Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 7 - La bohème

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Last spring, as we strolled through the Art Institute of Chicago’s 19th century collection, former Lyric General Director Anthony Freud noted the preponderance of paintings of women — many of them legendarily gorgeous works. I pointed out that these were not always depictions of innocents or grande dames, but rather were often coded images of prostitution, one of the few paths of survival (besides marriage and motherhood) for single, working-class females of the time. And at that moment we had a mutual revelation about how paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Courbet, and even Renoir, among others, could illuminate much of the backstory of La Bohème and its compelling characters. Puccini himself, and his audience, would have understood the unspoken tensions inherent in the works of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters held at the Art Institute — and indeed it’s fair to say that the social observations in the paintings are echoed in his operatic renderings of Mimì and Musetta. In Bohemian life, there is abundant beauty, but plenty of darkness as well. The concept of Bohemianism, which originally referred to transient peoples, especially the Romani, had morphed in the 19th century to define a non- conformist lifestyle opposed to bourgeois conventions of respectability. Synonymous with art culture, Bohemianism was not only an urban phenomenon but, as the French writer Henry Murger specified in his introduction to Scènes de la vie bohème , Puccini’s source material, it “only exists and is only possible in Paris.” Puccini’s fourth and most beloved opera, La Bohèm e draws not only on Murger’s tales of the alternative lifestyle of artists, writers, and musicians in the Latin Quarter of Paris, but also on his own experience as an impoverished composer in Milan, when he too lacked the means to pay for food, heat, and rent. His first actual visit to Paris, however, was a business trip in the mid-1890s, around the time he was composing the opera, which premiered in 1896 in Turin. We know little about that visit and whether or not he ventured up to the Butte (hill) of Montmartre, the undisputed mecca of bohemianism, whose lower rents and romanticized promises of sex and debauchery continue to attract artists and tourists today. Puccini’s sentimental love tragedy takes place in studios and cafés, prominent symbols of Montmartre’s subculture; seen on the backdrop, a hint of the unfinished Tour Eiffel specifies this production’s moment as the late 1880s. Here we are introduced to the painter Marcello, poet Rodolfo, and (later) musician Schaunard, true bohemians convinced of their talents and future while living in obscurity and poverty. More to our point, we meet Musetta and Mimì, who represent the reality of single women in an increasingly populated, expensive, and patriarchal society where prostitution was not only accepted but regularized in the service of men. Puccini had already written an opera about a famous prostitute, Manon Lescaut, the glittering 18th century courtesan, who metaphorically preys upon men wealthy enough to provide her with a life of material luxury. La Bohème presents two members of the less exalted echelon of prostitution: Mimì, inherently innocent of greed and vengeance, whose incentive is survival, and Musetta, a spirited singer, escort, and call girl. By the second half of the 1890s, when Puccini’s opera was produced, prostitution was both an entertainment and a vice, whose practitioners were identified as filles publiques , pierreuses (from the cobblestones streets they walked), filles de joie , and belles de nuit (loosely translated to public women, streetwalkers, joy girls, and beauties of the night), among other pejorative monikers. Apart from the Courtesan, an expensive escort who benefitted from extremely wealthy suitors, and whose fashions and styles were emulated by respectable bourgeois wives, the majority of prostitutes came from the country and needed money not only to keep themselves alive but frequently to support other family members. At the same time, prostitutes were not considered professionals (what one would call sex workers today) but social deviants, and thus a threat to the nuclear family and subject to rules set down by the very men who profited from their availability. Thus began the two-tiered system of “ soumises ” (literally, subjugated by the police) and “ insoumises ” (unregulated). The former refers to women who worked for a maison de tolérance , or brothel, and were forced to follow house rules in terms of clientele, wages, and living conditions; the latter refers to those like Mimì and Musetta, free from those restrictions but, as independents, more vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. Insoumises ... refers to those like Mimì and Musetta, free from ... restrictions but, as independents, more vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune.