La bohème

Astonishing as it may seem today, La bohème’s fortunes were poor at the beginning. First performed in February 1896, Puccini’s romantic opera is one of the best known operas in the world.

The story follows Bohemian writer Rodolfo and seamstress Mimì’s whirlwind romance, as both struggle with life as impoverished Parisians.

However, after a less-than-impressive first performance, with a sub-par tenor, Puccini himself despondently wandered the corridors of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy overhearing hushed conversations about how the opera could not possibly last.

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However, La bohème soon successfully made its way around an extensive network of international theatres, and audiences lapped it up everywhere.

The first performance outside Italy was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1896. The UK premiere took place at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, in 1897, by the Carl Rosa Opera Company supervised by Puccini himself.

It is hard to hear such a familiar opera with the ears of someone listening at the end of the nineteenth century, but at that time there was definitely something of ‘the shock of the new’ about La bohème.

The New York Times condemned the opera for low morals, reporting that ‘the celebration of the scarlet woman seems to be almost unavoidable … today’.

As the years went by La bohème would establish an unshakeable place at the heart of the global operatic canon.

Star singers wanted to perform in it and to record it. Its stand-alone arias took on a life of their own through being reused in film soundtracks (most prominently in Moonstruck) and adverts, even occasionally being reworked as pop songs.

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Suor Angelica

Sentimentality was also a charge that was laid at the door of Suor Angelica, a much later Puccini opera. Suor Angelica is part of a trio of three short operas, Il trittico (The Triptych) – Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi which was first performed in 1918.

The story of Suor Angelica is one of a young, unmarried mother separated from her child by her aristocratic family and confined to a convent.

Some early critics were puzzled by the stillness of the music used to evoke its claustral atmosphere, and the Roman-Catholic subject-matter proved a stumbling block in the English-speaking world.

Suor Angelica, we understand with the benefit of hindsight, is an incisively gripping psycho-drama, which really gets inside its unfortunate protagonist’s state of mind.