Puccini's Paris garret lovers conquered opera overnight
La bohème—Puccini 1893–1895, libretto Illica and Giacosa from Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème—premiered 1 February 1896 in Turin under twenty-eight-year-old Toscanini. Rodolfo and Mimì's doomed romance now ranks among the most staged operas worldwide.
Murger's 1851 source is less a novel than a loose string of sketches about young bohemians in 1840s Paris, with no single plot. Like the 1849 stage version Murger wrote with Théodore Barrière, the opera centres on Rodolfo and Mimì, ends with her death and folds another of Murger's heroines, Francine, into Mimì. The librettists invented much of acts two and three, while acts one and four stitch together chapters of the book; the lovers' first encounter is borrowed from an episode that originally belonged to Jacques and Francine. Early on, Ruggero Leoncavallo protested that he had already offered Puccini a finished libretto on the subject.
The first night at Turin's Teatro Regio drew a muted audience and divided critics. Evan Gorga, singing Rodolfo, could not cope with the part's high writing, so his music was transposed down. Even so, the opera spread quickly: Naples, Bologna and Rome staged it within the year, and Buenos Aires hosted the first performance outside Italy on 16 June 1896. The Carl Rosa company brought an English version, supervised by Puccini, to Manchester on 22 April 1897 and then to London's Royal Opera House that October, with Berlin, Paris and Prague following by 1898.
By 1903 the Opéra-Comique alone had performed it a hundred times. The Metropolitan Opera first mounted it on 26 December 1900 with Nellie Melba as Mimì, and Melba sang the role opposite Enrico Caruso in Monte Carlo in 1902. Gustav Mahler conducted the Vienna premiere in 1903, and the Met chose it for the final performance in its original building on 16 April 1966. When word of Puccini's death in Brussels on 29 November 1924 reached Rome during a performance, the show was halted and the orchestra played Chopin's Funeral March.
Toscanini marked the fiftieth anniversary in 1946 with a radio broadcast featuring the NBC Symphony Orchestra, later issued by RCA Victor; it is the only recording of a Puccini opera by its original conductor. Not everyone was charmed: Benjamin Britten wrote in 1951 that after a handful of performances he found the score cheap and empty, and the Salzburg Festival held off staging it until July 2012. The opening scene still grabs audiences, with a painter and a poet burning a manuscript to keep warm in their garret on Christmas Eve.
Source: La bohème
