San Francisco Opera :: La Bohème

"A Radiant 'La Bohème'—Glorious Singing, Gripping Music and a Touching Love Story!"
–San Jose Mercury News (Click here to read more)

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Nicola Luisotti, San Francisco Opera's music director designate and a master of the Italian repertoire, conducts Puccini's most beloved opera. This heartwarming story of starving artists falling in and out of love in 19th-century Paris is a seamless mix of romantic passion, poignant tragedy and high-spirited fun. The superb cast is headed by Polish tenor Piotr Beczala (Tamino in 2007's The Magic Flute) and Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu (Magda in 2007's La Rondine), who has wowed critics and audiences with both the beauty of her voice and the depth of her characterizations. "The opulent-voiced Gheorghiu thoroughly inhabited Mimì in an emotionally convincing, multifaceted way you don't see or hear very often," said the Los Angeles Times.

ACT I

It is Christmas Eve. As Marcello paints, Rodolfo, unable to write, gazes through the windows at the smoking chimneys of the Parisian rooftops. The bohemians are suffering from the cold. Marcello is about to sacrifice one of the sparse furnishings to the empty stove when Rodolfo has an inspiration: pages of his drama will warm them. Colline returns from a fruitless visit to the pawnbroker. As the fire dies, Schaunard saves the day by arriving with food, firewood, and pockets full of money. The table is already laid before Schaunard can announce that for Christmas they will dine out. The friends are about to leave when Benoit, the landlord, comes for the rent. The bohemians trick him into talking about his amours; then, feigning moral indignation, they throw him out, unpaid. The friends leave, but Rodolfo stays behind to finish an article he is writing.

Presently, there is a knock on the door. A young woman enters. She asks if she may light her candle and Rodolfo invites her in. As soon as her candle is lighted, she departs only to return moments later in search of her key. Rodolfo secretly finds and pockets the lost key. As they continue to search, their hands touch. He tells her of his life as a penniless poet. She enchants Rodolfo with a description of her modest existence as a seamstress. As she ends her narrative, the voices of Rodolfo's friends rise from the street, urging him to hurry. Rodolfo goes to the window and tells them to meet later at the Café Momus. He turns to Mimì and declares his love, which she timidly admits is returned.

ACT II

A holiday crowd mills about the small square in the Latin Quarter dominated by the Café Momus. Enjoying the Christmas spirit, the bohemians spend their money: Schaunard buys a horn, Colline an overcoat, and Rodolfo purchases a bonnet for Mimì. They meet at the café and order dinner, after Rodolfo has presented Mimì to his friends.

Musetta and Alcindoro, an elderly admirer whom she orders around like a pet poodle, take the table adjoining the friends. Marcello studiously avoids looking at Musetta, with whom he has recently broken up. Musetta tries to attract his attention by staging a temper tantrum. Raising her voice so that all may hear, Musetta delivers an oration on her beauty and its devastating effects. She decides it is time to rid herself of Alcindoro and feigns a terrible pain in her foot. Musetta sends Alcindoro off for a new pair of shoes. The merry making is dampened by the arrival of the bill. The bohemians search their pockets hopelessly until Musetta takes the bill from the waiter and deposits it together with her own. She announces that Alcindoro will pay both bills on his return. Alcindoro returns with Musetta's new shoes and is confronted with the bills.

ACT III

Amid the snow and mist of a February dawn, the city's early risers begin their daily routines, while the revelers in a tavern continue the night's festivities. Mimì asks directions of a sergeant who points out the tavern decorated with Marcello's paintings. She asks the innkeeper to send Marcello out to her. Tearfully, she appeals to him for help. She refuses to go into the tavern because Rodolfo, who has left her, is inside. Marcello promises to talk to him. Rodolfo attempts to justify his cruelty to Mimì on the grounds of her coquettishness, but Marcello sees through the pretext. Rodolfo admits that he still loves Mimì, but says he cannot endure watching her health fail because of his inability to provide for her. Coughing and violent sobs betray Mimì's presence. Rodolfo takes her into his arms, while Marcello charges into the tavern to investigate the cause of a burst of Musetta's brazen laughter. Mimì says goodbye to Rodolfo and tells him they must part without bitterness. They quickly realize that they cannot go through with the separation. Their decision to stay together until spring is made against the background of violent quarreling between Musetta and Marcello.

