Mark Austin Puccini’s ‘La bohème’ regularly tops lists of the best-loved operas. A rare evergreen in the repertoire, the work can justifiably be called a cultural phenomenon. Alexandra Wilson investigates the forces behind this in her absorbing new book in the Oxford Keynotes series.
Her decision to broaden the focus beyond a critical introduction to the opera allows fascinating insights to emerge. We learn that during the composition process Puccini worked in alternating phases with his two librettists in a rare example of successful committee authorship. Contemporary responses to the work reveal how a male viewer would often identify with one of the four Bohemians, prompting Wilson to compare it with the TV series Friends and its similar “depiction of twenty-something relationships in an urban loft setting”. A romanticised vision of Paris lies at the heart of ‘La bohème’. Puccini located four of his operas in the city: ‘Manon Lescaut’ (1893), ‘La bohème’ (1896), ‘La rondine’ (1917) and ‘Il tabarro’ (1918). Yet astonishingly he had not visited Paris before writing ‘La bohème’. The contrast with the specificity of place he sought in ‘Tosca’ (1900) is striking. (Puccini famously reproduced the exact soundscape of Rome's church bells at dawn, jotting down the pitches and locations across the city.) It’s clear that Bohemian Paris is an imaginary location, “more a state of mind, a way of dressing and behaving, than an actual place, arguably just as idealised as any ‘exotic’ operatic locale.” This has allowed directors to set recent productions as far apart as Brooklyn, Elizabethan London or the moon. At first ‘La bohème’ did not appear likely to become a mainstay of the repertoire. Puccini’s music suffered considerably from comparisons with Wagner, whose works enthralled audiences. The notorious Italian critic Fausto Torrefranca saw ‘La bohème’ as symptomatic of the decadence of Italian culture, blaming it and Italian opera generally (too bourgeois and effeminate) for the decline of the nation. In England it was regrettably labelled “one of the weakest operas Sheffield has ever heard”. Key to its eventual success was the soprano Nellie Melba, the greatest female star of her day, who studied the role of Mimì with Puccini for 6 weeks, and toured internationally. She still played the role in her sixties, retaining audience affection if not dramatic plausibility. Wilson is particularly strong on different approaches to staging the opera. The discussion often seems to transcend the focus on ‘La bohème’ to provide a philosophy for opera staging in general. Although Wilson recognises that updating the setting is “undoubtedly a welcome and necessary means of giving vitality to the art form”, her sympathies seem to lie with directors who, like her, attempt to get to grips with the context and detail of the original vision: The argument that updating operas to the present is obligatory in order to make them ‘relevant’ or to bring in new audiences is facile, indeed perhaps even insulting to the intelligence of these imagined novice audience members, who presumably have no problem ‘relating to’ characters in films and television dramas set in Roman times or the Tudor period. Her answer to decades-long “snobbery" about Puccini’s sheer accessibility is an invitation: “[Puccini] gave himself completely unto theatrical pleasure and…perhaps we ought to yield to it as well.” Given this open-mindedness, the reader may be surprised by her sanitized reading of Mimì, the tragic heroine of the drama. We are told several times that the first encounter between Mimì and Rodolfo is fortuitous, and it is “inconsequential” that she informs Rodolfo her real name is Lucia. This seems to misrepresent Mimì’s significance. Whereas the four men are relatively comfortable, in essence play-acting a Bohemian life, she is poor. She has very few possessions. The thinly-veiled implication in the libretto is that Lucia has a public identity as “Mimì”, probably not by choice. It’s not clear exactly what this means: actress, hostess, escort, or prostitute. Since she lives in the same apartment block as Rodolfo it seems unlikely that the famous candle is extinguished in a chance encounter. More likely she spotted him a while ago, now wants some company, perhaps needs some income, and has chosen her moment. On this it might have been interesting to interview some of the great singers and coaches of the role today to provide a theatrical perspective. This is a minor quibble about a text that is extremely well-written and engaging. Although the Keynotes Series is aimed at “performers, curious listeners and advanced undergraduates”, the book will appeal to any opera lover who has enjoyed Puccini’s most famous work. Hopefully directors too will absorb what Wilson has to say, and perhaps even consult her. 'La bohème' is often understood as a symbol for opera thanks to its irresistible music and emotional impact. Wilson’s book in turn is an exemplary demonstration of the importance of cultural context in keeping it alive.
