Somewhere in the world, perhaps as often as once a day, there are many who are seeing or hearing Puccini’s La Bohème for the first time. It could be in an ornate theater, a high-school auditorium or on a recording. The opera might be sung in Russian or French or English. It doesn’t matter. The message always comes through.
I envy these newcomers to Bohème. They are discovering this evergreen score and story with new eyes and ears, unprejudiced by familiarity and past performances. For them, the touching love story of Mimì and her Rodolfo leaps into life with the freshness of a spring day.
Few works of art possess the ability to recreate themselves with such immediacy as Bohème and to withstand the pressure of the years and the passing fads and styles they bring. Bohème goes on, oblivious to time and tide, touching our most sensitized emotions. It has become a metaphor for anyone who has ever been in love, lost that love or agonized over the difficulties of loving.
It is a simple story, so simple, in fact, it might have become trite in the hands of a less acutely-attuned man of the theater. In Bohème, boy meets girl, boy losses girl, both gets back girl and girl dies in boy’s arms. Curtain. How basic can you get? There is barely a variance or development of what has through the years become a dramatic cliché.
And yet, in Bohème, we have one of the most adored and enchanted operas ever written. It strikes a sympathetic chord within those who are passionate about opera and those to whom opera is just a diversion. Puccini’s music has a great deal to do with this of course. It is his best—melodious, unpretentious and soaring.
“I love small things,” he once said, “and the only music I can or will make is that of small things…as long as they are true and full of passion and humanity and touch the heart.” Nowhere was he truer to this credo than in La Bohème.
But Puccini cannot take all the credit, for he did not possess a monopoly when it came to the truths of Bohème. Equal admiration must go to the simple beauties of the novel by French author Henri Mürger on which the opera is based. It could not have been an easy chore to make a libretto out of these tales of the city—Paris, in this case—that were originally published in serial form (Scènes de la vie bohème). They are so populated with people and so overcrowded with incident that the first draft of Bohème’s libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica ran to nearly twenty acts!
Each character in the opera is a compound of two and sometimes more figures from Mürger’s book. Mimì, for example, is drawn from several of Mürger’s loves—chiefly Lucille Louvet, a midinette who died of tuberculosis. But she is also Marie Vimal, a frail, gentle creature, who later became involved in fraud, and a young girl named Juliette, who also died of consumption. And the episode involving Mimì’s lost key in Act I of the opera and her fur muff in Act IV came from events involving yet another character named Francine.
Mürger’s book is a roman à clef in which he cast himself as the poet Rodolphe. He and his friends frequented not the Café Momus of the opera’s libretto but the Café de la Rotonde in the Paris Montparnasse district. Mürger was frequently there in the company of his friends, with Louvet on his arm. One of the real-life bohemians of that time has described her like this:
“There was a trace of hardness on her face…she was married and separated from her husband, a cabinetmaker…I saw her more than once at his [Mürger’s] digs in the Rue Mazarin, on the second floor of the house at the corner of the Rue de Buci. Her countenance struck me: head a little large compared to the bust, hair blonde chestnut, large blue eyes, pallor, face like wax…”
When she was admitted to the women’s ward in the Hôpital de la Pitié in the final stages of her illness, Louvet complained that Mürger had abandoned her. When a mutual friend told Mürger of her plight and her plaint, he responded “What do you want me to do? I don’t even have enough to take her a bunch of violets for ten centimes.”
The friend counseled him “Take her your heart, but go, for she is very sick.” Mürger managed only one awkward visit before Lucille’s death at the age of twenty-four. This is a far cry from Puccini’s grief-stricken Rodolfo, who throws himself prostrate across Mimì’s dead body as the curtin falls on the last act of the opera. Luckily for the romantics among us, art, in this case, did not imitate life.
It took Puccini’s librettists three years to boil down their original outline to four acts and complete verses that met Puccini’s demands—“logical, concise, interesting and well-balanced.” But it was not the four acts we know today. When Puccini set to work on the score, Act I was in two scenes subtitled “The Garret” and “Momus.” Act II was the “Barrière d’Enfer,” or the customhouse scene; Act III was called “The Courtyard”; and Act IV was a return to “The Garret.”
Eventually “The Courtyard” was dropped and the two scenes of Act I became Acts I and II. Evidently, no music was written for The Courtyard,” but the text for this discarded act was found among Illica’s papers. It explains a lot.