ACT IV

Sadly reminiscing about their broken love affairs, Marcello and Rodolfo try to work. Both try unsuccessfully to appear pleased that their former companions are flourishing. Schaunard and Colline arrive with frugal provisions and a more cheerful outlook. They fall upon the food and stage a mock ball which is followed by a simulated duel. At the height of their clowning, Musetta appears. Mimì is waiting on the stairs; she is seriously ill. Rodolfo rushes to Mimì and brings her in. Musetta sends Marcello to pawn a pair of earrings and bring back a doctor. Colline bids a fond farewell to his overcoat which is destined for the same fate as Musetta's jewels. One by one the friends find discreet reasons to leave. The lovers are alone. Feeble attempts at their former banter are succeeded by reminiscences of their love. Musetta returns with a muff to warm Mimì's hands. Marcello announces that a doctor is on the way. Mimì falls asleep as Musetta murmurs a prayer. Rodolfo notices that a change has come over his friends, who already know what he only now realizes: Mimì is dead.

Somewhere in the world, perhaps as often as once a day, there are many who are seeing or hearing Puccini’s La Bohème for the first time. It could be in an ornate theater, a high-school auditorium or on a recording. The opera might be sung in Russian or French or English. It doesn’t matter. The message always comes through.

I envy these newcomers to Bohème. They are discovering this evergreen score and story with new eyes and ears, unprejudiced by familiarity and past performances. For them, the touching love story of Mimì and her Rodolfo leaps into life with the freshness of a spring day.

Few works of art possess the ability to recreate themselves with such immediacy as Bohème and to withstand the pressure of the years and the passing fads and styles they bring. Bohème goes on, oblivious to time and tide, touching our most sensitized emotions. It has become a metaphor for anyone who has ever been in love, lost that love or agonized over the difficulties of loving.

It is a simple story, so simple, in fact, it might have become trite in the hands of a less acutely-attuned man of the theater. In Bohème, boy meets girl, boy losses girl, both gets back girl and girl dies in boy’s arms. Curtain. How basic can you get? There is barely a variance or development of what has through the years become a dramatic cliché.

And yet, in Bohème, we have one of the most adored and enchanted operas ever written. It strikes a sympathetic chord within those who are passionate about opera and those to whom opera is just a diversion. Puccini’s music has a great deal to do with this of course. It is his best—melodious, unpretentious and soaring.

“I love small things,” he once said, “and the only music I can or will make is that of small things…as long as they are true and full of passion and humanity and touch the heart.” Nowhere was he truer to this credo than in La Bohème.

But Puccini cannot take all the credit, for he did not possess a monopoly when it came to the truths of Bohème. Equal admiration must go to the simple beauties of the novel by French author Henri Mürger on which the opera is based. It could not have been an easy chore to make a libretto out of these tales of the city—Paris, in this case—that were originally published in serial form (Scènes de la vie bohème). They are so populated with people and so overcrowded with incident that the first draft of Bohème’s libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica ran to nearly twenty acts!

Each character in the opera is a compound of two and sometimes more figures from Mürger’s book. Mimì, for example, is drawn from several of Mürger’s loves—chiefly Lucille Louvet, a midinette who died of tuberculosis. But she is also Marie Vimal, a frail, gentle creature, who later became involved in fraud, and a young girl named Juliette, who also died of consumption. And the episode involving Mimì’s lost key in Act I of the opera and her fur muff in Act IV came from events involving yet another character named Francine.

