Opera Insights
by Karl Hesser
When Giacomo Puccini first read Henri Murger's novel Scènes de la vie de bohème , he could not have helped but strongly identify with and completely understand the characters. He knew only too well the hardships and joys of struggling young artists. Born in Lucca, December 22, 1858, Puccini was the heir to a tradition of musical Puccinis already four generations old. His ancestor, also named Giacomo, was a composer of church music who had been appointed musician to the Republic of Lucca in 1739. The tradition was so strong that when Puccini's own famous father died, two of his positions (choirmaster and organist at the Church of San Martino and teacher at the Collegio Ponziano) were reserved for the six-year-old Giacomo, with no consideration that he might want to do something else with his life.
Nevertheless, after hearing a performance of Verdi's Aida when he was 13, Puccini decided that his future lay beyond the confines of Lucca. At 19, he was able to convince a great-uncle to provide him with enough financial support to study in Milan. After successfully passing the entrance exams, he became one of the students of Amilcare Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda .
Initially, he thought he would become an orchestral composer, but Ponchielli convinced him otherwise and suggested that he enter a one-act opera competition. Puccini's opera Le villi did not win, but it did impress Arrigo Boito sufficiently that he raised money to mount a performance. When it was performed in May, 1884, the 26-year-old composer was astounded at its success: La Scala scheduled it for the following season, and the publisher Ricordi bought the publishing rights, commissioned a second opera, and gave him an advance of 300 lire a month for two years. When Edgar finally premiered in April, 1889, it was a failure because of the libretto ? a fact which would have painful repercussions for all of Puccini's future librettists. Ricordi, however, did not give up on him, and the result was Puccini's first major success, Manon Lescaut .
Puccini's life between the Conservatory and the premiere of Edgar was the period most closely resembling the characters in La bohème. Puccini seems to have lived basically on beans and raw onions (he hated beans for the rest of his life); the exception was a Milanese restaurant, The Aida, which allowed him to run up a tab. When he got his first advance from Ricordi, he rushed to the restaurant, ordered an extravagant meal and then paid off all his past bills. He also fell in love during this period, with Elvira Gemignani, the wife of a Lucca merchant. She left her husband to live with Puccini, and they stayed together for the rest of his life, despite his indiscretions and her intense jealousy. By 1890, his debts were so great that he considered joining his brother in South America. The success of Manon Lescaut changed everything: He was able to build his villa at Torre del Lago, buy a car, and begin to live like landed gentry.
Puccini began to work on La bohème even though he knew that his friend Leoncavallo was already working on an opera based on the same book. His determination to set his own version of the story ultimately ruined their friendship, and Leoncavallo was bitter about the events until the end of his life. Surprisingly, especially in view of the opera's perennial "Top Three" status on opera fans' lists of all-time favorites, La bohème was not a success when Toscanini conducted its premiere on February 1, 1896, at the Teatro Regio in Turin. The public was indifferent, and the critics were generally hostile. Three weeks later, in Rome, the public again was unimpressed. Things improved somewhat during performances in Naples, but it was not until April (at a production in Palermo) that the opera caught on with the audience and became the universal success that it has been ever since.
The reasons for the opera's initial lack of success are difficult to identify. La bohème does not have the grandeur of Wagner or the nobility of Verdi; its ordinary people living ordinary lives did not have the searing verismo qualities of Leoncavallo or Mascagni (a style Puccini would later explore in Tosca and Il tabarro ). However, the opera became its own genre. It is a tender love story, showing how the heat of young love may briefly resist the cold realities of the world, but cannot fully withstand them. It shows the transitory nature of youth, the luminous rapture of love at first sight, and the harsh consequences of fragile health. It does not judge the characters' morality, nor should it: Youth learns its own bitter lessons in its own too-brief time. The story has become a timeless parable of the passage of youth and illustrates more completely than any other opera the joys, sorrows, and conflicts of real people. The recent Broadway show Rent , admittedly based on Puccini's opera, recently demonstrated the story's continuing universal appeal. While we watch the story of the poet and the seamstress, the painter and the party girl, the musician and the philosopher unfold, younger audiences will see themselves and identify, while mature audience members will remember.
These materials appear courtesy of Florida Grand Opera.
