5 things to know about La bohème

1° A desperate passion

Giacomo Puccini studied composition in Milan, and it was a time marked by financial struggles. He frequently had to pawn possessions to cover basic expenses and once had a single herring as dinner for him and three others. (Puccini would later put these scenes from his student life into Act IV of La bohème.)

But in 1893 things were starting to look up when his third opera, Manon Lescaut, was praised as a triumph. Many had doubted Puccini’s choice of subject given that the French composer Jules Massenet had created his own opera about Manon only a few years ago. ‘But why shouldn’t there be two pieces about her?’ replied Puccini. ‘A woman like Manon can have more than one lover! Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets; I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion.’ He was unafraid of competition and conflict, and it paid off, with George Bernard Shaw saying, ‘Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.’

2° A friendship turned sour

One of these rivals was also a friend, the composer Ruggero Leoncavallo, who had just had a hit of his own with his opera Pagliacci. During its composition, Leoncavallo had left the high temperatures and equally high rental costs of Milan for a cottage in Vacallo, in the high mountains of the Italian Tyrol. He persuaded Puccini to follow him, and when he moved into his new place just across the street he was greeted by a painting of a clown - a pagliaccio - hanging in Leoncavallo’s window. Puccini promptly countered with a towel bearing a hand - a mano.

But this friendly rivalry would soon turn sour. One day, Leoncavallo invited his friend over to show him what he was working on. It was an opera called La bohème, based on Henri Murger’s 1851 book of stories about the garret artists of Paris’ Left Bank, La Vie de Bohème. A while later, Puccini informed him that, actually, he too was working on his own adaptation of the book, which by sheer coincidence he also planned to call… La bohème. A livid Leoncavallo took their feud public, writing to a newspaper that his priority over the adaptation was ‘indisputably established’. This only served to sharpen Puccini’s competitive edge, who replied in in a rival publication: ‘Let him compose, and I will compose. The public will judge.’

3° Messing about in boats

Though a composer by profession, Puccini’s real passion was hunting, especially shooting waterfowl. He moved to and built himself a villa near Torre del Lago, choosing the place primarily because it adjoined a lake rich in potential victims. His partner, Elvira, was less than impressed, complaining that ‘instead of boating around on the lake with his gun and his vagabond friends, he should be at the piano, working on La bohème.’

In his defence, perhaps Puccini was simply trying to embody the same bohemian spirit of Henri Murger, who was himself an enthusiastic hunter in his later life. The author was unfortunately a very poor shot, which earned him the affectionate local reputation as ‘the hunter who never kills anything.’ In an invitation to a friend to join him in a day’s pheasant shooting he wrote, ‘I will introduce you to an old cock that I have respectfully missed five times, so now that he knows me he doesn’t even bother to get out of my way.’

4° Cold hands, not cold feet

The moment when Rodolfo and Mimì first meet at the end of Act I is one of the most romantic love scenes in all theatre. In La Vie de Bohème, Murger based the character of Rodolphe on himself. Despite this, the author portrayed the impoverished poet in unflattering terms, describing him as ‘a young man whose face could hardly be seen for a huge, bushy many-coloured beard. To set off the prognathic hirsutism, a premature baldness had stripped his temples as bare as a knee. A cluster of hairs, so few as to be almost countable, vainly endeavoured to conceal this nakedness.’

Mimì, in contrast, is described as a small, delicate, lively and attractive eighteen-year-old girl, ‘of a type especially suited to Rodolphe’s artistic and poetic predilections.’ Her face is lovely, with a young, fresh smile ‘and a glance both tender and full of imperious coquetry.’ But as Puccini depicts in the Act I aria ‘Che gelida manina’, what more than anything else caused Rodolphe to fall in love with Mimì were her hands. ‘Yet these hands,’ warns Murger, 'so frail, so dainty, so soft to the lips - these childish hands in which Rodolphe had placed his newly burgeoned heart - these white hands of Mlle Mimì were soon to tear that heart to pieces with their rosy nails.’

5° All in good time

Among the many things that make Puccini stand out from his contemporaries is his extreme detail of tempo. When you listen to a Puccini aria, there’ll be a lot of pushing and pulling, as if the singer is at the mercy of his or her emotions. The subtle slowing downs followed by faster sweeps are all dictated on the score. This makes his operas very tricky to conduct.

Time is pliant in Puccini’s hands. He gives his music an organic feeling, as if not only the singers but also the orchestra, the drama and time itself are breathing as one, sometimes gasping, sometimes purring, but always living on the edge. This is the embodiment of the bohemian spirit, and is especially suitable for an intimate, domestic drama where each scene happens in real time, as is the case with La bohème.