Loretta: That was so awful.
Ronny: Awful?
Loretta: Beautiful... sad. She died!
-
John
Patrick Shanley Moonstruck (dir.
Norman Jewison, 1987)
In the 1987 film, Moonstruck, Ronny Cammareri (Nicholas
Cage) woos Loretta Castorini (Cher) by taking her to La bohème at ‘the Met’. In the Third Act, as the two principals on
stage touch hands through the snowflakes, Ronny reaches over to Loretta, who
takes his hand, and a solitary tear trickles down her face. This beautiful scene
is a far better assessment of the opera than anything ever attempted by
critics.
Puccini’s La bohème will always be loved by audiences wherever opera is
performed. It is a staple of every company, the vehicle of great performers
(Melba and Caruso were a legendary partnership as Mimì and Rodolfo), and also a
great ensemble piece for companies which do not boast stars. But what makes it
endure? Gordon Kerry has written about the music. Suffice it for me to say that
Puccini wanted it to be constantly melodic (sometimes right down to the bass
line) even if the words were merely: “The bill – already?” Fausto Torrefranca,
one of the first critics, complained that Rodolfo’s opening phrase, “Nei cieli
bigi”, about the chimneys smoking across the rooftops of Paris, could just as
easily have been set to the words, “And for this evening, I’d like some
macaroni”. But Torrefranca misses the point. Audiences are deeply grateful for Puccini’s
unashamed melodiousness.
But there’s another reason why Bohème endures. It is fundamentally touching.
Think of six young people enjoying
their youths in the poorer artistic echelons of Paris. Cold and hungry, Rodolfo
and Mimì can still find a love that is more serious than the youthful affairs (“loves
that last as long as a bedroom candle”) of their peers.
 |
| Ji-Min Park as Rodolfo and Takesha Meshe Kizart as Mimi. Photo: Jeff Busby, courtesy Opera Australia |
But Mimì is sick. Try
as Rodolfo and Mimì might to enjoy their love, the shadow of mortal illness
hangs over them, and Rodolfo even tries to break off with Mimì rather than face
the inevitable heartbreak of her death. Mimì, for her part, steels herself
against Rodolfo’s hardness by going off with a viscount who may shower her with
better gifts. But then she returns. Too late. Rodolfo’s friends, clearer-sighted
than he, realise that she is half an hour from death. She dies while Rodolfo is
covering the window to shield her eyes from the spring glare. Even this brief
account, without the music, reveals the potential for a memorably sad tale.
And this is where we glean the other
great strength of La bohème. The
music is genius, but La bohème works also
because Puccini and his librettists, Illica and Giacosa, and even his
publisher, Ricordi, worked so hard to create dramatic situations that can
really wring your heart.
Don’t believe me? There is another
Bohème and it is instructive to
compare the two.
On 20 March 1893, Ruggero
Leoncavallo, famous for Pagliacci, declared
in the newspaper, Secolo, that he had
been working on an adaptation of Murger’s novel, Scenes from Bohemian Life, since the previous December. He said
that he had even offered the part of Schaunard to the singer Maurel at the time
of the latter’s arrival in Milan to sing in Verdi’s Falstaff. “Imagine my surprise”, Leoncavallo seemed to be saying,
when Puccini informed him that he himself was working on La bohème.
The next day, in the pages of the Corriere della sera Puccini disputed
that he had got the idea from Leoncavallo. He claimed to have been working on
the idea since the time of the Turin premiere of his previous opera, Manon Lescaut. Leoncavallo shot back: no,
Puccini got the idea a few days after returning
from Turin. And so the spat went on, until Puccini eventually said, in his
final public retort: “Priority in art does not mean that one must interpret the
same subject with the same artistic ideas…Let the public decide.” And they
have. For Puccini.
Leoncavallo’s La bohème is worth hearing. There are sweeping lyrical highlights. Musetta
even has a waltz song. And many of its defenders argue that Leoncavallo’s version
remained more faithful to Murger’s original novel. Though histrionic in the
fashion of verismo opera,
Leoncavallo’s La bohème maintains a
measure of detached social criticism.
But in a sense, so what? It is far
less moving than Puccini’s opera. Compare the number of performances in the 114
years since both were premiered. Leoncavallo fails to achieve precisely what
Giacosa says his co-librettist Illica achieved in his adaptation: extracting a
“dramatic action” from an episodic novel which had always seemed to Giacosa
“exquisite but little suited to the stage.”’
Henry Murger’s bohemian tales were
first written in serial form for editions of Le Corsaire, 1845-48. They were later adapted into a play La Vie de bohème, and premiered at
Paris’s Théâtre des Variétés in 1849. This was so successful that Michel Lévy
commissioned Murger to turn the work into a novel, Scenes from Bohemian Life which was published in 1851.
Murger’s novel delightfully
portrays life among the bohemians of 1830s Paris (rambunctious young people oblivious
of poverty, as they energetically seek the higher rewards of art and
philosophy). The characters and locations were based on real people and places.
