Moments in an inexorable drama (Puccini's Tosca)

Moments in an inexorable drama – a spotlight on Tosca’s musical highlights

Act I proper of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s 1995 opera Harvey Milk begins with music that is recognisable as the brutal Scarpia motif from Puccini’s opera Tosca. Why? Harvey Milk, the assassinated San Francisco City Supervisor and gay rights leader, loved opera and....well, Tosca is arguably the opera buff’s opera par excellence.

Critics may dismiss Tosca but it’s a particularly successful piece of music theatre. Its libretto is as economical as a screenplay. At the same time audiences have great musical moments to savour. Trust Puccini to be able to detect the opera beneath a dialogue-heavy play - Sardou’s La Tosca of 1887.

I wouldn’t want to launch into an appreciation of Tosca’s great moments without first paying tribute to the swift and inexorable drama that Puccini and his librettists, particularly Illica the scenarist, created from Sardou’s well-made play. In operatic terms, Sardou’s play is too much - five acts, historical minutiae, 23 characters... Illica began the task of condensing it, reducing the number of characters and the number of acts. Together the Puccini team’s version concertina-ed the action, ratchetting up the tension, and most importantly making room for lyrical expansion (in other words arias and set pieces such as love duets).

Sardou’s play begins with the Sacristan and Cavaradossi’s servant Gennarino (not in the opera) discussing Cavaradossi’s habits. No stakes raised there! But Puccini’s curtain goes up on Angelotti, who has escaped from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Puccini can get to the first of the opera’s ‘big numbers’ as quickly as possible.

Recondita armonia

And this is Cavaradossi’s aria – Recondita armonia (How strange a thing is beauty). Cavaradossi is painting a Mary Magdalene for the church where the First Act is set. Unconsciously almost, Cavaradossi has modelled his Magdalene on a woman who has been coming each day ostensibly to pray – the Attavanti, who has actually been preparing an escape kit to conceal in the family chapel for her brother, Angelotti. But Cavaradossi is in love with Tosca. How can he admire the Attavanti’s beauty at the same time? Cavaradossi muses on the power of art to merge all kinds of beauty.

The aria begins with one of the opera’s most striking orchestral effects. Hushed strings leading to hurdy gurdy-like swirls on flutes and clarinet. Lyricist Giacosa’s text consists of two verses of five lines each, over which Puccini constructs his ingenious melody. Cavaradossi’s musing is expressed in near-monotone, rising to a lyrical outpouring as he compares the two women’s eyes. Puccini returns to the ruminating single tones as Cavaradossi reflects on art, that ‘strange enigma’, before surging again - focussed on Tosca - to a top note. ‘Recondita armonia’ is often sung in concerts; in the theatre you get to hear it counterpointed with the Sacristan’s pious asides, a perfect example of how Puccini can use music to delineate contrasting characters.

The Sacristan leaves; Angelotti emerges from his hiding place. Puccini’s Cavaradossi recognises him as ‘the Consul of the former Roman republic’ and that is enough to establish him without Sardou’s lengthy introductions. But Tosca arrives and Angelotti must make himself scarce.

Act I Love Duet

It’s a tribute to the dramatic flow of this opera that many of the big numbers are also fully-fledged scenes, and can be discussed as such. Such is the case with the love duet in Act I, four lyrical sections interspersed with recitative.

The music settles as Tosca enters. Though her theme is sweetly orchestrated – flute and pizzicato strings - she’s jealous. Who was Mario talking to? Cavaradossi placates her and she talks (that is, in recitative) about their meeting later that evening. Ascertaining his happy expectation, she tells of her dream of a little house for the two of them in the country. We are 15 minutes in, precisely at the point where Oscar Hammerstein II later stipulated that the lead character in a show should have an ‘I Want Number’. Puccini follows Giacosa’s rhyming scheme here (although quite often, in this 20^th century opera, he overrides it) and as she rises to her highest point: ‘... palpitate/ ...albor,/ ...stellate! / ...amor!’, Cavaradossi breaks in joking about how she ‘fetters’ him. But note, they rarely sing together in this love duet – that’s one of the realistic (‘verismo’) touches; after all, real people rarely speak at the same time. In another long recitative, Tosca notices the portrait of the Attavanti as Magdalene. Cavaradossi reassures her (‘Quale occhio’) that no eyes in all the world can equal the ‘dark, fiery eyes of my Tosca’. They now sing in duet, although it’s mostly dovetailing and interjection. Tosca leaves, calmer now that he’s sworn his love, and Cavaradossi can get Angelotti from his hiding place.

