In 1849 Murger joined forces with a young dramatist, Théodore Barrière, to develop the stories into a play, La Vie de bohème, which became a surprise hit. Murger (1822–1861) was still in his 20s when he began to write a succession of satirical sketches based on his own experiences and serialized in an obscure magazine called Le Corsaire. The opera is taken from Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, a semi-autobiographical novel about life in the Latin Quarter of Paris during the 1840s. The action … was more than something that could have happened: most of it actually had happened, not only in the life of Henri Murger, but a great deal of it also in the life of the composer who set Murger’s novel to music. The characters are ordinary, unimportant.Ĭritic Spike Hughes has said, Until the appearance of La bohème the public’s experience of Love on the opera stage had been of a somewhat lofty emotion of more than life-size dimensions and usually with consequences which (keeping their fingers crossed) the public could reasonably regard as unlikely to apply to them…īut with La bohème they were introduced for the first time to a world with which they were familiar… We follow the lives of these young people as they struggle to make ends meet, flirt, fall in love, and break up – until the end, when the friends gather round to take care of the dying Mimi. But their tender romance is doomed, for Mimi is ill with consumption, and Rodolfo is too poor to help her. Meanwhile, Rodolfo meets the frail seamstress Mimi, and they fall passionately in love. Schaunard has some money from a gig and brings food, wine, and enough cash for a celebration at the lively Café Momus, where they inevitably run into Marcello’s on-again, off-again, girlfriend, the coquettish Musetta. Colline, a philosopher, and Schaunard, a musician, turn up. Marcello, a painter, and Rodolfo, a poet, burn one of Rodolfo’s plays to keep warm. The opera opens on a freezing Christmas Eve in Paris. It’s a sparkling portrayal of the Bohemian life – la vie de bohème – that free-spirited, romantic counterculture of starving artists in freezing garrets, meeting life with plucky camaraderie, youthful derring-do, plenty of love-making and heartbreak – and occasionally some work on their art. Unlike many of Puccini’s operas, La bohème is named not for a girl, but for an almost mythical place – a time of life, a state of the heart.
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