Puccini’s La Boheme: The Costs of Bohemianism

Photo by Adolfo Hohenstein (1854–1928), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The cute girl on your floor is finally here. In your apartment. You’re a touch panicky, but you’ve practiced for this. And you’re in some measure eloquent, you tell yourself. You’re a poet, after all.

Game time.

“Look m’lady, let me tell you three things about myself: Who I am, what I do, and how I live,” you tell her. She nods, hopefully from interest, not mere courtesy; you forage on. “I’m a poet, I write, and how do I live? I live!”

In the moment you pause for breath and effect, you realize she is far less impressed with your prepared speech than you had hoped.

Blessedly, your natural earnestness asserts itself, and you hazard telling the simple truth.

You tell her you’ve chosen a bohemian life, but you live like a great lord. The words spill out naturally, and — you can practically hear the music swell — a heretofore unknown feeling engulfs you. Suddenly, you realize you’ve monologued, and, slightly embarrassed, you ask her about herself. She says she’s called Mimi.

The above is a faithful-ish translation of Rodolfo’s famous aria, “Che gelida manina,” from Giacomo Puccini’s operatic masterwork, La Boheme. The opera follows Rodolfo, Mimi, and their friends as they gallivant through 19th-century Paris. A consummate tenor, Rodolfo indeed styles himself a poet, thinks himself suave, and has a healthy jealous streak. Mimi loves him, nonetheless, but like most sopranos, she fights a terminal respiratory illness. (Some scientist should research the correlation.) Like most women who date young men, Mimi is too good for her partner, and when finally she succumbs to her disease, Puccini practically wrestles the tears from his audience. Tragically, Mimi passes due largely to her time living in Rodolfo’s drafty apartment, which worsens her cough. His poverty, however, can give her nothing better. They certainly share good times (e.g., Act II), but also bad ones (e.g., Act III).

Conventional wisdom says La Boheme romanticizes the bohemian lifestyle. Upon deeper consideration, however, the piece is deeply skeptical of the man-child, Rodolfo, whose personal failings, and choice of idealistic instability over the drab sureness of bourgeois life, wrecks his relationship with the woman he loves and hastens her death.

Further, Rodolfo and his roommates’ happy-go-lucky, live-for-the-moment, shove-it-to-the-man posture towards adulthood leaves them poor in social capital when they need it most. The poet mentions a rich uncle, but neither he nor the avuncular fortune appear. Ultimately, Rodolfo has no one to appeal to as Mimi’s condition worsens — no family, no church, no financially stable friend. Rodolfo’s roommates and Musetta — a “singer” who enjoys a combustible relationship with the group’s painter, Marcelo — do their utmost, but none possess the financial or social capital to save Mimi.

And Mimi, for her part, consents to treatment she should not. To fulfill her own unhealthy Romantic longings, she falls for a poet, who, while earnest, is jealousy-prone and woefully immature. The one accentuates the other’s dysfunctions.

These tragic heroes resemble too many of this twenty-something writer’s peers: happy to fudge their way through life’s difficulties, cut off voluntarily from institutions of civil society, and determined to mold the greater world to fit their personal tastes. Many kids, these days, eschew bourgeois life choices, only to bemoan confusedly the consequent dearth of bourgeois outcomes; and those who do achieve success walking the bourgeois walk too often refuse to talk the bourgeois talk. Many young folks’ plan financially to afford next month’s rent and thrice weekly UberEats orders, not good medical insurance or a mortgage. They frequent bottomless brunch on Sundays rather than Café Momus on Christmas Eve. Immediately available food, consumer goods, social, and intoxicants have eroded many young people’s tolerance for delayed gratification. Building discipline, like building a muscle, requires consistency and many repetitions.

In the long term, for most, this lifestyle ends in listlessness, anomie, and existential frustration. The sentiment that what is worth doing is also difficult, is trite yet generally true, for meaning and fulfillment usually spring from invested effort. The stable, white-picket-fence life is damn good, as many plumbers and electricians can attest. What’s more, participation in local communities and institutions yields happiness and contentment. It drives economic success as well — as does marriage. And when life’s curveballs break most sharply, savings, family, and community mitigate, or stave off entirely, disaster.

In sum, however, La Boheme’s audiences should understand its warning not as polemic against artistic endeavors or non-traditional lifestyles per se, but rather a reminder that such choices inevitably involve tradeoffs. Truly great art — which often emanates from non-traditional, not-so-balanced folks — is not only, well, great, but elemental to the human experience. Its creation requires individuals to decide non-rationally to pursue their wildest dreams. Some succeed, some fail. For some, artistic meaning and experiential pleasures compensates for financial stresses and other opportunity costs; for many, they do not. Years ago, a veteran opera coach, whose professional credits include the Metropolitan Opera, told this writer that if one can imagine pursuing happily a career other than music, one should.

However, many younglings’ self-centered, appetite-driven existences rise less from artistic pursuits than from Peter Pan-ism. An otherwise unhealthy fixation on, and hyper-sensitivity to, sensation and emotion can provide insight to artists by which they distill the human experience’s ineffableness in an aria or a watercolor. (“In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be,” to appropriate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of great books.) But most modern bohemians live listlessly for no cause but the avoidance of grown-up life’s unpleasant parts. They hazard the artist’s risks without hope for his payout.

Puccini never ascended higher than his – and perhaps the art form’s – Mount Everest: La Boheme. From the clattering opening notes of Act I to Rodolfo’s final, heartrending Mimi!, he captivates his audience, spanning sitcom and drama, romcom and tragedy. He writes each scene flawlessly, excepting perhaps the inclusion of Parpignol, an odd fellow who falls somewhere between the Pied Piper and that creep who drives that van. Puccini made each character funny, sympathetic, and distinctive. And above all, the music has no parallel.

Puccini’s criticism of the bohemian lifestyle makes the piece still more compelling. By reflecting the timeless truths — and tensions — of this mortal coil, great art often advances profoundly conservative points, regardless of the creator’s intent.

Society owes a debt to bohemian artists, past and present, for the beauty they create. But don’t think the life is easy or costless.