La bohème:
La bohème is the French title of an Italian opera often uttered with a warm sigh, and in English-speaking countries it is never translated as The Bohemian Girl because the sigh is not there in English. As it turns out, in art as in life, the sigh with which you utter a name is everything.
The popular 1996 musical Rent takes its title—and most of its plot—from Puccini’s La bohème. The title comes from Bohème’s first act, when the landlord Benoît interrupts the antics of the four men and demands the delinquent rent on their garret with one brusque Italian word, “affitto!” Playwright Billy Aronson and composer Jonathan Larson’s beloved musical Rent created a sensation and an entire cottage industry, including Lin Manuel Miranda’s pandemic film Tick, Tick... Boom! based on another musical by Larson, an autobiography of his years composing Rent. This would be akin to Puccini writing an opera about his composition of La bohème—and how we can all wish he had.
Larson’s own story mirrored La bohème, including his tragic death at age thirty-five from a misdiagnosed aortic dissection that took his life only a day before Rent’s first Broadway preview. For a generation of theatergoers who were themselves coming of age, Larson became linked forever with his own characters, especially Mimi Marquez, the leading female character based on Puccini’s title character. Many of the most ardent fans of the musical, who called themselves “Rent-heads,” later happily discovered (or rediscovered) Puccini’s La bohème, bringing their fandom full circle.
One wonders what Puccini might have thought of a remake of his treasured Bohème that turns his beloved Parisian seamstress Mimì into a Latina stripper in lower Manhattan. We can’t imagine that he would have been anything other than delighted. He composed in an era when reusing stories was not only accepted but expected.
Puccini was forever linked with Bohème, to the point that it was difficult for him to be taken as seriously as his talent should have demanded. Puccini, so beloved now, did not enjoy much acclaim in his life. “Povera Mimì . . . ” (poor Mimì) sings Marcello in the third act of La bohème. We might echo with “povero Puccini” for the woeful reputation the composer had during much of his lifetime, especially from the classical music establishment. In post-Wagnerian times musicians split into all sorts of bizarre factions of believers in pure music (which disdained opera completely, except Wagner); it was in this era we saw the rise of new and second schools of various kinds. Puccini experienced modern problems: he was one of the first in the world to experience a car accident—one that gave him a limp for the rest of his life—and he died of effects of excessive tobacco use.
Photograph of Giacomo Puccini by Atelier Willinger, Vienna. Theater Museum Vienna, Austria.
Puccini composed three of the most popular operas in history, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, and Tosca, but that was hardly all. Manon Lescaut and La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) are both thrilling works that audiences love when they attend them—getting an audience to attend anything in the twenty-first century is the biggest issue facing the arts, but it is not so difficult to get them to enjoy it once they’re here. Puccini’s famous final opera, though he did not live to complete it, was his epic Turandot, an orchestral and choral glory set in a fantasy fairytale China. But his masterpiece is his 1918 commission from the Metropolitan Opera, his trio of one-act operas that together form a single work entitled Trittico, which for me is the greatest single evening of Italian opera ever composed. Why? It holds within it all of the impulses that propelled Bohème to such unprecedented popularity—youth, humor, and pathos—but it has so much more. It was Puccini’s artistic reaction to the horrors of World War I, which had no discernible end in sight as Trittico was conceived and composed. Unable to face the scale of the death all around him, he had two different librettists fashion three diversely wonderful operas that share a powerful unifying theme: the effect of one death on those left alive. In a fairer world Trittico would be as popular as Bohème, but culture, like the life it reflects, is unpredictable.
And Bohème’s success was also unpredictable. It was wildly unconventional for the mores of its day. Very few operas of the era were about regular folks. It was considered unseemly at the time to portray poverty. Charles Dickens went a long way towards changing that in literature; in opera though, it was rare until Puccini’s Bohème opened the floodgates.
Wagner, though gone for twenty years or more by the time of Puccini’s maturity, had influenced all. Verdi had been a national hero for most of his long life, and his death in 1901 left Italy without a unifying cultural figurehead. Following Verdi’s death in the same month as Britain’s Queen Victoria, the Italian intelligentsia turned to Puccini to fulfill the legacy of both Wagner and Verdi, which was a big ask for anyone. Puccini was altogether a more light-hearted and sentimental creative artist. He did not aspire to the intellectual heights of Wagner nor the epic emotional worlds of Verdi. Most of Wagner and Verdi’s title roles were male (Aida was an exception), and Puccini’s operas were largely about women. Not only that, they also appealed to women in a generation when women attending the theater became more commonplace—through most of the nineteenth century, the theater or opera house had been an extension of the business day, and women were rarely present. Puccini changed all of that, just as he changed the entire idea of what popularity meant in the opera house.
