NOSTALGIA
FOR THE BOHEMIAN LIFE
By Timothy McGee
The
Bohemian lifestyle has always conjured up a wonderfully romantic picture.
On the one hand there is the carefree image of roaming the streets of
Paris, sitting for long hours in the cafes with artists, writers and musicians,
and sharing the nights with a succession of young, attractive women.
Even the poverty that accompanies it is attractive in its own
melodramatic way: living hand to mouth, sharing tiny unheated garrets on the
Left Bank, selling your clothing in order to buy a paintbrush. Of course there
is also the serious downside: various diseases, including alcoholism and
tuberculosis. But nobody dwells on that part of it too long.
The story of La Boheme actually got its start in just those
circumstances. In the
mid-nineteenth century, the struggling young Parisian writer Henri Murger wrote
the novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, based on his own life: the small shared
room, the Café Momus where he hung around with artists and journalists - his
models for the characters Marcello and Colline
- and even a musician who sometimes called himself Schaunard. The novel was
immediately popular, and a few decades later, when Giacomo Puccini was looking
for a good opera plot, this story caught his attention.
It also rang some personal bells. As a young, impoverished student at the
Milan Conservatory, Puccini also had shared tiny accommodations, frequented the
cafes with various creative types, and chased the girls.
In fact he later described himself rather accurately as “a mighty
hunter of wildfowl, beautiful women, and good libretti.”
At the time he was working on “La Boheme,” Puccini was still
struggling for success and living a life not too distant from the one he was
setting to music. He would spend
the evenings drinking, playing cards, and carousing in a local café (soon
after, renamed Club La Bohème), and then he and all his friends would adjourn
to his house where they carried on the party while Puccini sat in the corner
working on the opera. “La Boheme,” which premiered in Turin in 1896, was
roundly condemned by the critics, including the composer Gabriel Faurè, who
referred to it as “a dreadful Italian work.” But the public loved it, and it
has endured as one of the most frequently produced operas in the repertory,
followed closely by Puccini’s later successes: “Tosca,” “Madame
Butterfly,” and “Turandot.”
The critics have continued to condemn Puccini’s works as
“handkerchief operas,” considering them to be monuments of bad taste, cheap
sadism, and crude tear-jerking sentimentality - exactly the qualities that
endear them to the opera-going public.
And the effect of all this criticism on the composer? He was hardly
affected at all by the cheap shots. Immediately following the success of “La
Boheme,” he bought a yacht that he christened “Mimi I,” and built a large
villa in place of his more modest house at Torre del Lago. From that point on he
never looked back. It was a life of expensive cars, flashy clothes, bird-hunting
expeditions, and an endless succession of beautiful women.
As Puccini would undoubtedly agree, the bohemian life is a great place to
start, and a marvellous source of romantic dreams - but you really wouldn’t
want to live there for long.
Timothy McGee
Bizet’s Carmen: A Smoke on the Seamy Side
By Timothy McGee
By modern standards, the subject matter of Bizet’s Carmen would be considered rather mild, but when it was first presented in 1875 it was denounced by both the public and the press as indecent. It wasn’t just that Carmen blatantly exudes sex and is openly seductive, although that was definitely a part of the shock. The entire opera was perceived as glorifying the lowest, seamiest side of society; one where casual sex, smuggling, and murder are commonplace. It was certainly not the first theatrical work to present this kind of material, but to the Parisians who attended the Opéra Comique premiere - an audience accustomed to more family-oriented productions - this was scandalous beyond compare.
No one in today’s audience is horrified by the opening choral scene in which the women workers at the Seville cigarette factory are taking a smoke break in the local village square. But at the time this would have been one of the most outrageous moments in the opera: women smoking! and in public! Disgraceful! Did they have no shame? No sense of propriety!! It would be more than fifty years, not until after WWI, that "decent" European or North American women would have thought of smoking in public. In fact, the cigarette industry was so sensitive to this social taboo that until well into the 20th century in any advertisements where a woman was shown smoking, she was always very clearly "non-Western." Bizet finessed this problem by making his women Gypsies, which not only eliminated a social gaff, but also brought a level of exoticism to the story. At the time France was entranced by "exotic" places and people - the orient, the Eastern Mediterranean, or in this case, the nomadic Gypsies. The Spanish setting provided the excuse for the inclusion of vibrant dances, which lent an aura of excitement to the production.
The criticism of Carmen did not stop at the plot. In the original production there was only spoken dialogue instead of recitatives, which reduced the orchestral participation and made the entire work seem less lyrical, an element the press was quick to notice. Although Bizet’s songs and dances are extremely popular with today’s public, and universally loved for their beautiful, haunting melodies, the critics branded them "unmelodious," and worse, "Wagnerian," conjuring up what was considered to be the worst of the Germanic (= non-French) musical trends of the time. The criticism could hardly have been more severe.
Bizet did not
have an easy time writing Carmen; after a dozen
Carmen, in the version that now has recitatives (supplied by Ernest Guiraud shortly after Bizet’s death), has been an audience favourite for over 130 years. It is perhaps ironic that at this time we have come back to the position that smoking is socially unacceptable - even for Gypsies.