Puccini: La bohème
The standard repertoire, #2
This is the second in a planned series of pieces about the operas of the standard repertoire. The first installment was Eugene Onegin.
La bohème, Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera about young artists falling in love in 1830’s Paris, is often put forward as the perfect introductory opera for newcomers, and it’s easy to understand why. The music is romantic and easy on the ears, and for opera neophytes there are more important advantages: the story makes dramatic and emotional sense, the ending is a tear-jerker, there are no troubling racial/gender politics or overly dull stretches, and it’s short — depending on the number and length of intermissions, you can be in and out in two and a half hours.
For all these reasons, La bohème is reliably popular and a staple of the repertory. This means that seasoned opera types tend to dismiss it, even if they loved it as beginners. It’s a fixture, so frequently performed that it almost fades into the background, and serious opera people sometimes seem to forget it exists. Saying your favorite opera is La bohème is a bit like saying your favorite movie is Pretty Woman: it’s not exactly a marker of bad taste, but it’s not going to impress anyone.
I’m one of the people for whom La bohème was a gateway. I was around fifteen years old when I started getting deeply interested in opera, and to educate myself, I bought a copy of Opera for Dummies (in my defense: it was the 90’s). Looking back, it’s actually difficult to imagine a better primer. The book laid out the jargon, conventions, and etiquette of opera-going in detail, along with summaries of each of the most popular operas in the standard repertoire. Because it was the 90s, it also came with a CD-ROM featuring some truly great singers, Maria Callas, Nicolai Gedda, and Renata Scotto among them. I have very fond memories of listening to the CD on my Discman while riding Edmonton Transit buses to school on freezing winter mornings. This track of Nicolai Gedda singing Che gelida manina, a song that begins with a line about having cold hands, played on my headphones while the bus climbed Bellamy Hill. The gist of the song is: I’m a poet, and I want you to fall in love with me. His listener obliges.
And here’s Pavarotti singing the same aria, which I include because he sings it so beautifully:
This is the opera that makes Cher fall in love with Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck, and its story roughly follows the plot of a rom-com, albeit with a sad ending. Four young, broke friends — a writer, a painter, a musician, and a philosopher — are cheerfully getting by in 1830’s Paris. The writer, Rodolfo, has a meet-cute in Act I with a pretty neighbor, Mimi, and the two fall in love. They’re happy in Act II, but in Act III, they fight and break up. Act IV reunites them, and they sweetly reminisce about their love before Mimi dies of tuberculosis. You can always hear sniffles in the audience in the final 20 minutes.
The first notes of La bohème have the jaunty assurance of a Broadway musical, letting the audience know that they’re in for a delight. And it doesn’t withhold its pleasures, giving us the gorgeous fall-in-love sequence 20 minutes into Act I: one aria for the man, one for the woman, and one duet. Although it ends with a death, it is not especially preoccupied with mortality. Isn’t it glorious, it asks, to be young and broke and in love?
Puccini had excellent instincts for what would be popular with audiences. He was the latest in a five-generation line of musicians and was groomed from birth to be a composer, but he frustrated his teachers and mentors. He wasn’t much of an intellectual and didn’t have a lot of tolerance for boredom. In this he was well-aligned with the largely bourgeois Milanese opera audience, who had limited patience for Wagner’s lengthy epics but went wild for one-act shockers about vengeful clowns and adulterous Sicilians. Puccini’s mature operas borrow a lot of tricks from Wagner but never allow scenes to go on for too long (with a notable exception or two), and his arias always aim to stuff the maximum amount of emotional intensity into a commercially friendly length of five minutes or less.
There are many people for whom the sentimentality is a bit too much, and I can’t blame them — La bohème lays on the romance and the sweetness very thick. Critics of Puccini mostly take the line that he’s a bit too popular, that his operas drug audiences into an emotional response with swoopy melodies and manipulative theatrical tricks without offering any real musical or psychological depth. His operas are also highly resistant to directorial concepts. There are all kinds of ways for provocateur directors to make a weird Figaro or a challenging Faust, but it seems pretty much impossible to make a weird bohème. It doesn’t have any rough edges or ambiguity or interesting gaps to exploit; it succeeds too well at being itself.
La bohème is foolproof, which makes it easy to dismiss. I admit that I mostly skip over it when I’m looking at a season calendar. But whenever I hear its great arias, I can’t help but get caught up — no other opera does what it does quite so well.
Some more musical highlights:
Mimi’s self-introduction aria. Her real name is Lucia, and she embroiders flowers:
Mimi and Rodolfo in love:
The painter’s girlfriend Musetta sings about the pleasures of being beautiful: