Puccini's opera was based on Henri Mürger’s novel, Scènes de la vie de bohème. The book was originally published as a series of stories or episodes from the lives of quasi-fictional bohemian students, poets, actors and artists living in the Latin Quarter in Paris around 1840. These stories were essentially reminiscences of Mürger’s own student life at the time, with the major characters being based on his extended circle of friends and acquaintances. The main character of the novel (Rodolphe) is Mürger himself, more an editor of popular magazines than the poet of the opera. Mosco Carner, in his exhaustive biography of Puccini, quotes a description of the hero from Mürger’s original: “…a young man whose face could hardly be seen for a huge, bushy, many-colored beard. To set off this prognathic hirsutism, a premature baldness had stripped his temples as bare as a knee…” Can you imagine the operatic Rodolfo appearing on stage looking anything like this?! The other characters are either directly drawn from Mürger’s student days (like Benoit and Schaunard) or are composite characters based on two or three individuals with whom the author was involved (Mimì, Musette and Marcel).
Once published in novel form, Mürger’s work struck the imagination of contemporary Parisians who found much to love in these vivid characters. It also became something of a parlor game trying to discover which real personage was the basis for one of the fictional characters. The author’s success was compounded by a dramatic version of the book, a five-act play entitled La Vie de Bohème, that he wrote in collaboration with Thèodore Barrière and was first performed in 1849. The libretto for the opera is based on both versions, a wise choice by Puccini’s librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. Besides having the challenge of telescoping this sprawl of countless episodes into a compact and singable text, they had to decide how many of these wonderful characters the operatic version would successfully support. In doing so they had to jettison a number of colorful individuals but, thankfully, not to the detriment of the basic story that they decided to tell: the doomed love of a sensitive poet for a terminally ill seamstress.
For all its literary influence on the general picture that we have of the bohemian life in the Paris of the 1840s, Mürger’s work is not the most scintillating read, and for opera lovers it is more a curiosity to be explored rather than a work to be enjoyed on its own merits. (It is rather like Sardou’s La Tosca, upon which Puccini’s opera Tosca is based: the opera is so much greater than its source). For whatever reason Giacosa and Illica were able to extrude a significant amount of true poetry out of the story and characters of La vie, a treasury of language that inspired Puccini to a level of musical genius that he had only touched upon in his earlier works.