La Bohème

“ This brings Murger to his own day, of which he says: "Aujourd'hui comme autrefois, tout homme qui entre dans les arts, sans autre moyen d'existence que l'art lui-même, sera forcé de passer par les sentiers de la Bohème." If Chelsea were here to make a triumphant interruption, it would have spoken too soon, for he proceeds to give the definition which serves as an epigraph to this chapter, and, without a word of warning, contradicts what he has said before in the sentence: "Nous ajouterons que la Bohème n'existe et n'est possible qu'à Paris." ”

“ But la vie de Bohème, once so vivid a reality, has now no tangible substance: it wanders about, the palest ghost of a legend, formless and indistinct. The young may look forward to it and the old pretend to look back on it, but young and old, in either case, are turning their mind's eye upon a mere abstraction. The word "Bohemian" has become as conventional as "gentleman," with less content for all its greater glamour.
The glamour of Bohemia, too, is projected from a paradox. On the assumption that it exists, those who wish to live in Bohemia idealize it; those who have lived in it boast of it ”

“ C'étoit un homme d'assez grande taille et brun; mais doux et affable, vaillant et libéral, et qui passoit pour avoir toutes sortes de bonnes qualités. Parmi les personnes qui l'accompagnoient étoient quelques seigneurs de Bohème que les Houls en avoient chassés parce qu'ils ne vouloient pas être de leur religion. [Footnote: Houls, Hussites, disciples de Jean Hus (qu'on prononçoit Hous) , sectaires fanatiques qui dans ce siècle inondèrent la Bohème de sang, et se rendirent redoutables par leurs armes.] ”

“ The first Bohemia, that of the second cénacle, was less a common life than a common recreation. It was an incomplete vie de Bohème in so far as its members were united, not by a desire to share all the joys and difficulties of life, but by a particular artistic enthusiasm. There is no record that any of them worked or dwelt together, that they took part in joint expeditions of amusement, or that the mutual acquaintance of those female divinities for whom they plied so "fatally" their emotional bellows is to be presumed—and these are marked characteristics of Murger's vie de Bohème. ”

“ To have talent it is not sufficient to put on a summer overcoat in May; one can be a true poet or artist and yet keep one's feet warm and have one's three meals a day."
Their Bohemia, in fact, was a kind of undergraduate existence, in which all sorts of disorder and youthful folly might be excused on the plea that youth must be served, but which could in no sense be regarded as a part of civic life, much less as the best part, the most truly disinterested and artistic. This is a significant change of attitude from the days of la Bohème galante, which was one of the centres of Paris. ”

“ It may safely be said that in the real Bohème there was no such goodly company of industrious, gifted, morally austere, intellectually gay, unselfish young men, and that there never will be in any society till the coming of the Coquecigrues.
The Bohemia of artistic tradition began in what Théophile Gautier named the "second cénacle." The first cénacle, as all the world knows, was that of Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and the brothers Deschamps, who met regularly at the cabaret of Mère Saguet on Montparnasse in the days when Hugo was still hatching the plot of the literary revolution. ”

“ To Murger, who wrote of what he knew, the man who had the means to live a stable existence, howsoever retired, was a fool if he remained in Bohemia: to the inhabitants of la Bohème galante it was the not being entirely destitute which made their life peculiarly worth living. If Colline ever speculated with any profundity he may have seen that his friends and he lived really in a prison of which poverty, prodigality, and idleness were warders. ”

“ This opera was composed in 1896, and the music is of a far higher order than that of "La Tosca", particularly the love scenes.—
La Bohème grows on one more and more, the oftener one hears it; but such bits as Musette's waltz, the quartet and the love duet in the last act cannot fail to appeal to everybody. The composer has given a most realistic subject a highly poetic setting.
The first act opens in a garret in Paris, in about 1830, and shows us Rudolph the painter and Marcel the poet, from whose Bohemian mode of life the opera derives its name, at work. ”

