Sea Scenes

Abstract

Chapter 7 reads Puccini’s La Bohème to highlight the agonistic leitmotifs and life-motifs that thread the concept of bohème back to the Red Sea. What has the landscape of Marcello’s painting, which starts the opera, to do with the portrait of Mimi’s life and final death? If we answer, nothing directly, we play to the idea that the opera’s true beginning is not its first start but its second, when Mimi climbs the stairs to become a muse in the poet’s garret. Yet why not play to both starts, relating them as they are so related in Murger’s scenes?