La Bohème in pop culture

La Bohème

Movies, pop music and Broadway musicals have all drawn inspiration from the original Bohemian love story.

Puccini’s masterpiece about a group of struggling artists trying to find fulfilment in 19th century Paris is not just popular. It’s popular culture.

La Bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas across the world, drawing new audiences to opera year after year. Inspired by Henri Murger’s novel Scenes of Bohemian Life, this extraordinary piece has inspired many artworks in the years since its 1896 premiere.

Here are just a few of La Bohème’s most memorable appearances in pop culture from recent decades.
See La Bohème at Sydney Opera House

Rent

The most famous adaptation of La Bohème is Jonathan Larson’s Broadway musical Rent. Larson transported the action from 1830s Paris to New York at the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s/early ‘90s.

Rodolfo becomes Roger, Musetta becomes Maureen, Marcello becomes Mark, and Benoît becomes Benny. And the lovers aren’t threatened by tuberculosis in Rent, but HIV/AIDS is taking its sad toll on their community.

There are direct references to La Bohème scattered throughout Rent: the song that Roger writes for Mimi features the main melody from Puccini’s Musetta’s Waltz, and the pair’s meeting mimics their operatic counterparts, involving a candle that won’t stay lit.

And you might even spot some references to Rent in our production of La Bohème: the stripy jumper that Marcello wears is in the same colour scheme as the one worn by Mark in the original production of Rent.

Moonstruck

In the pantheon of movie scenes featuring Oscar-winning actresses crying at the opera, Cher’s single tear at a performance of La Bohème stands out.

This wonderful scene comes from Moonstruck, a lush romance about two Italian New Yorkers finding love in an unlikely place. Nicolas Cage’s character, Ronny, takes Cher’s Loretta to her first opera, La Bohème, and Loretta finds herself deeply moved by Mimì’s third act aria, ‘Donde lieta uscì’.

The film also features a reimagined version of Musetta’s Waltz as its theme. Thankfully Loretta and Ronny have a happier ending than the one Puccini wrote for Rodolfo and Mimì.

Moulin Rouge!

While Baz Luhrmann’s jukebox movie musical draws inspirations from many different sources (the story has clear parallels with the opera La Traviata, and Luhrmann says his strongest inspiration was the Greek legend of Orpheus) the debt it owes to La Bohème is clear.

Both Moulin Rouge! and La Bohème are set in Paris and both feature a doomed love story in which a poet falls in love with a woman suffering from consumption. And both end with the pair singing their love to each other in spectacular fashion, before the woman promptly dies. It is opera, after all.

Don’t You Know?

Musetta’s Waltz is undoubtedly the most famous tune from La Bohème, and it’s been used in all sorts of pop culture over the last century. In 1959, it was adapted into an R&B song performed by Della Reese called ‘Don’t You Know?’

The song reached number one on the US R&B Chart and number two on the pop chart (Bobby Darin’s recording of ‘Mack the Knight’ was the unbeatable number one), and sees its protagonist declaring her love in truly dramatic fashion.

Find out for yourself why this opera has inspired so much pop culture. See La Bohème at the Sydney Opera House, from 12 January to 11 March.
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*Source: Opera Australia,
PO Box 291, Strawberry Hills NSW 2012, Australia
opera.australia@opera.org.au