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La Bohème
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| The Puccini family provided the Tuscan city of Lucca with five generations of distinguished church musicians and composers, stretching from one Giacomo (1712-81) to another, his great-great-grandson, the composer of La Bohème and principal flame-bearer of the great Italian operatic tradition into the twentieth century.
Giacomo the younger (1858-1924) effectively inherited the position of organist and choirmaster at the church of San Martino when aged barely five, following the death of his father, but took on responsibility for the post when he reached fourteen.
By this time he had already begun to show signs of a talent for composition, and would incorporate his own keyboard musings into the daily liturgies at the church.
However, it was a performance of Verdi's Aida he attended in 1876 which finally persuaded him to break with the ecclesiastical family tradition and dedicate himself to the composition of opera.
As he later put it, "Almighty God touched me with his little finger and said: 'Write for the theatre - mind well, only for the theatre'." From Lucca he progressed to Milan, epicentre of operatic life in Italy, and studied composition there under Ponchielli and Antonio Bazzini.
It is said that his impoverished life-style and the friendships he enjoyed in these three years of study provided him with the musical inspiration for Acts 1 and 4 (set in the garret) of La Bohème.
Indeed, the mercurial C major figure at the start of Act 1 (and repeatedly employed throughout the opera to suggest life in the 'Bohemian' garret) is lifted from a student composition dating from his Milan years, the Capriccio sinfonico.
The librettos for his first two operas, Le Villi (1884) and Edgar (1889), were provided by Ferdinando Fontana, a promising writer who was the personal friend of Puccini's teacher and champion, Ponchielli. It was partly through frustration at Fontana's inability to engage successfully with his developing musical language that Puccini decided to follow his own dramatic instinct and choose for himself the subject of his third stage work. This was to be based on the same Abbé Prévost novel that had inspired Massenet's enormously successful Manon (1884). Such was his determination to achieve precisely the right scaffolding on which to hang his music, Puccini enlisted the services of no less than five librettists, including the composer Leoncavallo and two eminent literary figures, Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Manon Lescaut, as the opera was to become known, achieved an enormous success when it was first produced in 1893, and established Puccini as a leading figure in the new generation of Italian opera composers. Bernard Shaw noted judiciously at the London première of the work that "Puccini looks to me more like the heir to Verdi than any of his rivals." The libretto of Manon Lescaut was pieced together under the careful supervision of the composer himself in collaboration with his publisher Giulio Ricordi. The creative process that resulted in this work engendered a chemistry between Ricordi, Puccini, Giacosa and Illica which, in the years that followed, was to give birth to three stage masterpieces: La Bohème, Tosca The genesis of Puccini's next work involved an acrimonious dispute with Ruggero Leoncavallo, composer of the hugely popular Pagliacci (1892). Leoncavallo possessed considerable literary gifts as well as musical, and, as we have seen, had contributed as a writer to the mosaic libretto of Manon Lescaut. On March 19th 1893 the two composers (at that stage friends and colleagues) met in a Milan café and began to discuss future plans. Puccini mentioned that he had begun to work on a musical setting of Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème - a loose collection of tableaux depicting the lives of impoverished young artists in Paris of the 1840s, which had brought their author vast fame and wealth when adapted for the theatre in 1849. Murger's original texts, published episodically in the magazine Whether or not Puccini was guilty of duplicity is difficult to ascertain, but such would not appear entirely out of character - he had a keen sense of competition and was known on occasion to pilfer other composers' material, such as Illica's treatment of the stage-play Tosca, originally bought by the publisher Ricordi for the composer Alberto Franchetti. Nevertheless, it is clear that by the time of his celebrated meeting at the café with Leoncavallo, Puccini's own Bohème project was well under way. Popular as Murger's original work had been, it was no easy task to transform what was in effect a rambling collection of autobiographical sketches into a cohesive dramatic plot with a beginning, a development and a resolution. Puccini and his librettists set to work with great enthusiasm even before the première of Manon Lescaut, but the tale of the work's evolution is long and tortured, punctuated with frequent expressions of despair from each contributor and occasional announcements of resignation. That the work was ever completed is largely due to the diplomatic mediation of Giulio Ricordi, a tireless enthusiast and a man whose vast experience in the opera industry earned him the unquestioning respect of the collaborators. Illica, a well-known playwright and colourful public personality, was set the task of constructing the plot's basic architecture, while Giacosa, a distinguished older man who had the respect of Europe's literary establishment, provided the poetic verse. Puccini, after the success of Manon Lescaut, was determined that his own interpretation of the source material's inherent drama should be paramount, and was quite prepared to wound his partners' feelings in pursuit of the perfect libretto. Illica described their joint meetings as "real battles, during which suddenly entire acts were torn to pieces... ideas which had seemed beautiful and dazzling moments before could be thrown out, and thus the long hard work of months destroyed in one minute... After each meeting Puccini had to run to the manicurist to have his nails done. He would have bitten them off to the bone." The most serious threat