La bohème

• 1. Introduction

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  La bohème, the opera Giacomo Puccini composed between 1893 and 1895, opens with a candle going out in a cold Parisian garret, a lost key, and two strangers stumbling in the dark toward each other. That meeting between Rodolfo the poet and Mimì the seamstress is one of the most recognized scenes in all of opera. Yet the work nearly belongs to a different composer entirely, its premiere drew a subdued reception, and its source novel was not a novel at all. How did a disputed, mixed-reviewed opera about bohemian poverty in 1830s Paris become one of the most frequently performed works in the world? The answers begin not with Puccini but with a Frenchman named Henri Murger, a patchwork of borrowed characters, and a very young conductor who would later become the most famous of his era.

• 2. The Source and the Dispute

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  Henri Murger published Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1851, and the book had no unified plot. It was a collection of vignettes about young bohemians living in Paris in the 1840s. Puccini's librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa drew most directly from chapters scattered across the book, stitching episodes into acts. The meeting of Rodolfo and Mimì follows chapter 18 closely, though in the book those characters are not Rodolphe and Mimì at all but Jacques and Francine. The librettists also merged two of Murger's female characters, Mimì and Francine, into a single figure. In the published libretto they defended the choice with a question posed in Italian: "Who cannot confuse in the delicate profile of one woman the personality both of Mimì and of Francine?"

  Before the opera reached the stage, Puccini became entangled in a priority dispute with the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo. Leoncavallo claimed he had offered Puccini a completed libretto on the same subject and that Puccini should stand aside. Puccini replied that he had not known of Leoncavallo's interest and that, having already been at work on his own setting for some time, he could not abandon it. Leoncavallo pressed ahead and finished his own La bohème, assigning the role of Marcello to a tenor and Rodolfo to a baritone, reversing the voice types Puccini used. Leoncavallo's version premiered in 1897, a year after Puccini's, and never gained comparable standing. The rights situation added another complication: while Murger had died without heirs and his book was in the public domain, the rights to an 1849 stage adaptation co-written with Théodore Barrière were still controlled by Barrière's heirs.

• 3. A Subdued Premiere

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  On the 1st of February 1896, the opera opened at the Teatro Regio in Turin, conducted by a 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini. Evan Gorga sang Rodolfo, but his voice could not reach the high tessitura the role required, and the music had to be transposed downward for him. Cesira Ferrani sang Mimì. The audience's first response was muted, and critical opinion split sharply. Despite that uncertain debut, the opera spread through Italy within months. The Teatro di San Carlo mounted it on the 14th of March 1896, Bologna's Teatro Comunale followed on the 4th of November, and Rome's Teatro Costanzi staged it on the 17th of November.

  The first performance outside Italy took place in Buenos Aires at the Teatro de la Ópera on the 16th of June 1896, with Hariclea Darclée and Emilio De Marchi in the lead roles, conducted by Edoardo Mascheroni. The United Kingdom premiere followed on the 22nd of April 1897 at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, sung in English and presented by the Carl Rosa Opera Company under Puccini's supervision. Alice Esty sang Mimì and Robert Cunningham sang Rodolfo. The same company brought the opera to the Royal Opera House in London on the 2nd of October 1897 and to Los Angeles on the 14th of October 1897 for the United States premiere. New York heard it for the first time on the 16th of May 1898 at Wallack's Theatre. The Royal Opera House's own production did not arrive until the 1st of July 1899, when Nellie Melba sang Mimì alongside Fernando De Lucia as Rodolfo.

  Germany's premiere came at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on the 22nd of June 1897. France's Opéra-Comique staged a French translation by Paul Ferrier at the Théâtre des Nations on the 13th of June 1898, with Julia Guiraudon and Adolphe Maréchal in the lead roles. By 1903 the Opéra-Comique alone had performed the opera one hundred times.

• 4. Death, Grief, and a Stopped Orchestra

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  The Metropolitan Opera in New York staged La bohème for the first time on the 26th of December 1900, again with Nellie Melba as Mimì, Albert Saléza as Rodolfo, and Luigi Mancinelli conducting. On the 16th of April 1966, La bohème served as the final opera performed in the Metropolitan Opera's original 1883 building before it closed.

  The opera reached Brazil in two stages. The Theatro da Paz in Belém hosted the country's first performance on the 21st of April 1900, with the Brazilian soprano Tilde Maragliano as Mimì and Giorgio Polacco conducting. The following year, on the 2nd of July 1901, the opera was mounted at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus. Among the celebrated later stagings, the production in Monaco at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on the 1st of February 1902 brought together Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso, with Léon Jehin conducting. The Vienna State Opera presented the Austrian premiere on the 25th of November 1903, with Gustav Mahler on the podium and Selma Kurz as Mimì.

