From slur to soaring success: ‘La Bohème’ conquers bigotry
Giacomo Puccini’s opera, “La Bohème” premiered in Turin, Italy, 122 years ago. Although the opera is one of the most adored today (my immigrant father’s favorite), it received harsh reviews at its opening. Unfortunately, it was a classic case of a work coming out at the wrong time and place. Much of Italy and all of Germany were entranced by the classy characters and heavy music of composer Richard Wagner, especially his “Götterdämmerung“(“The Twilight of the Gods”).
Puccini’s tale about lower classes, poor people — the two leads, a struggling poet (Rodolfo) and a seamstress (Mimi) overwhelmed by love, debts and disease — had little relevance to Turin’s well-heeled audience, including some royalty. But two months later in a performance in Palermo, Sicily, with a far different class of viewers, the opera was so well-received that the audience would not leave until the company, in an unprecedented encore, reprised the entire last act’s death scene of Mimi. The rest would be history.
The opera’s annals would be similar to what happened in the United States during the Great Depression of the 1930s when Hollywood came out not with movies about daily struggles of the poor but escapism through extravagant musicals. Then came the movie version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1940 about the unbelievable heartaches of a family trying to eke out an existence. And moviedom, as with opera under Puccini, would be changed.
Puccini’s story, set in Paris in 1830, was not original, borrowing heavily from a French author, but the music was original and captivating in every one of the acts. As one of the few warm newspaper critics put it after the Turin premiere: The audience “did not know how to leave the world of German transcendentalism in order to hear the music which ... speaks in exquisite melodies of eternal human passions.” How Puccini came to his originality in “La Bohème” is not clear, especially since his previous opera a couple years earlier, “Manon Lescaut,” borrowed heavily from Wagner, was proper and accepted.
American opera lovers know that “La Bohème” has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera more than any other opera, nearly 1,300 times. What is perhaps not known is that is that the opera’s music has penetrated American popular tunes, movies and plays for years, with writer John Patrick Shanley and director Norman Jewison giving the opera its biggest boost in an award-winning film, “Moonstruck,” in 1987. Starring Cher and Nicholas Cage as Sicilian/Italian-American lovers (who eventually marry) from blue-collar families in Brooklyn, the movie reverberates in background music drawn from “La Bohème.”
But it goes an additional step, as illustrated by Cage, a baker, in his dialogue with Cher, asking her to attend the Met with him: “I love two things. I love you, and I love the Opera. If I can have two things that I love together for one night, I will be satisfied to give up the rest of my life.” Of course, the opera they see together is “La Bohème,” Cher’s first visit to the Lincoln Center.
Afterward, inviting her to share his bed, Cage defines the anxieties of love in line with Puccini’s: “Love doesn’t make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”
The dichotomy in the essence of what the movie is all about makes the film universal. Note director Jewison’s sophisticated view: “an operatic, multi-generational romantic comedy.” Then there’s Cher’s inelegant language when asked by her mother if she loved Cage. “Ma” said Cher, “I love him awful.”
The film made a lot of money ($92 million), garnered three Academy Awards (including Cher for best actress and Shanley for best original screenplay) and still finds a place on TV’s premium movie channels. Critic Roger Ebert was ecstatic: “The movie makes you laugh, which is very difficult, but it also makes you feel open to your better impulses, and that is harder still.”
But The New York Times reviewer was condescending, bordering on an ethnic slur, akin to the Turin press in 1896. “With its accordion music, its bits of dialect, and its love of opera ... ‘Moonstruck’ clearly means to celebrate all things Italian. However, it creates the false impression that most of the people who made it have never been closer to Italy than, perhaps, Iowa.”
The Times’s Gotham rival, The New York Daily News, never at a loss in choosing the right words for its working-class readership, had a different take. “This is a movie,” wrote its critic, “that makes you want to sing ‘Bohème’ and walk in the moonlight and move to Brooklyn.”