All this popularity notwithstanding, La Bohème is a masterpiece, for the very reasons Beecham cited. Of the several kinds of musicodramatic mastery that make it so, I’ll mention only three. Two are in the orchestral scoring, namely, its powers of description and its adroit handling of thematic materials; and these interlock. Some of the description is pure illustration, either of some little action (Rodolfo dabs at Mimì’s forehead) or occurrence (the flame in the stove flares up, dies down) or of a conditioning atmosphere (snow falls; it’s cold; there’s a bleakness). Some is instant shorthand characterization, as with the first entrances of Colline, Schaunard, Musetta, and, of course, Mimì. Mimì’s entrances in Acts 1 and 3 always remind me (in feel and situation, for there is only a faint musical similarity) of Santuzza’s first entrance in Cavalleria: the female character whose fate is the story of the opera is announced by the orchestra. She arrives, dragging her fate with her. And in Act 4, Mimì brings it on full-blown, this time pre-announced by another character (Musetta: “C’è Mimì, c’è Mimì“), but punched into us by the orchestra’s deep temblor and the anguish in the accented high string figure that struggles up, then plunges back down and instantly mutates into the doom-laden motif we first heard in Act 3, as Rodolfo tried to get the cough-racked Mimì to enter the warmth of the tavern. There, it lasts five bars before cutting  to the wrenching figure we first heard with Mimì’s coughing in Act 1, and then to Marcello overhearing the flirtatious laughter of Musetta from inside. This being an opera, both these fragments have direct sung-word references that recall happier identifying moments, for the first is derived from Mimì’s literally introductory phrase (“Mi chiamano Mimì,” now turned into the recognition of her fast-approaching fate), and the second is the giddy theme, first introduced in the orchestra, to which Musetta sang “Voglio fare il mio piacere” in Act 2—and we’ll hear it again, sadly tweaked, on Musetta’s re-entrance with the muff in Act 4.

These are two of the many tiny motifs, some associated with moments of emotional meaning, but others with passing exchanges of no great import, that gradually create a web of living memory within which the characters (and we with them) act out their lives. We recognize a few of them on first acquaintance; others we may not trace at a particular moment until the fiftieth hearing, but they’re all good! They stick! This procedure starts early and builds through the course of the work, creating the feel of a stream of consciousness and a kind of mourning for times just gone by, as if they had to be clung to before they are lost. And isn’t that exactly how we live, with snatches of the past, some new, some old, always with us, sometimes wiped away by something urgent in the present, but then returning to carry us along? Or perhaps it’s only how romantics live. We could call the technique leitmotivic, but it’s not happening at the Wagnerian level the term implies. It is a representation of psychology, but Puccini’s is a psychology of everyday life, not of humanity in an archetypal sense, and heroic only in the way that survival itself is heroic. It is brilliant, and, in its effect, unique to Puccini—unique to Bohème, in fact, for Puccini did not employ it to anywhere near this extent in any of his other operas. This story inspired it.