Mürger’s book is a roman à clef in which he cast himself as the poet Rodolphe. He and his friends frequented not the Café Momus of the opera’s libretto but the Café de la Rotonde in the Paris Montparnasse district. Mürger was frequently there in the company of his friends, with Louvet on his arm. One of the real-life bohemians of that time has described her like this:

“There was a trace of hardness on her face…she was married and separated from her husband, a cabinetmaker…I saw her more than once at his [Mürger’s] digs in the Rue Mazarin, on the second floor of the house at the corner of the Rue de Buci. Her countenance struck me: head a little large compared to the bust, hair blonde chestnut, large blue eyes, pallor, face like wax…”

When she was admitted to the women’s ward in the Hôpital de la Pitié in the final stages of her illness, Louvet complained that Mürger had abandoned her. When a mutual friend told Mürger of her plight and her plaint, he responded “What do you want me to do? I don’t even have enough to take her a bunch of violets for ten centimes.”

The friend counseled him “Take her your heart, but go, for she is very sick.” Mürger managed only one awkward visit before Lucille’s death at the age of twenty-four. This is a far cry from Puccini’s grief-stricken Rodolfo, who throws himself prostrate across Mimì’s dead body as the curtin falls on the last act of the opera. Luckily for the romantics among us, art, in this case, did not imitate life.

It took Puccini’s librettists three years to boil down their original outline to four acts and complete verses that met Puccini’s demands—“logical, concise, interesting and well-balanced.” But it was not the four acts we know today. When Puccini set to work on the score, Act I was in two scenes subtitled “The Garret” and “Momus.” Act II was the “Barrière d’Enfer,” or the customhouse scene; Act III was called “The Courtyard”; and Act IV was a return to “The Garret.”

Eventually “The Courtyard” was dropped and the two scenes of Act I became Acts I and II. Evidently, no music was written for The Courtyard,” but the text for this discarded act was found among Illica’s papers. It explains a lot.

You will remember that at the end of “Barrière d’Enfer,” Mimì and Rodolfo are reconciled as Musetta and Marcello break up once again. Yet when Act IV begins, Rodolfo is still separated from Mimì and Marcello is still separated from Musetta. All is made clear in the missing act.

It was called “The Courtyard” because Musetta’s furniture was there, taken from her apartment in order to be auctioned off for delinquent rent. She had planned a party before this turn of events and, as charmingly capricious as ever, the party is held instead where the furniture is—in the courtyard.

Although this episode takes up barely a page in the novel, Puccini was at first attracted to the idea because it provided another chance for a crowd scene to parallel the one at Café Momus, with exuberant bohemian revels, massed choruses and neighbors complaining about the noise. Interestingly enough, a similar scene exists in Leoncavallo’s version of the story, an opera forever fated to be known and downgraded as “the other Bohème.”

The “missing” act opens with Marcello pointing at Musetta’s apartment and telling his bohemian pals (which include the still together Mimì and Rodolfo) that Musetta is being kept by “a crown councilor.” He refuses to attend her party to which all have been invited (“I don’t drink wine from another man’s cup”) and remains outside the gateway to the courtyard. At this moment a group of bailiffs emerge from the building. They have just attempted to evict Musetta, with little success: “A hellcat! She explodes. Goes wild! A panther! A hornet, a raging lioness.”

Musetta appears on her balcony, heaping further abuse on the bailiffs. The bohemians watch her display of fury with admiration. She sees them and comes running down the stairs to greet them. At this point, Giacosa and Illica give her a second aria:

“Behold, autumn enshrouds the street! Farewell, wide hats of Florence, revealing dresses, transparent veils that don’t tell lies and sleeves that laugh at caution! Farewell, radiant sun, farewell, sweet songs of birds. Musetta’s in her melancholy mood.”

As she sings, the porters come out of the building with her furniture which is piled up in a corner of the courtyard. Musetta tells her friends that her “protector,” the crown councilor, “roared like Vesuvius” when he saw Marcello’s name on the guest list for the party and refused to pay rent. “Now,” she moans, “I have bailiffs and a summons, and guests—but no salon.”

Rodolfo, ever the poet, rises to the occasion: “Look around,” he sings. “The courtyard, don’t you see, is a large greenhouse withouit glass, and Musetta and Mimì are its flowers. What more do you need? Some candles, wine and friends.”