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Mark Austin Is there any symphony that cries out for live performance more than Mahler’s 8th? Waves of sound emanating from hundreds of performers pin you to your seat; no recording can ever capture this. Stephen Johnson, in his new book The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 describes the electric atmosphere at the first performance in Munich:
“The concert was billed to start at 7.30pm, but Mahler didn’t make his entrance onto the stage until exactly 7.45pm - a spontaneous decision, or a carefully planned one? Either way it had the desired effect, stoking up the tension to exactly the right level…The nervous, excited chatter built steadily during the quarter of an hour that followed the expected start time; and when the tiny figure of Gustav Mahler made his way effortfully through the close-compacted mass of performers, a thunderous cheer suddenly erupted throughout the hall.” This was a genuinely historic moment, not dissimilar to the first Ring at Bayreuth in 1876. The performance was attended by musicians (Reger, Richard Strauss, Webern, Zemlinsky, Dukas, Saint-Saëns, and Stokowski), writers (Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig), royals, aristocracy and a vast intellectual and artistic elite. Many arrived in cars, creating unusual clouds of fumes. Modernity had arrived, yet this event was witnessed primarily by the old orders. Saint-Saëns, the musician whose life probably spans the most varied landscape in musical history (from just after Beethoven to a few years after the Rite of Spring) had also attended Wagner’s triumph in 1876. Johnson’s impressive study of the personal, cultural, and political landscapes of Mahler’s greatest public triumph is eloquent and passionately argued. Filled with fascinating moments, it will speak to any singer, orchestral player, conductor, or listener who has come into contact with the titanic creative energy of the 8th Symphony. (All the more extraordinary to read that the composition may have been a desperate musical offering from Mahler to dissuade his wife Alma from leaving him for her young lover Walter Gropius). Even today, the pressures on a conductor mounting this piece are such that we all recognise composer Ethel Smyth’s experience of working with Mahler - “like handling a bomb cased in razor-edges”. Johnson is particularly convincing in his exploration of Mahler’s distinct identities: Austrian, Germanic, Jewish and perpetual outsider. This is Mahler as an icon familiar to our own age. It is useful to be reminded of the historical contexts behind his symphonies, which as he famously said to Sibelius, aimed to contain the world. Thomas Mann’s son (not brother, as wrongly stated), historian Golo Mann interpreted the profusion of ‘world’-compounds such as Weltpolitik in the German language as an expression of imperialism. In this context Mahler’s decision to compose a symphony with text from Goethe assumes new significance. Alma is the hidden presence behind much of Mahler’s later music. Johnson avoids speculating about her affair with Gropius, but her powerful, self-obsessed personality is shown to stalk the composer throughout. It is well known that Alban Berg dedicated his haunting violin concerto to the memory of Alma’s daughter Manon, but perhaps not that the dying 18-year-old’s last words are recorded as: “You’ll get over it, Mummy, as you get over everything - I mean…as everyone gets over everything.” Mahler chose a medieval hymn ‘Veni, creator spiritus’ for the first part of the symphony. Johnson’s exploration of this choice is rigorous and insightful. It is a greater challenge to elucidate the second part with its text by Goethe - the very final lines of Faust. To what extent does the rest of Goethe’s complex text, written over decades, have any bearing on the symphony? It would be impossible to take a definitive position on this. Very few performers read texts as the author intended and Johnson avoids delving into Faust in detail. Highlighting Mahler’s emphasis on “musical argument” rather than “adding nuances of meaning to Goethe’s words”, Johnson even remarks how at one point Mahler’s setting seems completely to ignore the mood of the verse. Johnson’s narrative often takes the form of a series of open-ended questions, which may be frustrating for the reader seeking clear answers. But the tide of the argument flows in a convincing direction, and the refusal to force specific meaning on the music is true to Mahler’s own conception of his work. This speculative approach can nevertheless result in claims which may be outlandish, particularly when it comes to literary texts. Is Tadzio’s beckoning gesture at the end of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice really a tribute to Mahler and his setting of Goethe’s “The Eternal Feminine/ Draws us on” or just a nod to Goethe’s text on its own terms? Johnson’s book brings this music to life with rare vitality. Words about music are always inadequate, and yet, when we learn that Mahler himself confessed not to understand Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet (1908), it is clear that they have a vital, transformative role to play. With this work, Johnson inherits the mantle of the late Deryck Cooke and establishes himself as the foremost commentator on Mahler for the general reader. |