Everyone’s Favorite Opera: La Bohème
La Bohème’s enduring appeal is not only that it is a timeless tale with which we can identify; it is that Puccini and his librettists have captured, in word and music, the story and its characters. The bohemian life was something Puccini could write and compose about; he had lived in a garret apartment as a student at the Milan Conservatory, and for a time shared it with Mascagni, composer of Cavalleria rusticana. His first two operas had been disappointing failures, but from them he had learned that a bad libretto could ruin even a good story and a better-than-average score. The opera that followed, Manon Lescaut, was his first big hit and had no fewer than seven different writers, including the composer Leoncavallo and Puccini himself. Two of its librettists, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, worked with him on his next three operas, all of which have achieved lasting success.
Nonetheless, collaboration with Puccini did not always go smoothly. He was demanding in his attention to detail and demanded constant revision, often finishing an opera’s orchestration before finalizing the vocal lines. Yet this attention to detail is Puccini’s genius: Every word and note in La Bohème serves the characters and the story. The transitions from conversational exchange and crowd banter to arias, duets, and quartets and back again, flow with an appealing naturalness. The characters reveal their thoughts and feelings, and events in the story are believable.
La Bohème is shaped around two love stories, the fragile new love between the poet Rodolfo and Mimi, his downstairs neighbor, and the tempestuous, on-again-off-again affair between the painter Marcello and Musetta, the beautiful coquette. But the center of our attention is Mimi, not a queen or courtesan, but a seamstress who embroiders flowers on bonnets and other garments. She’s a common working woman, apparently simple in her desires, yet not as innocent as she initially seems. Her love affair with Rodolfo is complicated by his jealousy and his realization that she suffers from late-stage consumption, which is only worsened by their poverty and the cold—themes that recur throughout the opera.
Surprisingly, Puccini’s use of melody subjected him to criticism; he has been accused of succumbing to sentimentalism and being an unworthy successor to earlier great Italian composers. But Puccini’s sense of theater is a glory of his music. Rather than framing displays of vocal agility such as one finds in Bellini or Rossini, his melodies are constructed in gentle, step-like intervals that make his lyrical arias and duets some of the most easily recognizable in opera. In Bohème Puccini fully established his signature style, which is heard in the rhythmic relationship between the vocal lines and the orchestration. Both orchestration and vocal parts are full of color, and in Bohème Puccini begins to use particular instruments, as well as tempo, for descriptive effect. And finally, leaving nothing to chance, Puccini wrote copious instructions on his scores for the conductor.
La Bohème was not an immediate success. Critics were unappreciative at its world premiere in Turin in 1896. London’s Covent Garden refused to mount it when first offered the opportunity, and in 1924 an American textbook version of Scènes de la Vie de Bohème even omitted the stories of Mimi and Musetta, considering them inappropriate for college students. But Bohème’s (and Puccini’s) success was soon confirmed, championed by conductor Arturo Toscanini and tenor Enrico Caruso. In a more recent tribute to Bohème’s appeal, Jonathan Larson based his rock-opera Rent on it, setting the action in New York’s East Village with Mimi as an HIV/AIDS patient. Rent premiered in New York exactly 100 years after La Bohème’s opening in Turin.
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Michael Clive is a cultural reporter living in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. He is program annotator for Pacific Symphony and Louisiana Philharmonic, editor-in-chief for The Santa Fe Opera and editor of OperaHound.com.