You will remember that at the end of “Barrière d’Enfer,” Mimì and Rodolfo are reconciled as Musetta and Marcello break up once again. Yet when Act IV begins, Rodolfo is still separated from Mimì and Marcello is still separated from Musetta. All is made clear in the missing act.
It was called “The Courtyard” because Musetta’s furniture was there, taken from her apartment in order to be auctioned off for delinquent rent. She had planned a party before this turn of events and, as charmingly capricious as ever, the party is held instead where the furniture is—in the courtyard.
Although this episode takes up barely a page in the novel, Puccini was at first attracted to the idea because it provided another chance for a crowd scene to parallel the one at Café Momus, with exuberant bohemian revels, massed choruses and neighbors complaining about the noise. Interestingly enough, a similar scene exists in Leoncavallo’s version of the story, an opera forever fated to be known and downgraded as “the other Bohème.”
The “missing” act opens with Marcello pointing at Musetta’s apartment and telling his bohemian pals (which include the still together Mimì and Rodolfo) that Musetta is being kept by “a crown councilor.” He refuses to attend her party to which all have been invited (“I don’t drink wine from another man’s cup”) and remains outside the gateway to the courtyard. At this moment a group of bailiffs emerge from the building. They have just attempted to evict Musetta, with little success: “A hellcat! She explodes. Goes wild! A panther! A hornet, a raging lioness.”
Musetta appears on her balcony, heaping further abuse on the bailiffs. The bohemians watch her display of fury with admiration. She sees them and comes running down the stairs to greet them. At this point, Giacosa and Illica give her a second aria:
“Behold, autumn enshrouds the street! Farewell, wide hats of Florence, revealing dresses, transparent veils that don’t tell lies and sleeves that laugh at caution! Farewell, radiant sun, farewell, sweet songs of birds. Musetta’s in her melancholy mood.”
As she sings, the porters come out of the building with her furniture which is piled up in a corner of the courtyard. Musetta tells her friends that her “protector,” the crown councilor, “roared like Vesuvius” when he saw Marcello’s name on the guest list for the party and refused to pay rent. “Now,” she moans, “I have bailiffs and a summons, and guests—but no salon.”
Rodolfo, ever the poet, rises to the occasion: “Look around,” he sings. “The courtyard, don’t you see, is a large greenhouse withouit glass, and Musetta and Mimì are its flowers. What more do you need? Some candles, wine and friends.”
Everyone is swept up in the spirit of the moment and they begin arranging the furniture for a ball. Rodolfo leaves to get wine from the councillor’s cellar in the apartment building and returns with Marcello in tow. Musetta greets him coquettishly, and he repondes sheepishly, still smitten with her prettiness and joie-de-vivre.
The neighbors begin opening their windows to see what is going on and to complain about the noise. Schaunard issues an invitation to them all: “Mme. De Musette invites to the ball, the entire house, 8, rue Labruyère. All are invited, from ground floor to garret, regardless of rank, class, sex or age.”
In a good-natured way, the neighbors accept and descend to the courtyard, and are soon joined by a passing band of students. The dancing begins, and Rodolfo is miffed to see Mimì with one of the students. He tries to stop her from dancing, but she refuses. His anger increases when his friends tell him to leave her alone.
He soon becomes as sullen as Marcello in the Momus scene and, like him, melodramatically asks for a glass of poison. Musetta and Marcello also quarrel and at the height of the party, dealers arrive to bid on Musetta’s furniture. The act ends as Rodolfo is taken away sobbing and the auction reaches a fever pitch.
Why was the act discarded? We can only guess. Perhaps Puccini decided not to enlarge the character of Musetta to the point that she threatened the dominance of Mimì. Or perhaps he was unwilling to show his beloved Mimì (for whom he wept as he penned her death) in the same frivolous, flirtatious light that we see Musetta in the Momus scene.
Then, too, he might have felt that another big crowd scene would detract from the intimacy of Mimì’s ensuing death scene. This was not the first or last time Puccini was dramatically ruthless when it came to his operas, paring away what to him seemed unessential to keep our attention and sympathies focused on his heroine.
A further word about the two Bohèmes. It is said that the Galleria in Milan was the scene of the famous encounter between Puccini and Leoncavallo (the composer of Pagliacci) over Bohème. Over coffee, Puccini told his colleague that he had a new libretto with which he has in love, “It is based on a French novel, La vie de bohème,” he added.
Leaping up, Leoncavallo cried out, “But don’t you remember that I suggested La Bohème to you and showed you my libretto. When you said you had no interest in it, I decided to set it to music myself.” “Then,” Puccini said quietly, “there will be two Bohèmes.”