Everyone is swept up in the spirit of the moment and they begin arranging the furniture for a ball. Rodolfo leaves to get wine from the councillor’s cellar in the apartment building and returns with Marcello in tow. Musetta greets him coquettishly, and he repondes sheepishly, still smitten with her prettiness and joie-de-vivre.

The neighbors begin opening their windows to see what is going on and to complain about the noise. Schaunard issues an invitation to them all: “Mme. De Musette invites to the ball, the entire house, 8, rue Labruyère. All are invited, from ground floor to garret, regardless of rank, class, sex or age.”

In a good-natured way, the neighbors accept and descend to the courtyard, and are soon joined by a passing band of students. The dancing begins, and Rodolfo is miffed to see Mimì with one of the students. He tries to stop her from dancing, but she refuses. His anger increases when his friends tell him to leave her alone.

He soon becomes as sullen as Marcello in the Momus scene and, like him, melodramatically asks for a glass of poison. Musetta and Marcello also quarrel and at the height of the party, dealers arrive to bid on Musetta’s furniture. The act ends as Rodolfo is taken away sobbing and the auction reaches a fever pitch.

Why was the act discarded? We can only guess. Perhaps Puccini decided not to enlarge the character of Musetta to the point that she threatened the dominance of Mimì. Or perhaps he was unwilling to show his beloved Mimì (for whom he wept as he penned her death) in the same frivolous, flirtatious light that we see Musetta in the Momus scene.

Then, too, he might have felt that another big crowd scene would detract from the intimacy of Mimì’s ensuing death scene. This was not the first or last time Puccini was dramatically ruthless when it came to his operas, paring away what to him seemed unessential to keep our attention and sympathies focused on his heroine.

A further word about the two Bohèmes. It is said that the Galleria in Milan was the scene of the famous encounter between Puccini and Leoncavallo (the composer of Pagliacci) over Bohème. Over coffee, Puccini told his colleague that he had a new libretto with which he has in love, “It is based on a French novel, La vie de bohème,” he added.

Leaping up, Leoncavallo cried out, “But don’t you remember that I suggested La Bohème to you and showed you my libretto. When you said you had no interest in it, I decided to set it to music myself.” “Then,” Puccini said quietly, “there will be two Bohèmes.”

To stake out his artistic claim, Leoncavallo announced in next morning’s newspaper that he had just completed an opera on Mürger’s book. Puccini followed in the evening paper with a similar announcement.

Was Puccini poaching? We know for a fact that a few years later he had no scruples in wresting the rights to set Sardou’s Tosca to music from his colleague Alberto Franchetti (shamelessly aided by their publisher-in-common, Giulio Ricordi, who saw more profit in a Puccini Tosca than a Franchetti one).

Perhaps Puccini had turned down Leoncavallo’s offer of a collaboration on Bohème believing that if a fellow composer (who was also a librettist) didn’t choose to set his own words, they couldn’t have been very good. Whatever the truth of the matter, this is a classic case of the end justifying the means.

Puccini may have behaved unethically, but who would want to be without his Bohème? So, historically, the opera world wound up with two versions of the story. But in the affections and minds of the public, there is only one.

It had its premiere in Turin in 1896, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. A year later in Venice, the premiere of Leoncavallo’s Bohème took place and furnished the first important break for a new young tenor named Enrico Caruso. Oddly enough, neither opera was an enormous success on first hearing; both were received with much the same polite enthusiasm.

In later years, Toscanini said that he felt the reason Puccini’s version was not immediately accepted and adored was that the critics and the public had expected a grander work from him after his previous opera Manon Lescaut, and that they were not prepared for an opera as personal and unprepossessing as La Bohème.

Also, before Bohème, the opera-going public had thought of love in more tragic and bigger-than-life terms. Radames and Aida, Tristan and Isolde, Carmen and Don José set the standards. But with Bohème, suddenly the operatic stage held figures we all knew and in which we could recognize aspects of our friends and ourselves.

It took time, but little by little, the public and even the press came around to Mimì and Rodolfo and their chums, and today the Leoncavallo opera is little more than a curio, while a strong case can be made for Puccini’s setting as the most beloved theater piece ever written among opera’s basic ABCs (Aida, Bohème, Carmen).