“ However, this is a characteristic not of Puccini alone, but all the composers in the Young Italian School. They know no way to kill a gnat dancing in the sunlight except to blow it up with a broadside of trombones. Puccini's music in "La Bohème" also seems lacking in the element of characterization, an element which is much more essential in comedy music than in tragic. Whether they are celebrating the careless pleasures of a Bohemian carouse or proclaiming the agonies of a consuming passion, it is all one to his singers. ”

“ By substituting Caruso as the Rodolfo—it is one of the very finest parts of this tenor—and Scotti as the Marcello, we have practically the same cast as that with which this opera at the present time fills Covent Garden; invariably one of its most brilliant audiences.
In June 1898 Paris saw La Bohème at the Opera Comique, for which performance the composer visited the French Capital, for the first time, to superintend some of the first rehearsals. It went to America in the December of the same year, when it was mounted at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and sung in Italian. ”

“ We in England look at love differently and, as we naturally think, better, but we are not hindered, nevertheless, from abandoning our view occasionally. We do so implicitly when we shed tears over "La Dame aux Camélias," over "Madame Butterfly," and over Mimi herself in Puccini's "La Bohème." To be honest, then, we must accept Murger's view, if we enjoy his book, as there is very little doubt that we do. We applaud Musette when she surreptitiously waters the flowers whose duration is to measure that of her love for Marcel ”

“ The effect of this change upon Bohemia is not difficult to imagine. La vie de Bohème implies youth, so that its generations change as rapidly as those of a university. The generation of 1830 had either disappeared or become famous—that is, potentially rich—in a few years. The struggle which had convulsed all Paris was a thing of the past, and Romanticism was so far accepted, swallowed, and digested that by 1843 the necessity was felt for reverting to the classical tradition again, for a change, with the so-called école de bon sens. ”

“ The dance, sustained only by good spirits, never flagged, till in the final galop every mask with his partner rushed pell-mell from the room, leaped wildly down the rickety stairs, dashed up the Impasse, and came to rest under the moonlit ruins of the old priory, where a little cabaret had opened, and only the late dawn of winter drove Bohemia to its bed, to dream of the Pompadour salon, of Ourliac's satirical buffoonery, and of Roger de Beauvoir's magnificent Venetian costume of apple-green velvet with silver embroidery, and his inexhaustible wit, for once born of no champagne. ”

“ Manquer le train, to lose one’s opportunities in life, and consequently to be the reverse of prosperous.
A débute par un beau livre; B à vingt-cinq ans, expose un beau tableau.... Les mille obstacles de la bohème leur barrent le chemin... Ils resteront intelligents, mais ... ils ont manqué le train.—Tony Révillon. ”

“ Further, the Paris implied is the Paris of Murger's own day. That this was so may appear more clearly in the sequel, but for the present it must suffice to say that the Paris of the Romantic period, which gave birth to Bohemia, was unlike the Paris of earlier days in many respects, and no Romantic had any conception of the cosmopolitan Paris of to-day. La vie de Bohème, far from being a vague label, was a phrase packed with intimate meaning, meaning which at the time was not at all so fully manifest as under criticism and comparison it may now appear. ”

“ Journalism was not yet a commercially flourishing business, expenses were high, subscribers few, and Press laws menacing. The starveling poets and dramatists of Bohemia fell upon lean years, in which the weaker and more utterly destitute were destroyed by their privations, like Elisa Mercœur and Hégésippe Moreau. Nevertheless, the Romantics were not crushed out of existence. The stout hearts of those who held out still beat to a common measure, and maintained artistic fellowship in an ideal as an essential element of la vie de Bohème. ”

“ The Rue des Quatre Vents, the headquarters of d'Arthez' cénacle, in Balzac's time "one of the most horrible streets in Paris," remains blamelessly near Saint-Sulpice as dull and decent as the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne; and the Rue Vaugirard, where the second cénacle, headed by Pétrus Borel, held its frantic orgies round the punch-bowl and where Murger wrote his "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," is devoid of any spark of romance. ”

