Giacomo Puccini    

La bohème    

Giacomo Puccini was born in Lucca, Italy on December 22, 1858, and died in Brussels, Belgium on November 29, 1924 La bohèmewas first heard on February 1, 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Torino (Turin), Italy with Arturo Toscanini on the podium. It is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English Horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos and basses).

*****

Puccini’s La bohème shares its status among the world’s most frequently performed operas with the composer’s own Tosca, Verdi’s La traviata, Bizet’s Carmen and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Four of these five concern the fates of unconventional women, with Mozart’s delightful work more difficult to categorize. Puccini’s brilliant music keeps his works on this list, mixing psychological insight with inspired melodic writing. From Bohème’s opening notes, listeners are drawn into the young artists’ high spirits, fears, and yearnings. Puccini’s great gift is his ability to cast his melodies in many degrees of light and shadow, so that the music itself tells the story more compellingly than words can.

La bohème was heard first on February 1, 1896 at the Teatro Regio in Torino (Turin), Italy, with the celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini on the podium. Beloved as the opera is now, it was received by the glittering opening night audience with no more than polite respect.

The critics, too, were harsh:

“To say that this Bohème is an artistically successful opera is impossible. Bohème … makes little impression on the emotions of the listener, will leave few traces in the history of our lyric theater.”

“We ask ourselves what could have moved P. along the deplorable path of this Bohème. The question is a bitter one and we ask with pain.”

“Made for immediate enjoyment; saying this is an expression both of praise and of condemnation.”

Puccini and his friend, collaborator and publisher Giulio Ricordi, were experienced men of the theater, however. They believed in Bohème and knew just what to do. They shepherded their creation through the rest of its run in Turin, and then allowed it to lie fallow. They reopened it in mid-April in Palermo, a world away from Turin, where it was received with wild enthusiasm by an audience that knew nothing of its history. At the end of opening night, the ovation lasted so long that much of the final act had to be repeated, despite the fact that many members of the orchestra and chorus had already left the theater. Bolstered by a sold-out run in Sicily, the opera quickly took the world by storm, with performances at La Scala in Milan, in London, Vienna and Paris, in Germany, the USA, and South America. Ever since, it has delighted  audiences in the opera houses of the world. It also ran under its own name for over a year on Broadway in 2002-03 and was the inspiration for the long-running Broadway musical, Rent.

Opera was everything in the musical world of nineteenth-century Italy. Symphony concerts were rare. Orchestras were ad hoc, unruly, and almost always heard in the opera pit. Every town of any size had an opera house that presented a steady diet of favorites and premieres. Provincial theaters looked to the big cities for the best new works and large, opinionated audiences attended night after night. Newspapers eagerly published gossip about favorite composers, guessing, predicting what they were working on, when it might reach the stage, and with what performers. A successful opera was the closest thing to a Broadway hit today, and operatic composers could make fortunes.

Performance practices were loose. We now think of Bohème as a relatively brief and fast-moving opera, but a hundred years ago it could have lasted an hour longer than it would now. If an audience liked something, it would demand an immediate encore, sometimes more than once. To honor the structure of a work by performing it uninterrupted would have felt restrictive to most audiences. Everyone- performers, composer and audience – expected ovations and encores. Singers and composers paid strongly biased groups of fans who did everything possible, including hissing and booing, to undermine rivals. Toscanini, who led the premiere of La  bohème, was among the first Italian conductors to work to change this tradition; he encountered huge resistance and eventually refused to conduct at many Italian houses.

Guiseppe Verdi dominated Italian opera for a half century. Music by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and a host of others less famous filled many nights at the opera houses, but Verdi reigned supreme. As he aged (and Puccini grew to maturity), musical Italy stewed endlessly over who would succeed him as the great hope of “the lyric art.” The press and music publishers all had their favorites: Leoncavallo (I Pagliacci), Mascagni (Cavalleria rusticana), Catalini (La Wally), Ponchielli (La Gioconda) and Montemezzi (L’amore dei tre re) were mentioned often. In fact, there could be no direct successor to Verdi because the world had changed during his long life. His heroines’ sublimation and noble suffering resonated less and less with audiences who were looking for something immediate, human, more connected with everyday life. A new operatic style known as verismo emerged, with melodic and orchestral effects that suited less exalted subject matter.

Into this changing world leapt young, ardent, Giacomo Puccini, sure of his gifts, determined to win the public. Two early operas showed promise, but no one was prepared for the novelty, the frankness and audacity, of his first big hit, Manon Lescaut, which opened, also in Turin, in 1893. From then on, Italy was watching. Puccini and his librettists, poet Luigi Illica and playwright Giuseppe Giacosa, along with friend/publisher Giulio Ricordi, labored long over what should come next. Starting while Manon Lescaut was still fresh, they read novels, short stories, plays, searching for the right subject. They settled at last upon Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, a set of loosely connected stories first published serially in Paris in 1845-48, and then dramatized successfully as La vie de Bohème in 1849 by Théodore Barrière.

For two years Puccini, Illica, Ricordi and Giacosa struggled to fashion Murger’s tales into a fast-moving, modern opera about youth, love, and poverty’s cruel realities. They fought with each other. They ate, drank and smoked together. They resigned from the project and then allowed themselves to be coaxed back. La bohème meant too much to its creators for any of them to really walk away from it. Puccini, demanding and difficult, compelled his friends to give him the situations, words, and pacing he knew would tell the story best. Satisfied at last, he wrote the music in a few months, declaring La bohème complete on December 10, 1895.

And what had they created? A masterpiece, certainly. An affecting story, yes. Some of opera’s most memorable characters? Yes again, but their triumph was to have found the voice of the new society that was emerging across Europe. It was a world in which growing ease of communication and travel were accelerating social change. Women’s voices were slowly being heard outside the home. Non-conformers previously isolated in small hometowns flocked to cities and found others with shared values. Workers began to join together to demand decent lives.

La bohème is an opera about the memory of youth. The winds of social change blow through it. Much of its melodic basis is music Puccini wrote while a conservatory student. He treats his own youthful work with affection tinged by his own life experience. Mimí, frail and utterly impoverished, lives on her own, nourished mostly by her dreams. She is flesh and blood, vulnerable, doubtless immoral by Victorian standards, but good-hearted. If we despise her, we despise all young people. Her mistakes, her fragility, are the stuff of youth, which comes only once in each life and vanishes when we are not looking.

In La bohème, Puccini shows the full depth of his artistic intent for the first time. He desired to please the public, and he was a shrewd businessman and master networker, attending important performances of his works years after they had been written. But beyond that, he was a serious artist who studied the works of great German and French composers of his time, absorbing ideas about structure, pacing, harmony, and orchestration. His melodic gift pleased audiences, while his writing for orchestra demanded a new finesse and agility of players. He used Wagner’s idea of depicting characters and ideas in brief, recognizable motifs and then clad the motifs in the glowing, ambiguous harmonies of Debussy. Debussy did not fail to notice the compliment, paying a back-handed one of his own, “If one did not keep a grip on oneself, one would be swept away by the sheer verve of the music.”

This opera has remained popular  because we find in its characters something of ourselves: their mistakes, their innocence, their ardor are ours. We know, somewhere deep inside, that time passes too quickly, and youth is fleeting. Puccini’s music, elegantly crafted and  passionate, reaches directly into our hearts. During the first moments of the young lovers’ greatest joy, it hints at sadness to come; as Mimí’s life wanes, the music glances wistfully back at happier times. It is a dream, a dream we all share.

-Martin Webster