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Andrew Maughan

Rodolfo

Derrek Stark

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Sooyeon Kim

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Lacy Sauter

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Jaeho Lee

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Ross Coughanour

Meagan Sill

Musetta

Chelsea Hart

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Marcus Simmons

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Steven Berlanga

Keith Schwartz

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Christopher Seefeldt

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Bille Bruley

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Paul Nadler

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Jeffrey Marc Buchman

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C David Higgins

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Walter Huff

Brent Gault

Erik Krohg

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Patrick Mero

Dramaturgie

Vincent Liotta

Korrepetition

Daniela Siena

Jacobs School of Music (Indiana University)

Italienisch

La Bohème

Bloomington

Vereinigte Staaten

Musical Arts Center

1. La Boheme (1:49:21)
Giacomo Puccini, La Boheme
1. Act 1 (34:58)
2. Act 2 (18:44)
3. Act 3 (24:30)
4. Act 4 (31:09)

La Bohème Puccini

Public

Englisch

Genehmigt

Puccini’s achingly romantic music and tragic love story have made La Bohème themost popular opera of all time. Be there as struggling young artists in Left Bank Paris live, laugh, argue, and fall in love—including the poet Rodolfo. When he and the gentle seamstress Mimi meet, passion flares. But a happy ending for them was never meant to be. Savor both the intimacy and the spectacle of this extraordinary production that had audiences cheering in 2007 and 2011
by Matthew Leone

If one could create a list of operas that reflected Oscar Wilde’s famous saying “Life imitates art, more than art imitates life,” Puccini’s La Bohème would be near the top. At first glance, Puccini’s tale of love among struggling artists in mid-nineteenth-century Paris may seem like a curious candidate. While working on the opera between 1893 and 1895, the composer’s living circumstances hardly resembled those of the characters inhabiting Bohème’s squalid garrets and dingy cafes. Far from it—in addition to composing, Puccini also traveled extensively to promote his previous operatic success, the wildly popular Manon Lescaut. Furthermore, Manon’s success had made Puccini wealthy, and he could now pursue some of his favorite pastimes, including cycling and hunting trips.

Yet beneath these musical and financial successes, the reality was that Puccini’s life still imitated those of La Bohème’s characters: like the opera’s protagonists, Puccini and his collaborators struggled mightily to create a successful work of art. In some ways, it was no small miracle that the composer produced a finished opera at all. The history of La Bohème’s genesis is rife with multiple setbacks, creative differences, frustrations among the composer and librettists, and constant revisions to both plot and music that continued until opening night and beyond. Nevertheless, Puccini and his collaborators succeeded where Bohème’s characters could not, and their struggle makes for a story nearly as compelling as the opera itself.

The libretto for La Bohème created problems almost immediately. Puccini’s librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based the opera’s scenario on the French author Henry Mürger’s novel Scenes de la vie de boheme, which was well known in Italy at the time. Mürger’s Scenes was filled with numerous characters and various unrelated subplots, and creating a libretto with dramatic continuity proved immensely difficult. Scenes were frequently added and discarded, and more than once, Giacosa complained about the “wearisome pedantry” of his work on Bohème’s scenario. The initial drafts did not yet contain a number of scenes now regarded as essential to the beloved opera, including the meeting between Rodolfo and Mimi at the end of Act I. The love story between Rodolfo and Mimi was not even at the center of the drama until almost a year into the project.

Puccini himself struggled the most with the creation of La Bohème, and his consummate perfectionism and obsessive revisions of both plot and music (sometimes behind the librettists’ backs) caused multiple problems. He disagreed completely with the librettists’ original ending and the details of Mimi’s death, and his stubbornness forced Illica to come up with three different scenarios for the final act. Illica eventually started to question every word he wrote, and he came to expect that Puccini would react negatively to his latest work. Giacosa’s complaints about Puccini’s constant requests for changes, expressed in a letter dated a year and a half after beginning the project, are perhaps most telling:

“I’m tired to death of this constant remaking, retouching, adding, correcting. . . . I’ve written this damned libretto from beginning to end three times and
certain sections four or five times. How am I supposed to finish at this rate?”

Indeed, Puccini’s collaboration with Giacosa had soured to the point that Bohème’s publisher and promoter, Giulio Ricordi, needed to smooth things over. His letter to Puccini, dated nearly two years after the project’s inception, bluntly summed up the difficulties: “It seems to me with your Bohème, that I am at a ball game in which the libretto is substituted for the ball.” Furthermore, with each revision of the libretto came new music, and Puccini’s drafts are filled with crossed out passages and reworkings of previous ideas. Whole sections of music and entire scenes were also discarded in the later stages of composition. Puccini even reworked the second act after the January 1896 premiere, and portions of Act III were revised as late as 1898.

In light of all these revisions and collaborative difficulties, it is all the more remarkable that the “definitive” 1898 version of La Bohème is a work of impressive dramatic unity and musical economy. This dramatic unity is especially prevalent in the carefully constructed parallels between Acts I and IV: both acts take place in Rodolfo’s garret, and both acts conclude with a powerful romantic moment between Rodolfo and Mimi. Puccini’s music also reflects the libretto’s unity in its efficient reuse of various musical motives and themes. The score is meticulously constructed, with statements of previously heard melodies holding the entire musical and dramatic fabric together. Mimi’s farewell to Rodolfo in Act IV, “Sono andati,” is introduced by recalling the “love motif” from the Act I duet, “O suave fanciulla.” Mimi’s entrance in Act III is signaled by melodies from her Act I aria, “Mi chiamano Mimi.” Sometimes, this tight construction was a direct result of Puccini’s constant changes. Even in 1898, he revised Rodolfo’s entrance in Act III to include themes from his Act I aria, “Nei cieli bigi,” as well as fragments of “O suave fanciulla’s” love motif.

If anything, the numerous difficulties encountered by Puccini and his collaborators reveal that struggle can be a highly personal and relative sensation. The struggling artists in La Bohème endure constant hunger, poverty, and artistic setbacks—from their perspective, Puccini’s successful career and comfortable living conditions might seem like paradise. Yet for all his comforts, Puccini’s artistic difficulties with La Bohème caused him considerable distress. It is very possible that, from his own standpoint, creating an “ideal” Bohème was as much of a struggle as living the impoverished life of a Rodolfo or Mimi. Despite these vastly different circumstances, Puccini’s struggle to make La Bohème a successful work of art was very real. The most important difference between Puccini and Bohème’s struggling artists, however, is that in the end, Puccini triumphed.

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