Café Momus was at 15 Rue du Prêtres, Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois; Murger himself
was the model for Rodolphe. And the novel is really a series of vignettes in no
particular chronological order, containing a multitude of characters revolving
around the four friends. ‘A Good Angel’ (Chapter 2) is typical. Schaunard (who
is also a painter in the novel) persuades a representative of the sugar
industry to pose for him without his frock-coat, so that the starving Marcel
can wear it to dinner with a deputy of France. The sugar rep shouts Schaunard
dinner, so that when Marcel returns Schaunard is sleeping off the feast. Marcel
is resentful. He had brought the hungry wretch some dinner – and he takes some
peanuts out of his pocket. There it is - neat, charming, rounded-off.
But it is strange to think that the
same episodic book would have occurred to two composers, rivals, as suitable
for operatic adaptation at the same time. There is nothing intrinsically
dramatic in the novel (and both composers avoided the play, partly because the
most useful scene – Mimì’s death – was too close to Verdi’s La traviata).
Leoncavallo, his own librettist,
is more faithful in keeping certain characters – for example, Viscount Paul for
whom Mimì leaves Rodolphe. And he keeps the scene where Musetta goes ahead with
her planned soiree though she has been evicted and her furniture taken
downstairs into the courtyard.
But by trying to portray
faithfully the bohemian high jinks which are such a delightful part of the novel,
Leoncavallo submerges a clear throughline, particularly in the long first act.
We wait an age for some emotion to be engaged. There is a proposal to go to the
Bal Marbille, the wealthy Barbemuche offers to pay the bohemian’s bill, and
Schaunard salvages everyone’s honour in a billiards game while Marcello makes a
play for Musetta. At the end of Musetta’s soiree Viscount Paul steals Mimì away,
but Leoncavallo has concentrated our attention on Marcello and Musetta (the
lead tenor and soprano of his version), whose affair can never be as touching
as one that ends in death, and by the time Mimì’s death is announced in
Leoncavallo’s version, the audience could plausibly ask, “Which one was Mimì?
We have established no particular rapport with her.”
How this compares with the La bohème that audiences love; that of Puccini,
and Illica, Giacosa, and Ricordi.
Each member brought his own
brilliance to the enterprise. It was Giacosa (respected playwright and peer of
Boito, Verdi’s last librettist) who had to create wonderful verse from the
treatments and dialogue that Illica would send him scene by scene, or from the
nonsense verse to which Puccini composed his melodies as he sometimes sped
ahead sufficiently inspired by the dramatic situation and sure enough of his
dramatic instincts to go on without
the exact words in hand. While he was out hunting near his home at Torre del
Lago, Puccini came up with some nonsense lyrics to guide Giacosa to the sort of
words he wanted for Musetta: “Coccoricó,
coccoricó, bistécca (ie. cock-adoodle-do, cock-adoodle-doo, beefsteak)” to
which Giacosa wrote “Quando me’n vo’, quando me’n vo’ soletta” – Musetta’s
famous Waltz Song:
When I walk alone in the street
People stop and stare,
And all seek in me my beauty
From head to foot.
 |
| Act II La boheme. Taryn Fiebig as Musetta. Photo: Jeff Busby, courtesy Opera Australia |
Puccini exasperated them all with
his capriciousness and indecision. He was always looking for a certain
‘something’. As Illica complained: “I don’t know where to turn to find which
‘something’ is the ‘something’ that Puccini calls ‘something’.” But listening
to Puccini’s music, we can be thankful that he clearly found it. Meanwhile, Ricordi
kept his eye on all of them, brilliantly brokering their fallings-out and
contributing his own occasional prod.
Illica was the swift dramatic
thinker whom Puccini biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz greatly credits for Boheme’s success. It was Illica who found
the touchstone for their story in a chapter in Murger’s novel called ‘Francine’s
Muff’, chapter 18 in a 23-chapter novel, which does not concern Mimì or
Rodolphe! In this chapter, Rodolphe (Murger’s alter ego) tells the sad story of
the love that grew between Francine and an artist-friend of his, Jacques one
cold night. Francine’s candle had blown out and she came to Jacques for a
light. They fell in love in the moonlight. It was she who hid her key so that
Jacques might ask her to stay. And thus it began. The chapter goes on to
describe Francine’s tragic death and Jacques’ implacable despair, although the
chapter does not end there: it ends with Jacques’ death. But clearly Puccini’s Mimì
is also a composite of Francine.
“You have been able to extract
from a novel which seems to me exquisite but little suited to the theatre a
real dramatic action,” wrote Giacosa to Illica on 22 March 1893. But the scene outline
at this stage was as follows:
Act I i Garret
ii. In the Latin Quarter
Act II The Tollgate
Act III Musetta’s Courtyard
Act IV The Death of Mimì
The ‘Latin Quarter’ is the Café Momus
scene (today’s Act II) which was at this stage the happy finale to Act I. ‘Musetta’s
Courtyard’ (Act III above) lends credence to the theory that Puccini poached
his Bohème idea off Leoncavallo, who
retained this episode.
