Tom's Life Bits

Last-minute cast changes at an opera house are always full of drama, but one that enabled Saturday afternoon’s performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera is likely to go down in the annals of day-of-the-performance substitutions.

The rising soprano Kristine Opolais, who sang the title role of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” for the first time at the Met on Friday night, was awakened before 8 a.m. Saturday with a phone call from the Met: Could she sing the role of Mimi that afternoon in the matinee of “La Bohème,” to replace Anita Hartig, who was ailing?

The stakes are always high at the Met, with its 3,800 seats, but this last-minute switch would have a much wider audience. The performance, broadcast on the radio and transmitted live to movie theaters around the world as part of the Met’s “Live in HD” series, was expected to reach more than 300,000 people. But Ms. Opolais, whose performance in “Butterfly” ended just before 11 p.m. Friday, agreed to sing the new role at 1 p.m. Saturday.

She rushed to the Met, where costume fittings and a crash course on the staging awaited.

Mimi is a role with which Ms. Opolais is more than a little familiar. She has sung it with the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera and the Latvian National Opera and is scheduled to sing it at the Met next season.

Generally, there are few things operagoers dread more than getting a slip of paper in their programs announcing unplanned cast changes, but this year the Met has managed to make some of those occasions memorable. Last month, when the baritone Thomas Hampson, citing illness, pulled out of the opening night of Berg’s “Wozzeck,” the Met replaced him with Matthias Goerne, who had just sung the role at Carnegie Hall with the Vienna State Opera.

Kristine Opolais with Giuseppe Filianoti in The Metropolitan Opera's production of “La Rondine” in 2013.