Keep in mind what’s happened here. There’s another love scene later in the opera (also another tenor aria) and after the events of Acts I and II, they’re both of a more piquant emotionalism.

Angelotti now mentions that he fell victim to Baron Scarpia, police chief of Rome, and Cavaradossi swears to defend Angelotti against the ‘dirty bigot’. A cannon shot announces discovery of Angelotti’s escape. Cavaradossi has given Angelotti the key to his villa. Swift contrasts abound: no sooner has Angelotti gone than the Sacristan and pupils enter to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat at Marengo. This plot beats like a modern script.

The children’s high jinks are quashed by the arrival of Scarpia.

Act I Finale 

We now have the set-up for what Mosco Carner described ‘as one of the most effective act-endings in all opera’. Against the performance of a Te Deum, Scarpia gives vent to his twin lusts to see Cavaradossi executed  and Tosca in his paws. It’s a real inspiration, this finale. But Puccini researched thoroughly for it, seeking from his friend Fr Panichelli the plainsong melody to which the Te Deum was sung in Roman churches, the correct order of the cardinal’s procession and even the costumes of the Swiss Guard. He even sought a text that could give the chorus a murmuring effect under Scarpia’s exultation. ‘Adjutorum nostrum in nomine Domini’ - say it softly to yourself and you’ll hear how skilfully Puccini guaranteed choral mumbling. Interestingly, this is the only traditional finale in the opera. It’s as if we leave behind old opera in Acts II and III.

Act II

Act II basically consists of two large arcs: Cavaradossi’s interrogation and torture; and Scarpia’s bargain and murder. It begins with Scarpia eating alone and considering how he prefers violently conquering a woman than to have her meekly surrender. Handed a copy of the libretto in 1895 and asked to versify a monologue for Scarpia, Giacosa objected that, finishing the first act with a monologue and beginning the second with another by the same character ‘is a bit monotonous – apart from the fact that...[a] Scarpia acts; he doesn’t explain himself in words’. Actually, Scarpia’s previous monologue takes place in the context of an ensemble piece, but perhaps Giacosa was right. Scarpia presents his credo in context later in this Act when he tells Tosca how, when she sprang into her lover’s arms like a leopard, he determined to have her (‘Già mi struggea’).

This act is even more of a dramatic continuum than the first. Full-blown melodic moments emerge subtly from the story as short-lived ariosi. Puccini’s librettists got rid of Sardou’s

Act Two (preparation for the cantata) and placed the performance of the cantata as background to the Scarpia-Cavaradossi scene (Sardou’s Act III) giving Puccini a superb opportunity for a quasi-realistic spatial effect – and irony - as the cantata is performed outside Scarpia’s rooms during Cavaradossi’s initial interrogation. Tosca arrives after singing; Cavaradossi has been led away for torturing. She tries to ignore his cries but eventually reveals Angelotti’s hiding place and is allowed to see Cavaradossi. At news of Napoleon’s victory at Marengo (the earlier news had been wrong), Cavaradossi bursts into a paean to victory, another lyrical outbreak. As Cavaradossi is taken back downstairs, Scarpia begins his pursuit. ‘Now let us talk like friends together’, he sings, in the style of a nonchalant barcarolle. He tells her she has the power in her hands to free Cavaradossi – and we know the price he’s asking. Off-stage drums indicate the march of the condemned (a Puccinian sound-effect driving the plot) and increase the urgency of what Tosca must decide. Now we reach the only stand-alone aria in the entire act.

Vissi d’arte

‘I lived for art; I lived for love. Never did I harm a living creature,’ sings Tosca, wondering what she’s done to deserve this predicament. This is one of Puccini’s most-famous numbers, ‘a splendid piece,’ said Mosco Carner, ‘demanding of the singer a perfect legato and radiant, liquescent tone.’ Yet Puccini came to regret its placement in the opera; it held up the flow, he thought.

The words ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’, sung to a celestially-descending phrase, actually form the introduction to the aria. Tosca then weaves her confused thoughts (‘Daily I pray...why am I now suffering?’) around the core melody which is mainly carried by flute and cellos. ‘I gave jewels for the Madonna’s mantle,’ she goes on as violins, violas and cellos underscore the main melody and she rises to an impassioned climax. The aria is often greeted by applause in the theatre, but Puccini inserts Scarpia’s chords, odiously ingratiating, as the villain asks, ‘Your answer?’

