La Bohème

It’s Christmas Eve in Paris, somewhere around 1830. The stars are shining, the streets of the Latin Quarter are filling with revellers and in a freezing garret up amid the chimneys, four penniless aspiring artists are laughing through the cold. Puccini’s genius in La bohème (1896) is to make audiences of all ages feel like there’s nowhere they’d rather be, even though the poet Rodolfo has burned his own manuscript for warmth and the rent is already overdue. But who cares? They’re young, they’re free and before morning, one of them—at least—will be in love. Puccini paints both the joyous beginning and tragic ending of Rodolfo’s doomed relationship with the consumptive seamstress Mimì with the same heartfelt immediacy and tenderness—there’s a good reason why this is one of opera’s all-time great weepies, with handkerchiefs very much required. But La bohème has more than one story to tell, and whether it’s the painter Marcello’s on-off romance with the passionate Musetta or the colourful, teeming bustle of Parisian street life, Puccini depicts it with such warmth, such spontaneity and such a glorious stream of melodies (“Che gelida manina” is just the first) that La bohème has become one of the best-loved of all operas, inspiring contemporary imitators from Baz Luhrmann to Jonathan Larson. And understandably so: It’s an opera for anyone who’s ever been young.