the young Albanian tenor who sang Rodolfo, found that tears came naturally. “When those doors closed, they weren’t the doors of the bus, but the doors of life,” Mr. Pirgu said recently in New York, where he was making his debut as the happy-go-lucky Rinuccio in the Puccini triple bill “Il Trittico.” “Everybody cried. I cried.”

And how weird was it to have people standing centimeters away from the action? “You really get into your role when spectators are standing right next to you, some of them in tears, some of them picking their noses,” Mr. Pirgu said. “I’ve never had such an adrenaline rush in my life.”

Wildly popular, “La Boheme im Hochhaus” (“A High-Rise Boheme”) was the third foray by Schweizer Fernsehen, the Swiss national network, into prime-time opera programming. The first came in March 2007, with “The Magic Flute” on two channels, coupling a conventional telecast of that Mozart singspiel from the stage of the Zurich Opera House on one channel with simultaneous live backstage reports on another.

In September 2007 the cameras rolled for the more radical experiment “Traviata im Hauptbahnhof,” carried live from the main train station of Zurich. Viewers who wouldn’t know Boris Godunov from Aida stayed glued to their television sets. Helping them along were plot updates as well as documentary interludes .

The prime mover of the series was Thomas Beck. As director of music and dance for Swiss television, his mandate was to produce timely documentary segments for a 45-to- 90-minute time slot every Sunday evening.

“I was always convinced that opera in prime time had huge emotional potential,” Mr. Beck said recently . “ For ‘Flute’ we were hoping for perhaps a 12-to-15 percent market share on the first channel and 5 to 8 percent on the second channel. We never dreamed we would double those expectations.”

For the later shows the numbers were in the 30-to-40 percent range . Many have tried to package opera for the masses. Epic summer opera at the Roman arena in Verona has been a staple for nearly a century in Italy. Every so often an opera shows up in theaters as a feature film. But as a mass medium, television is in another league.

As expected, howls of purist indignation were heard, but not many. As Mr. Pirgu sees it, this is “opera for everyone.”

“If my mother went to the opera to see ‘La Boheme,’ she wouldn’t understand it, and she’s the mother of a tenor,” he said. “This she understood perfectly.”


“La Boheme,” with Saimir Pirgu and Maya Boog, is one of several operas that have been staged in public and shown on television in Switzerland. / SEVERIN NOWACKI/SCHWEIZER FERNSEHEN