La Bohème

Giacomo Puccini
Cherish the one you love
Christmas in Paris is magical, especially for Mimi and Rodolfo. Can their young love survive the cold reality of bohemian life as Mimi grows ill?
Conductor: Peter MARK
Stage Director: Julia PEVZNER
Performed in Italian
with English Supertitles
Study Guides available this August
The scene of the opera is Paris, About 1890.
Act I: Paris, Christmas Eve. In the Latin Quarter, the painter Marcello and poet Rodolfo try to keep warm by burning pages from Rodolfo's latest drama. They are joined by Colline, a young philosopher; and Schaunard, a musician who has landed a job and brings food, fuel and funds. But while they celebrate their unexpected fortune, the landlord, Benoit, arrives to collect the rent. Plying the older man with wine, they urge him to tell of his flirtations, and then throw him out in mock indignation. As the friends depart for a celebration at the nearby Café Momus, Rodolfo promises to join them soon, staying behind to finish writing an article. There is another knock: a neighbor, Mimì, says her candle has gone out on the drafty stairs. Offering her wine when she feels faint, Rodolfo relights her candle and helps her to the door. Mimì realizes she has dropped her key and, as they both search for it, their candles are blown out. The poet takes the girl's shivering hand, telling her his dreams. Drawn to each other, Mimì and Rodolfo leave for the café.
ACT II: Rodolfo buys Mimì a bonnet near the Café Momus before introducing her to his friends. They all sit down and order supper. Marcello's former lover, Musetta, enters on the arm of the elderly, wealthy Alcindoro. Trying to regain the painter's attention, she sings a waltz about her popularity. Complaining that her shoe pinches, Musetta sends Alcindoro to fetch a new pair, and then falls into Marcello's arms. Joining a group of marching soldiers, the Bohemians leave Alcindoro to face the bill when he returns.
ACT III: On the snowy outskirts of Paris, Mimì searches for the place where the reunited Marcello and Musetta now live. When the painter emerges, she pours out her distress over Rodolfo's jealousy. It is best they part, she says. Rodolfo, who has been asleep in the tavern, is heard, and Mimì hides; Marcello thinks she has left. The poet tells Marcello he wants to separate from his fickle sweetheart. Pressed further, he breaks down, saying Mimì is dying; her ill health can only worsen in the poverty they share. Overcome, Mimì stumbles forward to bid her lover farewell as Marcello runs back into the tavern to investigate Musetta's raucous laughter. While Mimì and Rodolfo recall their happiness, Musetta quarrels with Marcello. The painter and his mistress part in fury, but Mimì and Rodolfo decide to stay together until spring.
ACT IV: Some months later, Rodolfo and Marcello lament their loneliness in the garret. Colline and Schaunard bring a meager meal. The four stage a dance, which turns into a mock fight. The merrymaking is ended when Musetta bursts in, saying Mimì is downstairs, too weak to climb up. As Rodolfo runs to her, Musetta tells how Mimì has begged to be taken to her lover to die. While Mimì is made comfortable, Marcello goes with Musetta to sell her earrings for medicine, and Colline leaves to pawn his cherished overcoat. Alone, Mimì and Rodolfo recall their first days together, but she is seized with coughing. When the others return, Musetta gives Mimì a muff to warm her hands and prays for her life. Mimì dies quietly, and when Schaunard discovers she is dead, Rodolfo runs to her side, calling her name.
About the Composer
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)
Giacomo Puccini was the heir to Italy's cherished opera icon, Giuseppe Verdi: he became the last champion of the great Italian Romantic opera tradition, in which lyricism, melody, and the vocal arts dominated the art form.
Puccini came from a family of musicians who for generations had been church organists and composers in his native Lucca, Italy, a part of the Tuscany region. His operatic epiphany occurred when he heard a performance of Verdi's Aïda: at that moment the 18 year old, budding composer became inspired toward a future in opera. With aid from Queen Margherita of Italy that was supplemented by additional funds from a great uncle, he progressed to the Milan Conservatory, where he eventually studied under Amilcare Ponchielli, a renowned musician, teacher, and the composer of La Gioconda (1876).
