Dec. 13, 2024

Making Love Last

The enduring appeal of Puccini’s La bohème
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Act II of HGO's 2018 production of La bohème, directed by John Caird.

La bohème is the French title of an Italian opera often uttered with a warm sigh, and in English-speaking countries it is virtually never translated, 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.  

 

Jonathan Larson’s 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 four men and demands the delinquent rent on their garret with one brusque Italian word, “affitto!” 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 about his years composing Rent.  

 

Larson’s own story mirrored La bohème, including his tragic premature death at age 35 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 Márquez, the leading female character, based on Puccini’s character.  

 

One wonders what Puccini might have thought of a remake of his beloved Bohème that turns Parisian seamstress Mimì into a Latinx stripper in Lower Manhattan. We can’t imagine he would have been anything other than delighted. And he composed in an era when reusing stories was not only accepted but expected. Puccini, too, was forever linked with Bohème, to a point of making it difficult for him to be taken as seriously as his talent would 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 “Povera Puccini,” for the woeful reputation the composer had during much of his lifetime. He experienced modern problems: he was one of the first to experience a car accident, and he died of effects from excessive tobacco use. Any composer would envy Puccini’s popularity, but his deep connection with a large opera-loving public, and his cultural reach far beyond opera as well, were the very things that made him so suspect to his colleagues. An Italian music critic after the first performance of La bohème in Turin not only predicted the opera would make no great impression on the world, but also suggested that Puccini take up some other line of work to avoid further embarrassment. The review, which wasn’t an uncommon contemporary sentiment about any of Puccini’s operas, has obviously not aged well. La bohème is very easily the most popular opera ever composed, known and loved by millions. 

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Ivan Magri and Nicole Heaston as Rodolfo and Mimì in HGO's La bohème (2018). Photo credit: Lynn Lane

Puccini composed three of the most popular operas in history—La bohème, Madame 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 if they will attend them—getting an audience to attend anything is the biggest issue facing the arts, not getting 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. His undoubted masterpiece, though, is his 1918 commission from the Metropolitan Opera, his trio of one-act operas which together form into a single work entitled Il 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 WWI, 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, though Charles Dickens went a long way in changing that in literature. In opera, though, it was rare until Puccini opened the floodgates.  

 

Wagner, though gone for 20 years or more by Puccini’s maturity, had influenced all. The death of Verdi in 1901 left Italy without a unifying cultural figurehead (he had been a national hero for most of his long life), and 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 a rarity in that way), while Puccini’s operas not only were largely about women, but they also appealed to women in a generation when women attending the theater became more commonplace—through most of the 19th century, the theater or opera house was an extension of the business day, and women were rarely present. Puccini, in terms of opera, changed all of that.  

 

La bohème is rich with mirror images. Nearly every plot event occurs in both forward and reverse, foreshadowing two possible outcomes: a lifetime of happiness for Mimì and Rodolfo or an uncertain, unpredictable conclusion. The libretto is filled with these pairs: sunset and sunrise, winter and spring, Parisian rooftops mentioned by both Mimì and Rodolfo in different ways, and the two garret acts opening with the same musical material. The quarrels between Marcello and Musetta reflect the deeper, more painful jealousies and irreconcilable differences between Mimì and Rodolfo. Another notable plot mirror involves the gift Rodolfo buys for Mimì on Christmas Eve: a small bonnet, which she later tells him to return, a painful reminder for both of them. Then there is a final gift from Musetta—a muff to keep Mimì’s hands warm (her cold hands being the focus of Rodolfo’s aria in the first act). However, Mimì mistakenly assumes the gift is from Rodolfo, and Musetta, in a poignant moment, does not correct her. 

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HGO's long history with La bohème.

Bohème is also, for interpreters, absolutely jam-packed with musical delights, each of which has importance and meaning, and many of which are missed by conductors and directors. In their defense, it is almost impossible to do them all justice. To fully achieve them, a conductor must work in very close collaboration with a director and all of the artists to make it into an organic whole, and as a repertory opera, Bohème almost never gets rehearsed that way.  

 

There are so many details: La bohème begins with a musical shudder depicting the cold Parisian attic garret where 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 there is 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, and only the greatest can do that. How did he do it?  

 

He undoubtedly had a unique melodic gift, but he was more than that. 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. 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 is a score about young love that is more beautiful than La bohème, we have yet to hear it.  

 

La bohème has so many musical highlights that it is challenging to only point out a few. There are this opera’s famous arias, of course, all very well known: Rodolfo’s, both of Mimì’s, and Musetta’s famous waltz. The brilliant second act, only 18 minutes in length, packs in more fun and drama and comedy than many entire operas.  

 

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,” corrects the tempo of a boy’s 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 so often incredibly beautiful: when Mimì is in her dying moments, Puccini even orchestrates her last heartbeats as they get ever further-apart and faint. Absolutely no detail went unnoticed by him.  

 

Yes, there are 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 with adulthood will experience. It also shares with us, without lecturing us, a gentle reminder that life is brief, so grab the love that is yours. We don’t know exactly who said it, as it is one of those statements that is so true that many claim it, but when asked why opera stays alive at all, the answer was clear: there is always someone hearing La bohème for the first time. Sigh.  

about the author
Patrick Summers
Patrick Summers is the Artistic and Music Director, Sarah and Ernest Butler Chair, at Houston Grand Opera.