A classic tale of tragic romance, the opera “La Bohème” follows the love between poet Rodolfo and seamstress Mimi as they are forced to face the challenges of Mimi’s declining health and eventual death from “consumption,” as tuberculosis (TB) was commonly called in the 1800s.
Debuting 100 years later, the Broadway rock opera “Rent,” inspired by “La Bohème,” tells the story of a group of young artists struggling to survive in Manhattan’s East Village under the shadow of HIV/AIDS.
Both productions — and others, such as the 1993 movie “Philadelphia” starring Tom Hanks as a lawyer with AIDS and the 2022 miniseries “Station 11,” which follows a troupe of performers after a fictional swine flu pandemic — use art to raise public awareness of pandemics or other illnesses.
That was the topic at hand during “Creative Resilience: How Three Centuries of Pandemics Influenced the Arts,” a panel discussion at Rollins School of Public Health featuring medical experts; Tomer Zvulun, artistic director at The Atlanta Opera; and Lois Reitzes, program host of “City Lights” on WABE-FM.
Whether TB, AIDS or COVID-19, pandemics involve “a loss of loved ones and also a loss of our innocence,” Carlos del Rio, distinguished professor of medicine, infectious diseases, said that evening.
Soprano Cadie Bryan and tenor Kameron Lopreore of The Atlanta Opera brought these overwhelming emotions to life when they kicked off the discussion with select songs from “La Bohème.” The Atlanta Opera staged full productions of “Rent” and “La Bohème” this fall.
“Art is what got us through those long months of lockdown,” Bryan shared, happy to be back to performing in front of live audiences.
In the late 1800s, TB killed about one in five adults in Europe. Plays like “La Bohème” brought attention and public awareness to the illness.
“There is precedent for arts and sciences coming together to save humanity,” said panelist Stefan Goldberg, adjunct professor of epidemiology at Rollins.
Antibiotics tamped down TB during World War II until it rebounded in 1980 as the main killer of people with HIV/AIDS. Today, nearly 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis worldwide each year.
“Epidemics speak to each other, they influence each other,” said Eric Paul Leue, vice president of HIV services at Ponce de Leon Center of Grady Hospital.
With the Atlanta area currently having one of the highest HIV rates in the U.S., all three plagues are unfortunately still relevant to contemporary populations, said Leue, who lost his partner to AIDS in 2004. “We now have pre-exposure prophylaxis, we have the tools to stop the virus, we know how to do it, and yet we fail.”
COVID-19, which killed more than 1.2 million people in the U.S., “took advantage of health inequities in different populations and was fostered by vast amounts of misinformation and disinformation,” said Jodie Guest, senior vice chair of epidemiology at Emory.
Scientists can look to the arts for ways to communicate and connect, Guest said, which are strategies vitally needed during global health emergencies like pandemics.
Further explaining the science/art connection, depicting illness on stage “appeals to creatives because of the inherent drama in facing one’s mortality,” said Reitzes. “It’s a ready-made evil protagonist.”