Review: Puccini's 'La bohème' by Alexandra Wilson

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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