It can be faulted, if you are hard-hearted enough to want to do so, for there are unexplained dramatic holes in the libretto, and musically there are a few awkward transitional moments in the linking of scenes and set pieces. Yet, these pale next to the spontaneity of the score, its buoyancy, flow and sweetness. These qualities carry the day, cement the cracks and endear the opera to the public.

In Bohème, Puccini breathes life into his characters by encasing their words into a natural, conversational manner, yet one that remains thoroughly melodic and singable. The score is a triumph of what composer Gian Carlo Menotti has termed “parlar cantando,” or “speaking-singing,” a manner which he said has been the greatest challenge facing operatic composers from Monteverdi forward.

That the score is so alive is actually somewhat of a miracle and attests to Puccini’s single-mindedness in bending his material to his will. It is interesting to note that he drew some of the opera’s most famous phrases from bits and pieces of his other music.

The rapid, scampering opening figure that begins Acts I and IV comes from a Capriccio Sinfonico for orchestra he wrote during his own bohemian student days at the Milan Conservatory, at which time he shared a room with Mascagni. And when Rodolfo sings of the gray skies of Paris, it is in a phrase originally in praise of the blue skies of Sicily, written for an opera that was never finished—La Lupa.

Then, too, Musetta’s waltz, arguably the best-known moment in the opera and what seems on the surface to be a perfect bit of musical characterization, was originally a piano solo written for, of all things, the launching of a battleship in Genoa! Puccini forced Giacosa and Illica to fit a text to the tune, because he sagely knew it was a melody too good to be wasted on a one-time christening.

The touching quartet in Act III is the expansion of a song “Sole e amore,” written in 1887 (again, new thoughts were fashioned to old music). Apart from borrowing from himself, Puccini utilized other sources as well. The fanfare played by the military band in Act II, for example, came from a tune written in the time of Emperor Louis Philippe. He also added autobiographical details to the libretto. Puccini himself once had to sell a coat to survive and his diaries speak of a student supper for four that consisted of a single herring.

Ultimately, what matters most is that all these ideas and sources go together to create a new unity that is intensely expressive and individual. These qualities shine forth whether Bohème is sung in Hungarian or Chinese, sung by professionals or students, or seen at La Scala or in a tent. Bohème remains Bohème, an opera possessed of an affecting and universal appeal that will sustain it as long as people love and opera is performed.

This article was published by San Francisco Opera in 1996.

The Making of the Libretto for La Bohème
by Evan Baker

Creating an opera libretto for a demanding composer is difficult, hard work. Very few librettists ever are successful, let alone remembered by a public for their output. However, several prominent pairings of librettists and composers creating immortal masterpieces began in the eighteenth century with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte (Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte). Giuseppe Verdi stood out in the nineteenth century at first with first Francesco Maria Piave (Ernani, Rigoletto, La Traviata) followed by Arrigo Boito (Otello and Falstaff). The twentieth century includes Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Arabella) and Giacomo Puccini with his team of Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, creating three cornerstones of today’s operatic repertory: La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly. Several composers preferred to create their own libretti, most notably Richard Wagner for all his operas, and Alban Berg for Wozzeck and Lulu.

Although the process of creating a libretto is straightforward, it is a difficult one—particularly with temperamental librettists and strong-willed composers. After the selection of the source material, be it based on any combination of an original idea, a novel, or a stage play, a text must be produced, usually first in the form of a prose scenario. Versification follows with the words set to poetic and distinct rhythmic meters, in hopes of producing a coherent and singable text with a clear dramatic structure that the composer can set to music. The possibility that a libretto might stand on its own as literature is rare. Many poets and playwrights intensely disliked being librettists, considering it to be demeaning and unrewarding hackwork.

During the composition of his Manon Lescaut in 1892, Puccini became acquainted with Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Earlier, Giacosa had proposed a libretto to Puccini but it was politely declined. About the same time, Puccini was having great problems with the chaotic state of the libretto for Manon Lescaut. Giulio Ricordi, Puccini’s publisher, brought in Illica in as "script doctor" to salvage much of the text. At Ricordi’s behest, Giacosa also assisted with revising the libretto. Both greatly helped to make Manon Lescaut a success at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 1, 1893, and the seeds were planted for their collaboration on La Bohème.

