The Bohemian Life

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 298, 9 March 1945, Page 9

The Bohemian Life

O quote Laver’s biography of Whistler, "For most young men ‘la vie de Boheme’ is at some period of their existence the only paradise in which they still believe, a paradise inhabited by a fluttering cloud of grisettes, each transfigured by the light of imagination into something half-houri and half guardianangel." It is by the light of this same | imagination that we still listen enthralled | to Puccini’s opera La Boheme which we | had from 4YA one recent Sunday night. | The scene which it portrays, the famous

latin quarter, is now something so different as to seem another place entirely. Nowadays there are no "artists’ quarters" except those artificially | encouraged to flourish for the tourist trade and the war has put a

stop to that, too. Read any reliable biography of a modern artist and you will find him, with few exceptions, a modest and ordinary husband, father, and citizen when not engaged in the practice of his trade. You may be reasonably assured that if he lives the gay life of Bohemia he is not spending enough time on his work to be one of the topnotchers. This need not trouble us, however, in listening to the raptures of Rudolph, the romantic starvation of Schaunard and Marcel, the inevitably tragic tale of Mimi. The atmosphere so conjured mp is theatrical, squalid, bohemian, and entrancing, but the latter fact is due to Puccini rather than to Murger, whose romantic story was but the prelude to Trilby; and even this is mow so dated that it is in danger of becoming a curio.