To stake out his artistic claim, Leoncavallo announced in next morning’s newspaper that he had just completed an opera on Mürger’s book. Puccini followed in the evening paper with a similar announcement.
Was Puccini poaching? We know for a fact that a few years later he had no scruples in wresting the rights to set Sardon’s Tosca to music from his colleague Alberto Franchetti (shamelessly aided by their publisher-in-common, Giulio Ricordi, who saw more profit in a Puccini Tosca than a Franchetti one).
Perhaps Puccini had turned down Leoncavallo’s offer of a collaboration on Bohème believing that if a fellow composer (who was also a librettist) didn’t choose to set his own words, they couldn’t have been very good. Whatever the truth of the matter, this is a classic case of the end justifying the means.
Puccini may have behaved unethically, but who would want to be without his Bohème? So, historically, the opera world wound up with two versions of the story. But in the affections and minds of the public, there is only one.
It had its premiere in Turin in 1896, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. A year later in Venice, the premiere of Leoncavallo’s Bohème took place and furnished the first important break for a new young tenor named Enrico Caruso. Oddly enough, neither opera was an enormous success on first hearing; both were received with much the same polite enthusiasm.
In later years, Toscanini said that he felt the reason Puccini’s version was not immediately accepted and adored was that the critics and the public had expected a grander work from him after his previous opera Manon Lescaut, and that they were not prepared for an opera as personal and unprepossessing as La Bohème.
Also, before Bohème, the opera-going public had thought of love in more tragic and bigger-than-life terms. Radames and Aida, Tristan and Isolde, Carmen and Don José set the standards. But with Bohème, suddenly the operatic stage held figures we all knew and in which we could recognize aspects of our friends and ourselves.
It took time, but little by little, the public and even the press came around to Mimì and Rodolfo and their chums, and today the Leoncavallo opera is little more than a curio, while a strong case can be made for Puccini’s setting as the most beloved theater piece ever written among opera’s basic ABCs (Aida, Bohème, Carmen).
It can be faulted, if you are hard-hearted enough to want to do so, for there are unexplained dramatic holes in the libretto, and musically there are a few awkward transitional moments in the linking of scenes and set pieces. Yet, these pale next to the spontaneity of the score, its buoyancy, flow and sweetness. These qualities carry the day, cement the cracks and endear the opera to the public.
In Bohème, Puccini breathes life into his characters by encasing their words into a natural, conversational manner, yet one that remains thoroughly melodic and singable. The score is a triumph of what composer Gian Carlo Menotti has termed “parlar cantando,” or “speaking-singing,” a manner which he said has been the greatest challenge facing operatic composers from Monteverdi forward.
That the score is so alive is actually somewhat of a miracle and attests to Puccini’s single-mindedness in bending his material to his will. It is interesting to note that he drew some of the opera’s most famous phrases from bits and pieces of his other music.
The rapid, scampering opening figure that begins Acts I and IV comes from a Capriccio Sinfonico for orchestra he wrote during his own bohemian student days at the Milan Conservatory, at which time he shared a room with Mascagni. And when Rodolfo sings of the gray skies of Paris, it is in a phrase originally in praise of the blue skies of Sicily, written for an opera that was never finished—La Lupa.
Then, too, Musetta’s waltz, arguably the best-known moment in the opera and what seems on the surface to be a perfect bit of musical characterization, was originally a piano solo written for, of all things, the launching of a battleship in Genoa! Puccini forced Giacosa and Illica to fit a text to the tune, because he sagely knew it was a melody too good to be wasted on a one-time christening.
The touching quartet in Act III is the expansion of a song “Sole e amore,” written in 1887 (again, new thoughts were fashioned to old music). Apart from borrowing from himself, Puccini utilized other sources as well. The fanfare played by the military band in Act II, for example, came from a tune written in the time of Emperor Louis Philippe. He also added autobiographical details to the libretto. Puccini himself once had to sell a coat to survive and his diaries speak of a student supper for four that consisted of a single herring.
Ultimately, what matters most is that all these ideas and sources go together to create a new unity that is intensely expressive and individual. These qualities shine forth whether Bohème is sung in Hungarian or Chinese, sung by professionals or students, or seen at La Scala or in a tent. Bohème remains Bohème, an opera possessed of an affecting and universal appeal that will sustain it as long as people love and opera is performed.
This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1996.
