Scenes of Bohemian Life  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Revision as of 00:04, 15 December 2007; view current revision
←Older revision | Newer revision→
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

La Vie de bohème is an often-adapted story first serialized by Henri Murger in the early 1800s. These were turned into a play, La Vie de Bohème, in 1849, and later were compiled into the book Scènes de la vie de bohème (Paris, 1851). It has also been made into several operatic versions, the most famous of which was composed by Giacomo Puccini.

Plot summary

The story includes a group of friends in the Bohemian artistic subculture of France (see Bohemianism). As the group is poor, and some of its female members work as courtesans, challenging personal situations arise when one of the characters, who suffers from tuberculosis, must balance survival against romantic love.

The book was written from Murger's own experiences as a desperately poor writer living in a Parisian attic, member of a loose club of friends who called themselves "the water drinkers" (never money for wine). In his writing he combines instinct with pathos and humour, sadness his predominant tone.

Influence

In the late 20th century, the musical Rent was based on La Bohème, with AIDS substituted for tuberculosis. A movie, Moulin Rouge!, was also loosely based on this plot; it was directed by Baz Luhrmann, who had previously directed a wildly successful Australian production of Puccini's opera version which opened on Broadway in 2002.

The book is the basis for the operas La Bohème (Puccini) and La Bohème (Leoncavallo), and, at greater removes, the zarzuela Bohemios (Amadeu Vives), the operetta Das Veilchen vom Montmartre (Kálmán) and the Broadway musical Rent.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Scenes of Bohemian Life" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools