La bohème

The libretto’s first decision is subtractive: Murger’s loose cycle of anecdotes becomes four tableaux and one couple set against another. Every Act I event has a job. The burnt manuscript makes the cold, Benoit’s visit empties the room, and the candle and the key bring Mimì to Rodolfo and keep her there. Act III depends on Act II, since Marcello and Musetta are now together and quarrelling, and their quarrel frames the lovers’ parting. Act IV’s horseplay is required: it is the play Musetta’s entrance breaks. The test finds give in Act II, where Parpignol and the crowd make a picture for longer than the action asks, and in Benoit’s scene, a comic number whose function a few lines would serve.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: poverty does not end love by forbidding it but by making the lovers act, and the life of play young people build against want cannot hold a real death. The proof is Act III. Rodolfo tells Marcello that Mimì is a flirt, then breaks: “Mimì è tanto malata”
“Mimì is so ill”, and his jealousy is shown to have been the cover for helplessness. Act IV makes the point in form: the friends’ clowning is cut off by the dying girl on the stairs. Held below the gate because the disclosure is partly inherited, from Murger and from La traviata, and the opera’s sympathy softens it: the poverty is picturesque, and the illness serves feeling more than it is examined.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and almost all of it is the sublime of tenderness and loss. Act I rises three times in ten minutes: “Che gelida manina”
“What a cold little hand”, with its climb to the high C; “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì”
“Yes, they call me Mimì”, whose melody opens as she speaks of the first spring sun; and “O soave fanciulla”
“O sweet girl”, the lovers going out singing offstage. Act II rises in the ensemble built over Musetta’s waltz; Act III holds the winter dawn and the quartet. The death is a height of quiet that ends at full force on Rodolfo’s cry. Held below the top because the work never reaches the cold or the terrible, and charm fills the gaps.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Some archetypal structure is built, and it bears weight. The year turns: Christmas Eve, a winter dawn when the lovers agree to part “alla stagion dei fior”
“in the season of flowers”, and a last act in which spring has come and brings death, not renewal. Mimì enters with a candle gone out and asks for light; the asking is the love story in small. Youth itself is the figure, and Colline’s farewell to his coat is the bohemian taking leave of it, a thing sold for medicine. Held below the gate because the myth is the commonplace one of a consumptive girl and a poor poet, the particular is sentimentalised rather than raised, and no figure gains the force Otello gives its Credo.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is Italian opera of the early 1890s: Verdi’s late continuous style, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890), Puccini’s own Manon Lescaut (1893), and Massenet’s intimate lyric opera. The departures are an opera of four tableaux with almost no intrigue, in which nothing happens but weather, money and illness; a near-contemporary setting treated with neither verismo’s violence nor historical grandeur; a parlando so close to speech that the set pieces rise out of chatter; comedy and death in one idiom. What holds the axis here is that the road was largely laid: Otello (1887) had made the continuous texture Italian, and La traviata (1853) had brought the sick heroine into a contemporary room. A swerve of tone and scale more than of form.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a life is lived in scenes with gaps between them, and that the gaps are where things are lost. We never see the lovers decide, quarrel or reunite; we see Christmas Eve, then a winter dawn after the damage, then the end. The form makes memory audible. Act IV begins as Act I began, with the same music and the same two men at work, so the return is heard as a repetition that cannot be one; and Mimì’s last scene is made of the Act I themes, so that she dies inside the music of their first meeting. Held below the top by Act II’s set piece of crowd and spectacle, and by closed numbers that invite applause inside a form that elsewhere refuses it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is a long life in the theatre and a smaller literature than that life would suggest. Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama (1956) condescended to Puccini, and the scholarly return came late, with Mosco Carner’s Puccini (1958) and Julian Budden’s Puccini: His Life and Works (2002). The open questions are real but few: whether the sentiment is earned or worked; how far the work is verismo; whether the episodic form is a weakness or its knowledge; how the recall of themes in Act IV stands to Wagner’s leitmotif. Performance yields more: Mimì as a frail girl or a woman of sense, Rodolfo’s last cry sung or spoken. Held down because return has mostly meant repeated performance, not renewed reading.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is real but bounded: the work established a model for intimate realistic opera, ordinary people, a city, money and illness, in a quick conversational texture with lyrical expansion, and showed that an episodic shape could hold a tragedy. It perfected a manner; it did not reorganise opera’s possibility as Tristan or Pelléas did. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charpentier’s Louise (1900) and the Italian lyric operas of the next decades stand near it; its joining of speech and melody passed to operetta, the Broadway musical and the film score; Jonathan Larson’s Rent (1996) carried it into a new medium; its numbers became test pieces of the lyric voice. Much of that reach is shared with Puccini’s output as a whole.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is demonstrated across 130 years. The form survives whole: the Ricordi score is the performing version, and nothing is lost or doubtful. Presence is among the widest in the operatic repertory: continuous performance in every major house since 1896, and a recorded tradition from the early decades of the last century to the present. The presence is credited, but wide presence earns at most a tenth, and the surface fixed to its moment is not nil. The picturesque poverty and the consumptive heroine are period conventions, and they date more than the music. The figure stands a tenth above Otello on wider presence, and it is the only one of the five gate axes to clear its bar.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Command of the medium is close to complete, and it is the work’s strongest axis. The orchestration: the garret’s cold in thin textures, the snow at the customs barrier, the stage band of the Latin Quarter, the hush under the death. The conversational writing: dialogue at speaking pace, melody released at the point of feeling and withdrawn. The ensembles: Act II’s simultaneous crowd, children, vendors and principals, with Musetta’s waltz built into an ensemble while Alcindoro is sent away; Act III’s quartet, two couples in opposed moods kept distinct and joined. Illica and Giacosa’s libretto is a model of compression. Held a tenth below Otello by a narrower range of means, and by climaxes that lean on doubling the voice in the orchestra.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Benoit’s comic rent scene and Mimì’s death. One law governs them: the life of these people is play conducted against want, and the same quick idiom carries both. The friends get rid of the landlord with a joke because they cannot pay him; at the end they cannot pay a doctor, and the joke has run out. Act II’s carnival and Act III’s frozen dawn rhyme by place, the café and the tavern at the barrier, warmth seen from inside and from outside. The themes recur and bind the span. Held below the top by Act II, where spectacle strains the law, and by Musetta, who moves from comic coquette to moral centre with less preparation than the change asks.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The orders held: consciousness, in love, jealousy and the fear under it; the couple, twice over and in contrast; friendship, the society of four men; labour and money, in the artists’ work (a manuscript burnt, Schaunard’s paid engagement), rent, debt and things sold for medicine; the city, in the Latin Quarter crowd and the customs post; the natural order, in the seasons and the cold; illness and death. They are integrated: money decides the love story and the death. What holds the axis at its figure, the lowest of the twelve, is what the work leaves out. The family is absent, the state appears only as a customs barrier, history only as a period setting, and the sacred only in Musetta’s prayer. It is a work of one quarter, one winter and one circle.

Score: 7.7 / 10