What is the secret to the enduring popularity of Puccini’s La Bohème? From its premiere at the Teatro Reggio in Torino, Italy on 1 February 1896, it quickly became one of the most frequently produced operas in the repertoire, perennially fresh, incredibly beautiful, and totally absorbing from beginning to end. Singers love it, audiences love it, and box offices love it. It even spawned a Broadway musical, Jonathan Larsen’s Rent. What is it about this opera that has made it so beloved?
Perhaps it’s the opera’s youthful vitality. It’s all about young people trying to make meaningful lives for themselves as free spirits in Paris, full of hijinx and shenanigans, free love and free dinners, love at first sight and breakups that last months. They shamelessly mock their elders and flaunt themselves. This opera reminds us what it is like to be young.
Perhaps it’s the opera’s slice-of-life realism. Everyday concerns like paying the rent, getting your girlfriend back, and obtaining adequate healthcare are the substance of the episodic story. Just as in real life, rapturous joys share the stage with heart-wrenching sorrows. Realistic touches abound in the music, too. Consider how the hollow, open chords at the beginning of Act 3 portray the cold and quiet pre-dawn winter morning. Think how the crowds bustle all through Act 2, framing the main characters’ activity intimately within a big-city Christmas Eve. Notice how the delicate solo strings at the end of Act 4 show how tenuously Mimì is clinging to life.
Perhaps it’s the opera’s kaleidoscopic variety. It is comprised of equals parts comedy, romance, and pathos, all mixed together, and the music captures those modes in all their broad strokes and nuanced subtleties as they swirl by like a parade of fascinating moments.
Perhaps it’s the gorgeous music itself. One of the hallmarks of Puccini’s style was the “pregnant melody,” or the idea that every moment of the opera should be filled with memorably beautiful tunes. And yet the dialogue and action all seem to take place in real time — how can this be? Puccini’s brilliant dramaturgical solution was to give the melody to the orchestra at all times, with the singers intoning the words, frequently joining in then leaving from the orchestra’s never-ending flow. Thus, Puccini served the story’s real time events within the time-expanding exigencies of music, meanwhile exponentially enhancing the stupendous beauty of the melodies because his skill as a luscious, over-the-top orchestrator was equally sublime.
And finally, perhaps it’s the opera’s characters, at least one of whom anybody can relate to. Whether the emotional Rodolfo or the impetuous Marcello, the melancholy Mimì or the flirtatious Musetta, the introverted Colline or the extroverted Schaunard, or even the aging working-class schlub Benoit or the aging moneyed-class booby Alcindoro, there’s someone for everyone in this opera.
All of these are reasons why we continue to love La Bohème after more than 125 years, compelled by the ravishing sounds of Puccini’s characters laughing, weeping, living, and dying.
By Tedrin Blair Lindsay, Ph.D.