  Puccini died in Brussels on the 29th of November 1924. The news reached Rome in the middle of a performance of La bohème. The orchestra stopped playing, and in place of the opera the musicians played Chopin's Funeral March for the stunned audience. Toscanini, who had stood on the podium at the opera's birth in 1896, conducted a commemorative radio performance of it in 1946 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, featuring Jan Peerce as Rodolfo and Licia Albanese as Mimì. That recording, released by RCA Victor, remains the only recording of any Puccini opera made by the conductor who led its world premiere.

• 5. The Hidden Act

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  In 1957 the widow of librettist Luigi Illica died, and her husband's papers passed to the Parma Museum. Researchers going through the collection found the complete libretto for La bohème and made a discovery: Illica and Giacosa had written an entire act that Puccini chose to exclude from the final opera.

  The missing act was set between the Café Momus scene and Act 3. It describes an open-air party at Musetta's lodgings after her protector has refused to pay the rent out of jealousy. Her furniture is moved into the courtyard the night before an auction. The four bohemians turn the dispossession into a celebration, arranging wine and an orchestra. Musetta gives Mimì a beautiful gown and introduces her to a Viscount. The two dance a quadrille in the courtyard, and the sight of Mimì dancing with the young nobleman drives Rodolfo to jealousy. This scene explains the otherwise cryptic phrase Rodolfo directs at Marcello in Act 3, referring to the "moscardino di Viscontino," meaning roughly the young fop of a Viscount. Without the missing act, that remark arrives without context. Leoncavallo's competing version of La bohème, which premiered in 1897, included this episode, making it one of the few cases where Leoncavallo's treatment preserved material that Puccini left on the floor.

• 6. The Aria Heard Five Hundred Times

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  Enrico Caruso recorded "Che gelida manina," Rodolfo's first-act aria in which he takes Mimì's cold hand, in 1906. The aria became a benchmark for tenors across the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1980 it was recorded by nearly 500 tenors in at least seven languages. In 1981 the A.N.N.A. Record Company pressed a six LP set collecting 101 different tenors singing the aria.

  The broader discography of La bohème is extensive. The earliest known commercially released full-length recording dates from February 1917, on the Italian His Master's Voice label La Voce del Padrone, with Carlo Sabajno conducting the La Scala Orchestra and Chorus and Gemma Bosini as Mimì. The 1972 Decca recording conducted by Herbert von Karajan features Luciano Pavarotti as Rodolfo and Mirella Freni as Mimì, made before Pavarotti's international celebrity was fully established. The 1973 RCA Victor recording with Sir Georg Solti conducting, Montserrat Caballé as Mimì, and Plácido Domingo as Rodolfo won the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 1974. The 1959 recording conducted by Tullio Serafin, with Renata Tebaldi and Carlo Bergonzi, was included on the soundtrack of the 1987 film Moonstruck. Thomas Beecham, who worked closely with Puccini on a 1920 London production of the opera, recorded it in English for Columbia Records in 1936 and again for RCA Victor in 1956.

• 7. Adaptations and Descendants

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  Baz Luhrmann produced La bohème for Opera Australia in 1990 on a budget of A$60,000. Luhrmann set the action in 1957 rather than 1830, explaining that 1957 was "a very, very accurate match for the social and economic realities of Paris in the 1840s." He restaged the production on Broadway in 2002, where it ran for 228 performances. Three pairs of Mimìs and Rodolfos rotated through the run. The production received six Tony Award nominations and won two at the 57th Tony Awards: one for Best Scenic Design, awarded to Catherine Martin, and one for Best Lighting Design, awarded to Nigel Levings, plus a special Tony Honors award. Joe Jonas appeared in the children's chorus. Luhrmann's 2001 film Moulin Rouge! drew heavily on the opera's plot.

  Jonathan Larson's musical Rent, which opened in 1996, transplanted La bohème to New York City at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, replacing tuberculosis with AIDS. Character names echo the original: Roger stands in for Rodolfo, Collins for Colline, and Benny for Benoît. A character's surname is Schunard. The song "Light My Candle" mirrors the candle-and-lost-key scene from Act 1 directly.

  Robin Norton-Hale's 2009 production for OperaUpClose at the Cock Tavern Theatre in Kilburn staged Act 2 in the pub itself, with ordinary pub-goers serving as the Café Momus crowd. That production moved to the Soho Theatre in the West End in 2010 and won a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2019, Canada's Against the Grain Theatre set the opera in a contemporary Canadian urban setting; a performance at Toronto's Tranzac Club was livestreamed by CBC Gem on the 13th of October, and the broadcast earned two nominations at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards in 2021.