Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

La Bohème
The Bohemians

Origins of the Characters in Puccini’s La Bohème

Puccini's La Bohème is based on the writings of Henri Murger (1822-1861), a French author who told of the day-to-day life of struggling artists in Paris during the 1840s. Murger was the son of a Parisian concierge, and he grew up among the artists who were his father's tenants, one of whom is purported to have been the great singer Luigi Lablache.

The young Murger went to work as a messenger for a lawyer, but he lost the job because he spent too much of his time chatting with his artist friends. Soon he joined a group of young men who met daily in the cheapest café to eat and drink the minimum while discussing poetry, philosophy, painting, music and the other arts.

Murger began to write stories about his bohemian friends, and these tales were serialized in a periodical called Le Corsaire beginning in 1845. The four equally prominent characters were Rodolphe (Rodolfo in the opera), Marcel (Marcello), Alexandre Schaunard and Gustave Colline. In fact, Rodolphe is based on the real Henri Murger, and he describes this character as having a multicolored thicket of a beard complimented by very little hair on the top of his head. Of course, in the opera he is more likely to be romanticized as the handsome tenor. Marcel is said to have had some of the personality traits of the painter François Germain Léopold Tabar (1818-1869), who often spoke of his intention to paint the passage of the Hebrews through the Red Sea , but never actually put it on canvas. Murger describes Marcel's shabby clothing as being topped off by a strident green, hole-ridden coat which Musette, his coquettish lady friend, tried to darn at their first meeting. Schaunard, the musician, is modeled on Murger's friend Alexandre Schanne, the son of a wealthy toy manufacturer who became a bohemian for a time before resuming his bourgeois existence. He was gifted in music and painting, but gave up both arts for a regular income.

After Murger made bohemian life famous, he wrote his memoirs, Souvenirs of Schaunard . Gustave Colline is a combination of two philosophers with whom Murger was acquainted: Jean Wallon, who was inordinately fond of his hazel-colored overcoat which always had its pockets stuffed with books, and Marc Trapadoux, who was the most serious minded of the group. Some years later, Wallon's widow protested that image, insisting that her late husband was a militant Christian who searched unceasingly for truth. There are several prototypes for Mimi, including Lucille Lovet, a fragile beauty who died of consumption during the period when Murger was actively writing, and Marie Virginie Vimal, the seamstress whom the author loved passionately.

We know the most about the real Musette (Musetta in the opera), Marie-Christine Roux, because she was described by the writer Champfleury in his Adventures of Mademoiselle Mariette , as well as by Murger. A twenty-year-old artists' model with a melodious voice and a quick wit, she was said to accept only young and handsome lovers. After having saved some money, she made arrangements to retire to Algeria , where she was to reside with her sister. In December of 1863, she sailed aboard the Atlas for North Africa . Unfortunately, the ship sank en route, and the beautiful Marie-Christine drowned along with all the other passengers.

The installments of Murger's Bohemian Scenes ( Scènes de la vie de bohème ) published in Le Corsaire received a polite reception, but nothing more, until a clerk at the War Ministry who was trying to become a dramatist suggested turning them into a play. This young writer, Théodore Barrière, had already written several successful vaudevilles. He and Murger fashioned some of the characters and incidents from the Scènes into La Vie de Bohème , which scored a resounding triumph at its premiere on November 22, 1849, at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris . As might be expected, some major alterations had to be made in transforming the prose into drama. For example, in the Scènes , it is Francine who loses her key in the dark and finds love in the process, but in the play this scene is given to Mimi, the girl who dies of consumption.

On the evening of the play's premiere, one of the most important publishers in Paris, Michel Levy, treated both authors to an elaborate supper and offered Murger 500 gold francs to rework the stories from Le Corsaire into a novel, giving Levy all the publication rights. That was Murger's ticket to middle-class living, and he grabbed it. Within a week, had he found lodging in a far more respectable section of Paris from which, as fate would have it, he never again wrote a memorable piece.

Maria Nockin

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