Giulio Ricordi (1840–1912) must be considered the unsung hero in the creation of La Bohème. The most successful member of the family dynasty of the House of Ricordi, the Milanese music publishing firm, Giulio printed, among others, the works of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini. Marshalling his exquisite skills of diplomacy, charm, and tact, Ricordi gently guided the suspicious and often cantankerous Verdi out of his retirement after the great success of Aida in 1872, shrewdly inducing the composer to accept Arrigo Boito as his librettist in creating the magnificent operas, Otello and Falstaff. Called "Sör Giulio" by Giacosa, the publisher frequently inserted himself into the creative process of the libretto for Bohème.

Already an experienced librettist, Luigi Illica (1857-1919) was a writer and successful playwright. A fast worker, he also was easily offended and possessed a hot temper, which in one instance led to a duel where he lost half an ear. In working with Puccini, Illica took the source material and transformed it into a prose scenario that would be passed onto Giacosa for versification, although he versified some of his own text. One of Illica’s great skills was transforming lines of fixed syllables into irregular lengths, a complete contrast to the prevailing practice of standardized poetic meter. Giacosa humorously referred to such text as “Illicasiballi.”

Giuseppe Giacosa (1847-1909) was one of Italy’s leading playwrights during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Endowed with an elegant beard and rotund figure, he was known for his equanimity, earning the sobriquet "the Buddha." He versified Illica’s prose but was a perfectionist and worked slowly to produce quality text. Aware of his high standing as a playwright, Giacosa disliked writing librettos, calling the process "pedantic." It was hard work and frequently he became exasperated with Puccini’s endless demands for changes, leading to voluble letters of resignation that were never accepted. At one point, Giacosa complained to Ricordi, "I must confess that with these continual refinements, retouchings, additions, corrections, cuts, restoring the cuts, blowing it up on the right, thinning it out on the left, I am deathly tired."

Despite Illica’s and Giacosa’s irritation and complaints with the composer’s insistence for changes, more often than not Puccini’s instincts proved him correct. Often, Puccini did not know exactly what he wanted, but he always had in mind the image of the stage action which, combined with his music, would create the great theatrical effect. Often the three artists were summoned to Ricordi’s office, where they quarreled, hammered out compromises, suggested new ideas, cut passages of text, or excised entire acts. Frequently, Ricordi applied his diplomatic skills to soothe overheated personalities, resolved artistic differences, and occasionally made his own contributions to the libretto.

The source of La Bohème derives from Henry Mürger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, first serialized over three years beginning in 1845 in the Parisian journal Le Corsaire de Satan. Théodore Barrière collaborated with Mürger in adapting the short stories into a five-act play, La Vie de Bohème, which premiered to great success at the Théâtre des Variétés on November 22, 1849 with Louis Napoleon in the audience. Two years later, Scènes de la vie de Bohème appeared in book form in which Mürger added a preface and rearranged many of the short stories. Mürger’s semi-autobiographical character sketches captured much of the 1840s Parisian milieu of Montmarte and the Latin Quarter. The author imagined himself as Rodolphe, an impoverished, starving writer. Many of the other characters are composites of known figures of the period that would provide a wealth of material for the opera.

As Manon Lescaut approached completion in 1892, it seems that Illica introduced Puccini to Mürger’s novel. Puccini was enthusiastic and asked Illica and Giacosa to create the libretto. At the same time Ruggiero Leoncavallo, the composer of Pagliacci, announced his intention to write an opera also based on Mürger’s novel. A contretemps ensued, and in the end Leoncavallo’s La Bohème premiered at Venice’s Teatro la Fenice in 1897, eighteen months after Puccini’s opera. Despite a string of moderate successes, which included a production at the Vienna Court Opera under Gustav Mahler’s personal direction, Leoncavallo’s opera was eclipsed by Puccini’s version and disappeared from the repertory.