to the work's completion came in the summer of 1894, when Puccini seemed to lose interest in La Bohème, and instead became intrigued with the idea of setting to music Giovanni Verga's story La Lupa. Another Verga work, Cavalleria Rusticana, had provided Mascagni with sensational operatic material, and Puccini (again, keen to tackle a rival at his own game) travelled to Sicily with the intention of meeting Verga, working on a dramatic treatment of La Lupa, and researching the southern province's local character. He was eventually dissuaded from pursuing the notion, and returned, contrite, to work on La Bohème. One of the clearest results of Puccini's vigilant control of the libretto's development can be detected in the portrayal of Mimì. Murger's original characters were compounded from real-life models, friends of the author, and fellow bohemians: Rodolfo was in fact a portrait of Murger himself, and Mimì a composite of three frail female friends, two of whom, like Puccini's heroine, did actually die young of Tuberculosis. The difference between Murger's bohemians and Puccini's is one of idealisation. Whilst Murger looked back on his student days with affection, he was at pains to point out the hardship involved, the menace of ill-health, the disillusionment, the ghastly hunger and vicious cold; the bohemian life, he said, was a "preface to the Academy, the hospital or the morgue." In addition, he made no apologies for the style of living which a young artist's creed engendered, including coquettish flirtation amongst the women together with a free attitude towards sex. As much as this might have appealed to the young Puccini, it did not fit the mould into which his operatic heroes and heroines were to be cast. Thus Mimì is transfigured by Puccini into a model of high virtue and steadfast devotion - even unto death. A completed act of the libretto, in which Mimì's flirtation with the wealthy Viscount is highlighted, was never set to music - most probably because the text misrepresented Puccini's notion of the feminine ideal. His operas' heroines varied from a set pattern only in cosmetic detail. They were strong in moral fibre but yielding to the call of sensuous passion: fallen from purity, perhaps, but chastened by virtue of their experience, and all the more delectable for it. Mimì, Butterfly, Tosca, Liù, Manon, Minnie and others are projections of feminine virtue as seen by the composer. Puccini, the great philanderer who never found true love, made flesh his musical inspiration through these females, but in so doing was closer to the tradition of middle Verdi (Violetta, Leonora, Gilda) than the verismo of Murger. Where Puccini's dramatic genius can most be felt is in the work's musical and situational balance. The first and last acts, for example, are set in the garret, and thematic restatements in the score ensure that a symmetry is achieved. The middle two acts are both set outdoors, and compliment each other through the contrasting nature of their focus. Act 2 (Quartier Latin) is extrovert, full of crowds, activity and ordered bedlam, into which the main characters are skillfully interwoven, together with pronounced bursts of musical figures associated with them. Act 3 (Barrière d'Enfer), by contrast, centres on the four main characters alone, like a close-up, and the complexity of their interrelationships are explored in intimate detail. The work's overall balance is further achieved by the juxtaposition of opposing influences throughout: cold, hunger and poverty are set beside love, warmth, play and friendship; the tempestuous Musetta beside the temperate Mimì; the jealous Rodolfo beside the conciliatory Marcello (and vice versa, through a masterly inversion). Love and death are similarly juxtaposed, as are the joy and agony which accompany them; conversational patter in the less structured parts of the score, is set against sudden floods of lush melody, recognisable by virtue of their association elsewhere in the drama. The balance, and its inherent use of contrasts, is clearly intentional - the result of careful and painstaking deliberation on the part of composer and librettists. La Bohème had its first performance at the Teatro Regio in Turin, on 1st February 1896, precisely three years after the sensational opening of Manon Lescaut at the very same theatre. The conductor was the twenty-nine-year-old Toscanini, and the cast, after some problems with the Marcello, had been rehearsed to a high standard. The success of Manon Lescaut, however, was not to be repeated. "Bohème," wrote the distinguished critic Carlo Bersenzio in an embarrassingly short-sighted assessment, "just as it makes little impression on the emotions of the listener, will leave few traces in the history of our lyric theatre." All but a few reviews took this line, and Puccini, who recognised the importance of scoring a second hit to ensure his future, was heart-broken. There are several reasons why the opera was not well received at first, chief amongst which must be the very level of success achieved by Puccini with Disheartening though this première must have been to the team that created the work, it proved to be nothing more than a minor blemish on its road to triumph. Within three months the opera had been hailed a masterpiece in Naples and Palermo, and in the next two years was launched successfully at Covent Garden, Los Angeles and New York. The birth of the gramophone industry made popular hits out of the opera's individual arias, and the two principal roles became major vehicles for the generation's finest vocalists, especially Caruso and Melba. Caruso (along with other famous interpreters of the role, such as Björling and Pavarotti) was forced on occasion to transpose "Che gelida manina" because of the full-voiced top C at its conclusion - a liberty for which Puccini, in this particular instance, gave his personal blessing. Indeed, when first proposed for the role, in 1897, the great tenor, still a relative novice, was contractually required to audition for Puccini himself. After a few bars of the aria, the composer stopped the young tenor in stunned disbelief at what he was hearing. "Who sent you to me?" he asked, "God?" |
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