College seniors hurried to squeeze in last school memories

It was during Act 1 of the final dress rehearsal for Puccini’s “La Rondine” at the Peabody Conservatory that the school president sent out an email canceling all nonessential gatherings because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cast members quickly messaged friends, who streamed into the theater to catch the remainder of the only performance in the scheduled four-day run.

After all, the show must go on. And the graduation. And the senior sunrise, the pub crawl, the lake plunge and dozens of other ceremonies, productions and traditions that college students scrambled to salvage — a last, lasting memory before they were kicked off campus to ride out the outbreak from home.

“I’ve been following the news, and it doesn’t look like (graduation) is going to happen any time soon,” said Endicott College senior Nick Grace, who took a last lap around the silent campus on Boston’s North Shore before leaving. “If we don’t have our celebrations, we’re kind of robbed of our end-of-year ceremonies. Even if graduation itself is salvaged, it’s all of those moments.”

At Peabody, Hannah Alexandra Noyes broke into tears performing the role of Lisette the maid — not because the opera’s love story was doomed, but because her final year at the Johns Hopkins University music school was. In the conservatory’s dining hall, the orchestra hastily arranged chairs for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony that had originally been planned for the 1,000-seat, acoustically precise Shriver Hall.

“I emailed the conductor and said, ‘If I set up the concert, will you come and conduct?’ And he said, ‘Sure,’” French hornist Layan Atieh said. “From there, it all went and snowballed.”