But how much ground had to be
travelled before the team achieved the work that so effectively entices audiences
today. Ah, recalled Illica nostalgically in 1906:
Those sessions of ours [in
Ricordi’s office]…Real battles in which there and then entire acts were torn to
pieces, scene after scene sacrificed, ideas abjured which only a moment ago had
seemed bright and beautiful; thus was destroyed in a minute the work of long
and painful months. Giacosa, Puccini, Giulio Ricordi and I – we were a quartet
because Giulio Ricordi…would always leave his presidential chair and descend
into our semicircle…to become one of the most obstinate and most vigorous
belligerents…Giacosa was for us the equilibrium, [his] voice…the delightful,
persuasive song of the nightingale…And Puccini? After each session he had to
run to the manicurist to have his finger-nails attended to: he had bitten them
off, down to the bone.
It’s hard to imagine Puccini being
quite so terrified since, as composer, he was the ultimate arbiter, but yes, there
were fights and ultimatums. First one would threaten to leave, then the other,
then Puccini might desultorily wonder if it was worth going on…But those fights
saw changes that we wouldn’t want to live without, opportunities for Puccini’s
greatest music.
The biggest showdown was a meeting
in February 1894 to decide what to do with ‘Musetta’s Courtyard’. Illica and
Giacosa were reluctant to cut it. It would lessen the significance of Mimì’s
return to Rodolfo if they couldn’t show her going off with Viscount Paul. But Puccini
didn’t think this was important. He was most interested in Mimì’s death and
wanted to cut straight to it from the tollgate. Finally, the team came up with a
new beginning to Act IV, the return of the bohemians where Marcello and Rodolfo
could briefly allude to Mimì’s whereabouts, but more importantly create a boisterous
‘set-up’ for the ironic switch to tragedy with Mimì’s final entrance. Puccini was
happy of course. It also afforded him an opportunity for a kind of musical
recapitulation of Act I.
But Illica was worried about the cut:
we still don’t have anywhere for a big tenor aria he reminded Puccini. Then he
had another brainwave, what Giacosa called the “self-introductions”. Thus was
created the space in Act I for the very arias and duet (Rodolfo’s ‘Che gelida manina,
Mimì’s ‘Mi chiamano Mimì’ and their duet: ‘O soave fanciùlla’) by which a
modern audience gets to care about Mimì and Rodolfo and therefore the course of
their affair.
Thus after a year and a half did
work on the libretto create the tragic situations which make us extra-receptive
to the emotionality of Puccini’s music. Once the plot had settled into the form
by which we know it today, musical composition could proceed relatively
smoothly though, as Ricordi wisely conceded, the libretto might still need
shortening according to the “dictates of musical necessity, as they will appear
in the course of composition”.
Everything the four did creates a
story that gradually engages us, enlarges our sympathy and wrings our hearts.
It is not in Murger (nor Leoncavallo) this lamentable decline of Mimì, her
stifled cough in Act I, which becomes more pronounced in Act III, leading to
her breathlessness and inability to climb the stairs in Act IV. Nor the obvious
arrival of spring, to mock the death of one who had sung longingly of it in the
First Act. This was all mapped.
Considering all this it’s easy to
see why the opera took three years to reach the stage, from the controversy
with Leoncavallo in March 1893 to the first performance in Turin in February
1896. Some accounts blame Puccini’s need to personally attend the premieres
around Europe of his previous hit, Manon
Lescaut. Others recount that he’d been distracted by toying with an opera
on La lupa by Giovanni Verga, the
novelist on whose Cavalleria rusticana
Mascagni’s opera is based. And another reason may be the time he took out for
hunting trips. But a considerable part of the reason for the long gestation of
the opera is that it took all this time to get the story just right.
One can only imagine how the
librettists and publisher felt when they finally heard what Puccini, the
musical dramatist, had added - the intimation of magic in a change of key, for
example, as Rodolfo catches a glimpse of Mimì silvered in the moonlight. One
night in 1895 Puccini played Giacosa some of his ‘work-in-progress’. Giacosa
who was so frustrated by the experience of collaborating on Bohème, that he had several times threatened
to quit and “never write an opera libretto again”, was reconciled to the work. “Puccini
has surpassed all my expectation, and I now understand the reason for his
tyranny over verses and accents,” he wrote. (And of course Giacosa went on write
Tosca and Madam Butterfly with all of them again.)
Puccini’s opera is perfect in all
its elements. It is not because it was newer or more up-to-date (or first) that
it triumphed over Leoncavallo’s work. It is because it is a work that touches
audience’s hearts. Early audiences may have been a little slow to warm to it.
And many critics certainly didn’t know what to make of it, but by the time the
work had appeared at Palermo under Mugnone (its fourth production in two and a
half months in 1896), the reception was so rapturous that Mugnone had to repeat
the entire last act. The cast had already de-wigged and dressed to go home!
Never mind, the love affair went on. The acclaim for Bohème has not waned since. Audiences love this sad beauty.
Gordon Kalton Williams ©2011
This article first appeared in program booklets for Opera Australia’s
2011 production of
La bohème, directed by Gale Edwards. Photographs by Jeff Busby reproduced by kind permission.
If you are interested in other articles of mine on classical composers, please see:
Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], ideas for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012
My article on Tosca appears in my blog dated 15 December 2014