Early in 1893, Illica quickly drafted the scenario and sent it to Giacosa. The original scenario called for five scenes in four acts. Act I, scene 1: the garret and the Bohemians; scene 2: the Latin Quarter in Café Momus; Act II: at the Barrière d’Enfer; Act III: the courtyard of Musetta’s domicile; Act IV: the garret and Mimi’s death. Recently, newly discovered documents have revealed far more details that do not appear in the finished product. Only the high points can be offered here, but the details can be found in the excellent publication by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker, La Bohème as part of the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series (Cambridge, 1986).

Many of the events in the garret of the first and last acts are based on chapters of Mürger’s novel. Marcel’s painting of the parting of the Red Sea appears in chapter 7, and chapter 9 relates Rodolfo burning his manuscript to keep the garret warm. Chapter 19 shows the Bohemians duping their landlord, but the name Benoît comes only from the play. Mimì is actually a composite of two characters from the novel. Rodolfo’s first encounter with Mimì is taken from chapter 18 with the artist Jacques and the seamstress Francine. Schaunard, not Colline, goes to pawn the overcoat. In the novel, Mimì dies alone in a hospital; a stark contrast to the opera’s ending with her death in the garret.

Save for one allusion, Act II has no similarity with the novel. The only reference is to chapter 11, set in “A Café in Bohemia” that takes place inside the Café Momus, not outside, as in the opera. While composing the Act II music, Puccini came up with a musical theme that had no text. Giuseppe Adami, an early biographer of Puccini, gleefully relates the composer explaining to Giacosa how he envisioned setting the text to music:

... in his musical work, [Puccini] feels an impetus and excitement that Giacosa does not feel. He has his ‘busy hours in which the hand is slow to follow the mind.’ Having found situations and scenes, if the verses are lacking, he sets the situations to music, as he always did.... The words will come later and can adapt to already fixed rhythms.

From time to time, he makes a trip to Milan. He needs the verses for Musetta. He has already composed the famous Waltz. He sings it again and again to Giacosa, pacing up and down his studio in Foro Bonaparte like a Napoleon who must overcome every obstacle in that of the obstinate musical ear of his great collaborator. To make things clear, he writes the meter he wants:

‘Look, you must do me some verses that correspond to these words: Cocoricò, Cocoricò, bistecca [cock-a-doodle-do, cock-a-doodle-do, beefsteak]. The poet turns pale, shudders, groans. But the next day the lines [of Musetta’s text] are adapted precisely to the music:

‘Quando me’n vo – quando me’n vo – soletta...’

Giacomo pockets the verses. He smiles, satisfied: ‘Well then. Now we’re there... as you see, it really was so simple.’

The original Act III, "Courtyard of a house at 8 rue de Bruyère" was to have been a grand social gathering hosted by Musetta and was derived from an episode in Mürger’s novel. Richly detailed with many people, the act opened with the Bohemians, including Mimì, appearing at the entrance to the courtyard. At the same instance, Musetta throws out bailiffs who attempted to repossess her furniture for non-payment of the rent. In short, porters arrive to carry out the furniture, and Musetta decides to throw a party and invites the residents of the building with the courtyard. Amidst the milling people, Mimì is charmed by a Viscount, creating a jealous row with Rodolfo and, at the end of the act, they separate.

It appears the entire act was cut in part because Puccini disliked it. Further, the act itself held up the progress of the dramatic action and did not fit with the overall structure of the opera. Not all of the material from the deleted act was lost. Some of the ideas were recycled elsewhere, the most prominent being Musetta’s introduction of Mimì to a group of students: "She is called Mimì / but her name is Lucia." These lines were revised to become a part of Mimì’s magnificent aria in Act I as "Mi chiamano Mimì / ma il mio nome è Lucia."

The scene of "Barrière d’Enfer" at the outskirts of Paris now becomes Act III and appears to be invented entirely by Illica. At first, Puccini disliked the act (causing Illica to feel insulted and leading to another series of explosions and arguments), for it was laden with far too many details thus risking a break in the dramatic flow. Here Ricordi offered many valuable suggestions for cuts and refinements in the libretto, including that Musetta should sing her waltz reminiscence from inside the tavern. Eventually Illica was soothed by Puccini and Ricordi, and the collaboration proceeded further.