In Milan, Ponchielli became his mentor, astutely recognizing his extraordinarily rich orchestral and symphonic imagination, and his remarkable harmonic and melodic inventiveness, resources that would become the hallmarks and signature characteristics of Puccini's mature compositional style.
Puccini's early experiences served to elevate his acute sense of drama, which eventually became engraved in his operatic works. He was fortunate to have been exposed to a wide range of dramatic plays that were presented in his hometown by distinguished touring companies: works by Vittorio Alfieri, Carlo Goldoni, the French works of Alexandre Dumas', father and son, as well as those of the extremely popular Victorien Sardou.
In 1884, at the age of 26, Puccini competed in the publisher Sonzogno's one-act opera contest with his lyric stage work, Le Villi, "The Witches," a phantasmagoric romantic tale about abandoned young women who die of lovesickness; musically and dramatically, Le Villi remains quite a distance from the poignant sentimentalism which later became Puccini's trademark. Le Villi lost the contest, but La Scala agreed to produce the opera for its following season. But more significantly to Puccini's future career, Giulio Ricordi, the influential publisher, recognized the young composer's talent to write musical drama, and lured him from his competitor, Sonzogno.
Puccini became Ricordi's favorite composer, a status that developed into much peer envy, resentfulness, and jealousy among his rivals, as well as from Ricordi's chief publishing competitor, Sonzogno. Nevertheless, Ricordi used his ingenious golden touch to unite composers and librettists, and he proceeded to assemble the best poets and dramatists for his budding star, Puccini.
Ricordi commissioned Puccini to write a second opera, Edgar (1889), a melodrama involving a rivalry between two brothers for a seductive Moorish woman that erupts into powerful passions of betrayal and revenge. Its premiere at La Scala became a disappointment: the critics praised Puccini's orchestral and harmonic advancement from Le Villi, but considered the work mediocre; even its later condensation from four acts to three acts could not redeem or improve its fortunes.
Ricordi's faith in his young protégé was triumphantly vindicated by the immediate success of Puccini's next opera, Manon Lescaut (1893). The genesis of the libretto was itself an operatic melodrama, saturated with feuds and disagreements between its considerable group of writers who included Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Luigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa, Domenico Oliva, Marco Praga, and even Giulio Ricordi himself. The critics and public were unanimous in their praise of Puccini's third opera, and in London, the eminent critic, George Bernard Shaw, noted that in Manon Lescaut, "Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals."
For Puccini's librettos over the next decade, Ricordi secured for him the illustrious team of the scenarist, Luigi Illica, and the poet, playwright, and versifier, Giuseppe Giacosa. The first fruit of their collaboration became La Bohème (1896), drawn from Henri Murger's picaresque novel about life among the artists of the Latin Quarter in Paris during the 1830s: Scènes de la vie de Bohème.
The critics were strangely cool at La Bohème's premiere, several of them finding it a restrained work when compared to the inventive passion and ardor of Manon Lescaut. But in spite of negative reviews, the public eventually became enamored with the opera, and it would only be in Vienna, where Mahler, hostile to Puccini, virtually banned La Bohème in favor of Leoncavallo's treatment of the same subject.
After La Bohème, Puccini proceeded to transform Victorien Sardou's play, La Tosca (1887), into a sensational, powerful, and thrilling musical action drama, improving on his literary source and providing immortality to its dramatist.
His next opera was an adaptation of David Belasco's one-act play, Madam Butterfly (1904). At its premiere, the opera experienced what Puccini described as "a veritable lynching," the audience's hostility and denunciation of the composer and his work apparently deliberately engineered by rivals who were jealous of Puccini's success and favored status with Ricordi. Nevertheless, Puccini's Madama Butterfly quickly joined its two predecessors as cornerstones of the contemporary operatic repertory.
Puccini followed with La Fanciulla del West (1910),"The Girl of the West," La Rondine (1917), the three one-act operas of Il Trittico - Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi and Il Tabarro (1918), and his final work, Turandot (1926), the latter completed posthumously by Franco Alfano under the direction of Arturo Toscanini.
Photos: Virginia Opera - La Bohème, Anne M. Peterson