In exchange for Tosca’s favours, Scarpia agrees to execute Cavaradossi but ‘as we did for Palmieri’. Tosca thinks he means a simulation. Scarpia writes out a safe-conduct for Tosca and Cavaradossi and as he gives it to her, she stabs him. Opera aficionados have argued over interpretations of this scene for 113 years. In the 2011 Covent Garden production, the dying Scarpia (Bryn Terfel) actually landed on top of Tosca (Angela Gheoghiu) and she had to pull herself out from under him.

Act III

Prelude

Sardou describes the opening of Act III in quite some detail in his stage directions. How much more enjoyable is Puccini’s tone poem – Puccini even made a special trip to Rome to test the realistic effect of morning church bells from this spot. Here too is another example of Puccini’s use of situational music. The score was essentially complete when he asked the poet Luigi Zanazzo for some verses that would sound like a shepherd’s song of the Romagna, an oasis of calm, text that ‘must have nothing to do with the plot’. Toward the end of the prelude we hear an anticipation of Cavaradossi’s third act aria.

E lucevan le stelle

Cavaradossi asks for permission to pen a farewell to someone who is dear to him. Four solo cellos ‘sweetly’ repeat the love theme from Act I.

Originally Illica had written a paean to art and poetry here. Verdi was very impressed by it, when he happened to hear Illica read an early version of the libretto in Paris in 1894. But Puccini thought it had the wrong tone. Illica changed it to Cavaradossi’s reminiscence of a happier time. Puccini’s choice of clarinet to lead the melody makes it a particularly doleful recollection.

Tosca arrives and tells how she killed Scarpia after he had written their safe-conduct. Cavaradossi takes Tosca’s hands (‘dolci mani’) in his, and thus begins the third act Love Duet.

Act III Love Duet

This too unfolds in a series of lyrical sections ‘always interrupted at the right moment by recitatives/ariosi in which the action moves forward’ (Carner). Tosca tells Cavaradossi that his execution is to be a mock execution, and we now arrive at the point where Ricordi, Puccini’s publisher, had his biggest disagreement with the composer during the composition of the work for here, when Cavaradossi tells Tosca that he ‘minded death only because he would have to leave her’, Puccini inserted rejected music from an earlier opera, Edgar. ‘As it stands,’ huffed Puccini in reply, ‘[this “labour-saving device”] seems full of the poetry which breathes out of the words....As for its fragmentary character, that was deliberate..... In thought Tosca is constantly returning to the need for Mario’s fall to be well simulated and for his behaviour to appear natural in front of the firing squad.’ Tosca and Cavaradossi now turn their thoughts back to their coming freedom and sing for the first time in unison – ‘Trionfal, di nuove speme’ (World of love, shining with promise). However, there’s no instrumental accompaniment, a detail which some writers see as suggesting they know their high hopes are hollow; that the execution will be for real    

From here the opera proceeds quickly to the end. Cavaradossi is shot, Scarpia’s body is discovered, and Tosca throws herself from the ramparts. The orchestra thunders out a reprise of Cavaradossi’s aria, reminding the audience of the saddest music of the Act.

These are the sort of moments that make it onto ‘highlights’ recordings, but it may be worth asking what creates the clearly perceptible unity of this work. Academic critics fault Puccini for not making a more rigourous use of recurring musical motifs, but his motifs provide a recurring web of themes which keep an audience in Tosca’s world and they do provide occasional psychological complexity, as when Tosca talks of coming to Cavaradossi’s villa that night (in Act I) and the ‘Angelotti’ theme reminds Cavaradossi that the fugitive is there.

Finally, let’s think about the three big parts which are the fortuitous result of thinning-out Sardou’s play. Aficionados endlessly debate their favourite interpreters. Gramophone might speak of Carreras’s ‘poetic ardour’ and Opera Today might declare that ‘[Jonas] Kaufmann’s Cavaradossi is more in line with the strong....leading man’. You can even ask ‘Who was the best Scarpia?’ on Google and get answers such as ‘Sherrill Milnes “implacable”’. Many remember the genial Tito Gobbi (once Melbourne’s King of Moomba) as the greatest Scarpia. Gobbi himself talks about the great Toscas he sang beside in an article he wrote for the Cambridge Opera Handbook. He and Callas didn’t just sing, he says, they lived their parts.

US academic Joseph Kerman once dismissed Tosca as a ‘shabby, little shocker’, and musicologists may wish for more ‘motivic integrity’. But audiences hand down another judgement. They tend to greet Tosca’s conclusion - as the onstage ‘audience’ in Harvey Milk greets it - with a chorus of appreciative ‘bravos’.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013

(Australian librettist, Gordon Kalton Williams, is currently based in Los Angeles. This article originally appeared in program booklets for Opera Australia’s production of Tosca, directed by John Bell.  

"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme

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