La Boheme and Its Sources

Giacomo Puccini's first collaboration with librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa resulted in the sensational La Bohème; so successful, in fact, that when the opera opened in Palerma the audience demanded an encore of the entire last act, which was granted to them by a cast who had already changed into their street clothes. The celebrated work, based on selections from Henri Murger's The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, represented the beginning of the verismo movement in Italian opera.

While not purely verismo, an authentic and natural understanding of the depths of human emotion underscores the romantic lives of the Parisian artists who bring Puccini's music into being, adding realism to their melodrama. Illica, Giacosa and Puccini created a vivid world of exhilarating thrills and painful obsessions from scattered selections of Murger's text. By combining multiple incidents and characters, Rodolfo, Marcello, Mimi and Musetta were brought to life, made more complex in some ways and simpler in others.

The most striking character composite is that of Mimi, Rodolfo's volatile lover. From pieces of Murger's stories Mademoiselle Mimi, Francine's Muff, Mimi in Fine Feather, and Epilogue to the Loves of Rodolphe and Mimi Puccini's Mimi is created and destroyed, bringing La Bohème's audience both mirth and misery alike.

Mimi and Rodolfo's first encounter, the candle and key incident, is a reproduction of the Murger meeting between two characters named Francine and Jacques. With Francine's candle blown out and her key lost on the floor, the two youths make a meeting of both hands and hearts underneath the gleaming moonlight. However, while Francine slyly pushes the key under the furniture in order to stay with Jacques, Mimi must be convinced by Rodolfo to stay. The libretto stage directions state that "as Mimi tries to withdraw her hand" Rodolfo asks for "Just a moment, mademoiselle,/ and in a few words let me tell you/ who I am, what I do, how I live" (Puccini Act I).

While this is inherently not true to Henri Murger's tale, the candle and key incident is much more inviting and romantic than they way that the original Rodolphe and Mimi met; "Rodolphe then met Mimi, whom he had formerly known when she was the mistress of one of his friends; and he made her his own. There was at first a great outcry amongst Rodolphe's friends when they learned this union, but as Mademoiselle Mimi was very taking, not at all prudish, and could stand tobacco-smoke and literary conversations without a headache, they became accustomed to her and treated her as a comrade" (Murger 156).

No doubt the librettists saw the benefit in providing their audience with a moonlit encounter between star-crossed lovers over a stolen girlfriend who was accepted merely because she wasn't a hardcore non-smoker. While Murger was more realistic, Puccini and his cowriters had an incredible sense of what appealed to an audience. Puccini's impeccable timing and shortened arias delivered instant gratification and intense emotion.

While Murger conveys the character of Mimi mainly through the descriptions of Rodolphe and the narrative voice, Puccini introduces her through an explanatory aria in Act I. Her timid self-description makes her out to be much tamer than her wild Murgerian doppelganger, whose infidelity to Rodolfo is only one of her many vices. Puccini's Mimi sings that "My story is brief./ I embroider on linens and silks/ at home or outside./ I'm calm and happy,/ and it is my special pleasure/ to make lilies and roses" (La Bohème Act I).

The original Mimi, however, is portrayed by Murger as manipulative and erratic, capricious and materialistic. Her jealousy of her friends' apparent opulence causes her to overlook her starving artist lover for a man who can provide for her desires once she "began to dream of silks, velvets, and lace" (Murger 157). Puccini's Mimi is satisfied with simple pleasures of prayer and springtime, and would seemingly never abandon a man solely because he "was not very advanced in the art of love, and she did not like undertaking education" (Murger 159).

Puccini ends the first act of La Bohème with Rodolfo and Mimi's declarations of love for each other, whereas Murger seems to doubt the sincerity of their feelings altogether. Instead he paints an Ibsen-like portrait of a man obsessed, dependent on a life-lie to maintain his sanity.