Before this course, I knew next to nothing about the opera, other than the fact that it featured screaming in Italian. I never saw myself as an “opera person,” you know, the type to go in a fancy ball gown and drink champagne during the intermission. I didn’t even know that the opera was accessible to anyone outside of the top 1%. Gratefully, this misguided impression was disproved and I was exposed to Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme.

A Bohemian is defined as a person who has informal and unconventional social habits, especially an artist or writer. Puccini’s opera follows in four acts the lives of young Bohemians living in 1840’s Paris as they deal with love and death. This is significant because for centuries, the opera was dominated by characters who were royalty or mythological creatures with powers over life and death. It proved to be difficult at times to humanize these gods and goddesses and portray them in a way that permitted the common people to identify with them. This changed as composers began telling the stories of simpler and more realistic characters.

Puccini said that his success came from putting “great sorrows in little souls.” He was able to convey through his operas that people everywhere regardless of social class and status deal with love, envy, loss and heartbreak. The characters in La Boheme were familiar to me, and the storyline was relatively simple and uncomplicated. One of the misconceptions that I had about the opera was that they are complex and difficult to understand, but that was not the case with Puccini’s. The characters were so profound and believable that I was able to place myself in the shoes of each of them at one point or another.

Starting college and becoming more independent has forced me to become more aware of my finances. This allowed me to easily be able to understand the struggling Bohemians in La Boheme trying to pay their rent. I have experienced first love and the rollercoaster of emotions that accompany it, and seeing Mimi and Rodolfo’s relationship develop and evolve felt familiar. It is no doubt that we have all dealt with envy at some point, same as the young couples in the story. And finally, we have all experienced the loss of a loved one. 

Although I knew that Mimi would die in the fourth act, (thanks for the spoiler, Professor Eversley), I found that it did not ruin the opera for me. Puccini created a beautiful story that had me completely immersed from the beginning. Knowing the ending did not take away from the story for me. I enjoyed watching Rodolfo and Mimi fall in love and go through the trials and tribulations of a young couple. The themes explored in this opera were relatable. We have all lied to ourselves and others about our feelings in order to protect ourselves. This is exactly what Rodolfo did. He pretends to be overcome by fits of jealousy in order to push Mimi away because he can’t handle seeing her so sick. The events that take place seem familiar because the intense relationships portrayed depict emotions that are common to us as humans.

La Boheme has lasted over the centuries because of how relatable it is. Instead of portraying characters that would have been hard to identify with, this opera showcased themes of love and death amongst Bohemians in the Latin Quarter in 19th century Paris. Puccini told the untold stories of struggling artists and in doing so he created a magnificent piece of art that has transcended time.