La bohème was also at the apex of huge changes in the art of acting, exemplified in the rivalry of two actresses who were both contemporary with Puccini: Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. Acting in the nineteenth century, in both spoken plays and operas, was highly presentational and declamatory. Being a good actor in 1850 meant that you were successful at projecting your voice—no small feat—and that you could memorize and make personal a set of stock gestures that evoked emotions. This principle applied in exactly the same way in the opera house—acting was an art at that time that was symbolic of emotion without actually being emotional. Actors or singers or ballet dancers were meant to evoke emotion, not portray it. (Ballet has largely held to this style of acting, whereas opera has not.)
A scene from La bohème by Ruggero Leoncavallo at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris on October 10, 1899. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
It was Eleonora Duse who changed all of this. Duse had a theory that as an actress, she had to actually feel the same emotions as the character she was portraying. This was considered radical and dangerous nonsense by her contemporaries. Duse had two profound connections to opera in the form of her years-long affairs with the librettist Arrigo Boito and the playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio. One of the most fascinating men of his time, a man who knew both Verdi and Puccini, D’Annunzio was a poet, playwright, and journalist, and became a national war hero during World War I. La bohème entered into the world just as Duse’s new school of acting was emerging, and just before the advent of cinema.
Besides a soaring score, there are a lot of reasons for the success of La bohème with a large public. It is filled with mirror images. Virtually every plot event is alluded to twice, once forwards and once in reverse, foreshadowing two possible endings: a lifetime of happiness for Mimì and Rodolfo or an unpredictable ending. The libretto references many dualities: sunset and sunrise, winter and springtime, the Parisian rooftops viewed in divergent ways by Mimì and Rodolfo. The two garret acts, the outer acts of the opera, open with the same musical material. The quarrels of Marcello and Musetta are mirrored in the more painful jealousies and unbridgeable differences of Mimì and Rodolfo. There is the duality of gifts. First, a small hat which Rodolfo purchases for Mimì and which she instructs him to take back. Second, a final gift from Musetta to keep Mimì’s hands warm (an echo: her cold hands are the subject of Rodolfo’s first act aria), which Mimì assumes to be a gift from Rodolfo—a mistake Musetta silently allows to pass by in one of the opera’s most moving moments.
There are so many musical details: La bohème begins with a musical shudder depicting the cold Parisian garret in which the four bohemians live. They are a poet, painter, musician, and philosopher—Rodolfo, Marcello, Schaunard, and Colline—but what Puccini’s score tells us so clearly and with such aching beauty is that these men are none of these things. They are all pretenders lost in the mêlée of life trying to find their way. Rodolfo, the supposed poet, never produces a meaningful word as a writer until he gazes into the eyes of Mimì, and suddenly he finds the poetry he had been seeking in all the wrong places. Puccini profoundly understood these characters, and what he composed for them is truly indelible. He changed opera forever with this one work, something only the greatest composers can achieve. How did he do it?
Photograph of Gabriele D’Annunzio taken in 1922. Bibliothèque National de France, Gallica Digital Library.
He undoubtedly had a unique melodic gift, but he was much more than a tunesmith. The world into which he emerged was one of virtuoso orchestras and star singers, and he also had a unique ability to create roles that great artists long to perform, many of which—including the titular roles of Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot—remain coveted today. But Puccini’s greatest gift was with audiences, who loved his music instantly and love it to this day. He understood the human heart as only a great artist can. And if there were a score about young love more beautiful than La bohème, we have yet to discover it.
The musical high point of La bohème is the great quartet that closes the opera’s third act, an absolute wonder of character and subtlety. Within it we hear the entire drama: the cold loneliness of winter, the aching desires of the two young lovers, the harsh reality of Mimì’s illness, and the petty arguments of Marcello and Musetta. And not all of Bohème hits you over the head: Schaunard, the “musician,” quietly corrects the tempo of the bohemians’ pretend dancing, and the constant verbal one-upmanship in which the boys engage is always given some musical flourish as well. Much of Bohème is very subtle indeed, and often incredibly beautiful: when Mimì is in her dying moments, Puccini, having consulted with several doctors on the final moments of tubercular patients, even orchestrates Mimì’s last heartbeats as they get ever further apart and fainter. He left absolutely no detail unattended.
Yes, there are many good reasons we utter La bohème with a sigh. It connects us to the greatest impulses of love and youth and innocence and loss, things that every person privileged to experience adulthood will encounter. It has a score that never stops revealing subtleties of both mind and heart. Without lecturing us, it also shares a gentle reminder that life is brief, so you should grab the love that is yours. We don’t know exactly who said it—it is one of those statements that is so true that many now claim it—but when asked why opera stays alive at all, despite all odds and all of its insane expense, some very wise person spoke the truest thing ever said about why our art endures: there is always someone hearing La bohème for the first time. Sigh.
— © Patrick Summers