In the last act, the collaboration again nearly went awry due to Schaunard’s expanded character. Originally, the libretto included a humorous episode of Schaunard inveighing against sexual politics, diplomats, and economic reform stopped only by one of the Bohemians’ kick to his groin. Schaunard was also to have a mock "credo" against women and a drinking song in praise of water. Giacosa was never enamored of the act as it stood, and refused to give into Puccini’s stubborn demands for changes. Illica stepped in, and expended the time and energy to create the required verses. But it was too much. Everyone was exhausted, and in the end, all realized the scene held up the dramatic progress to Mimì’s final entrance. All of Schaunard’s solos were deleted and the libretto further revised to include the clowning and mock swordfight between Schaunard and Colline.

The work on the libretto cost the poets, the composer, and Ricordi much paper, effort, and frayed nerves. Nonetheless, Giacosa and Illica skillfully captured much of the rich natural language and ambience of expressed in Mürger’s sketches and the play that reflected the social lives of the inhabitants of Paris in the 1840s together with details of the scenic action. The librettists added to the libretto a short extract from Mürger’s foreword as well as their own, along with several character descriptions from the novel. Here follow several samples from the 1897 English translation of the libretto by W. Grist and P. Pinkerton:

Act I: ...Mimi was a charming girl specially apt to appeal to Rudolph, the poet and dreamer. Aged twenty-two, she was slight and graceful. Her face reminded one of some sketch of highborn beauty; its features had marvelous refinement... This frail beauty allured Rudolph. But what wholly served to enchant him were Mimi’s tiny hands, that, despite her household duties, she contrived to keep whiter even than the Goddess of Ease.
Act II: ...Gustave Colline, the great philosopher; Marcel, the great painter; Rudolph, the great poet, and Schaunard, the great musician as they were wont to style themselves... Mademoiselle Musetta was a pretty girl of twenty... Very coquettish, rather ambitious, but without any pretensions to spelling.
Act III: Either as a congenital defect or as a natural instinct, Musetta possessed a positive genius for elegance... Even in her cradle this strange creature must surely have asked for a mirror... Intelligent, shrewd, and above all, hostile to anything that she considered tyranny, she had but one rule—caprice... In truth the only man that she really loved was Marcel; perhaps because he alone could make her suffer. Yet extravagance was for her one of the conditions of well-being.
Act IV: And Mimi, too, no word of her had Rudolph ever heard except when he talked about her to himself when he was alone... One day, as Marcel furtively kissed a bunch of ribbons that Musetta had left behind, he saw Rudolph hiding away a bonnet, that same pink bonnet which Mimi had forgotten.

La Bohème successfully premiered with Arturo Toscanini conducting at Turin’s Teatro Regio on February 1, 1896, with twenty-four performances in two months. Puccini, however, was not completely satisfied and continued to refine the libretto. Not until April 13, 1896 at its first performances at the Teatro Carolino, Palermo did the La Bohème achieve its breakthrough to international fame and fortune. Affirmed by Giacosa and Illica in their preface to the libretto together with Puccini’s superb music, Mürger’s observation of the Bohemians holds true today: vie charmante et vie terrible—"A gay life, and a terrible one."

Approximate running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes including two intermissions
Sung in Italian with English supertitles

San Francisco Opera production
Chevron is Corporate Production Sponsor for La Bohème.
This production is made possible, in part, by Elizabeth and Burgess Jamieson and by Tad and Dianne Taube and Koret Foundation.
Production photo: Ken Friedman
Cast, program and schedule are subject to change

Broadcasts

Listen Sunday, May 3 at 8 pm on Classical 102.1 KDFC

Recorded live at the War Memorial Opera House during the 2008-09 season.

This broadcast was produced by San Francisco Opera, with technical production by the San Francisco Opera Sound Department.
Producer: Marilyn Mercur
Broadcast Host: Elaine Warner