“ Yet it was such who made the traditions of la vie de Bohème. To those who are impelled to break away and lead joyous, untrammelled young lives of privation and artistic striving all sympathy is due, but by masquerading under a tattered banner they do not revive its glory nor increase their own. Paris once had room for Bohemia, but London never. Chelsea and Soho, Highgate and St. ”

“ They all thought he had talent; at Heidelberg they had admired his water colours, Miss Wilkinson had told him over and over again that they were chasing; even strangers like the Watsons had been struck by his sketches. La Vie de Boheme had made a deep impression on him. He had brought it to London and when he was most depressed he had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion ”

“ We Englishmen can hardly understand the magic of this joyous phrase, vingt ans; through French prose and poetry it sounds again and again like a tinkling silver bell calling those who have lived and loved in youth to hark back for a moment in passionate regret, in an ecstasy of remembrance. To think of Bohemia without that silver tinkle in one's ears is to do it a grave injustice, for Bohemia throbbed with it then as with a tocsin, as with a summoning bell to a joyous refectory in some transcendant Abbaye de Thélème. ”

“ The play of the Vie de Bohème (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been produced at the Odeon, had run an unconscionable time—for Paris—and revived the freshness of the legend. The same business, you may say, or there and thereabout, was being privately enacted in consequence in every garret of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard to their own incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us went far, and some farther. ”

“ In the first place, it brought the more joyous festivities of tout Paris and the riotous celebrations of Bohemia into greater relief; and, in the second, the men of the aristocracy, like the Duc d'Aulnis, were driven to find distraction and amusement in a gayer world into which their own womankind was debarred from penetrating. It was they who formed a certain section of tout Paris; they were the viveurs, the dandies, the young bloods of the newly founded Jockey Club, the members of the petit cercle in the Café de Paris, who joined hands with what may be called la haute Bohème. ”

“ As a body they are worthy citizens enough, whose intelligence on some subjects is above the average, but they are masqueraders none the less if they wish to pass as enfants de Bohème. A reason for this masquerade may be found partly in the very human love of "dressing up" which is never to be discouraged, partly in the glorification of Bohemia in which writers of novels and reminiscences are prone to indulge. ”

“ A concrete instance of that is the case of Murger himself, who was set on his legs entirely by the sudden vogue of the dramatized "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème." But there was another reason at least as strong, far deeper, and more honourable. The stage, as I have already pointed out, was the battlefield of the Romantic struggle. "Hernani" brought home the new truths to the public far more vividly than any novel or poem could have done; every night they were declaimed before compelled attention. It is not surprising, then, that the stage played so great a part in the amusements of Bohemia. ”

“ Bohemia proper has no money except what it can make by its art, and as its inhabitants are young that is little enough. La haute Bohème, with a less strict limitation of years, makes money and spends it recklessly. Instead of pleading youth as the excuse of its folly, it claims the indulgence due to artistic achievement. ”

“ At the outset the atmosphere is established by the restless, vivacious, detached and spirited phrase which, if it hardly ever assumes the proportions, musically considered, of a leading theme, at least flavours very strongly the whole musical fabric. It may well be taken to represent the free unrestrained spirit of the Vie de Bohème. The curtain rises quickly, and we see an attic, inhabited by the quartet of gay spirits, those bold adventurers, as Murger calls them, who are stopped by nothing—rain or dust, cold or heat. Every day's existence is a work of genius, a daily problem. ”

“ From the old world story of Murger, Puccini turned to a notable example of modern French stagecraft, in Sardou's drama of La Tosca. His librettists again were Giocosa and Illica, and they provided the composer with a strikingly apt presentation of the grim story; not one, perhaps, that lends itself altogether to musical expression, but one which certainly grips the attention and carries the hearer along. By Tosca, Puccini certainly sustained his now universal popularity made manifest by the preceding La Bohème. ”