What's the story Rodolfo is a writer and his flatmate Marcello a painter: both are struggling no-marks in Paris’ competitive art world. Fortunately, another mate strikes lucky on Christmas Eve, and they have enough cash for a night on the town. Mimi from next door asks for a light for her candle and then suffers a violent coughing fit and faints. Rodolfo immediately falls for her, and she joins the friends’ night out. Marcello has an explosive on-off affair with the escort Musetta, while Rodolfo’s jealousy also scuppers his relationship with Mimi. Eventually, Mimi returns to Rodolfo’s apartment: she’s very sick by now, and there are so many things she wanted to say to him. Musetta sells her earrings to buy her medicine. But it’s too late now.

Why should we care? ‘Bohemians’ were 19th-century artists and radicals whose lifestyle involved high hopes, free love and empty pockets. The 1896 opera by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was based on Henry Mürger’s Parisian newspaper column and book Scenes of Bohemian Life. Mürger lived the bohemian life and described everything: even how he dumped the girlfriend on whom Mimi is based. This Paris may be beautiful, but it is also a city of unromantic graft – of feeling cold to the bones, scratching around for the rent and never having enough to eat. Youthful high hopes only carry the characters so far. Are the artists talented or merely nice boys slumming it? They worry about prostituting their talent, but the women have to face the prospect of hawking their bodies. Puccini wanted stories ‘that will move the world’, and his brave, sickly heroine certainly touches audiences. ‘They call me Mimi,’ her first aria begins, ‘I don’t know why.’ It’s a memorably hesitant beginning to a relationship that begins in darkness, flares, splutters and ignites again on her deathbed. Despite the energetic crowd scenes, La bohème begins and ends in Rodolfo’s garret – because life’s real revelations come quietly, with the person who changes your life, or the one you should have loved when you had the chance.

What does it sound like? La bohème is the sound of youth. The bohemians’ boisterous rhythms open the opera, and Puccini’s melodies often seem to build from nothing, which produces a chattery immediacy. Apart from Mimi, everyone tends to speak their mind, loudly and often. The four acts have been described as the movements of a symphony, moving through the second-act street party and the chilly third act, where offstage voices (in the warm inn or clamouring for attention in the snow) leave Mimi seeming isolated. La bohème wants to sum up the most vivid moments of your life, and it even turns nostalgic, as fragments of Mimi and Rodolfo’s early arias crop up later on. Rodolfo’s breathless first reaction to Mimi (‘Che gelida manina’ – ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’) grows out of a dreamy aria about his artistic plans. And Mimi’s last words float over a fragment of ‘Che gelida manina’: that first touch was the best moment of her life, the memory she clutches to the end.

Other stuff Film director Baz Luhrmann adores this opera, and produced it on Broadway. Its spirit of madcap bohemia and unexpected loss inform his dazzling movie Moulin Rouge. Puccini must have remembered his student days in Milan, where he survived mostly on minestrone. He confessed that when he finished composing La bohème, ‘I began to weep like a child. It was as though I had seen my own child die.’ The libretto was written by Puccini’s regular, odd-couple team of Giuseppe Giacosa (a celebrated poet and a perfectionist who fretted endlessly) and Luigi Illica (who was touchy and unpredictable but worked at speed). In rehearsal, Puccini demanded that the stage action should co-ordinate perfectly with the music, down to the tinkling of the wine glasses. Actress Lillian Gish took Mimi’s death so seriously in the 1926 silent film that she stopped eating and drinking, used cotton pads to dry up her saliva, and stopped breathing as the camera rolled.

Exploring further - links La bohème, edited by Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Cambridge Opera Handbook). A guide to the opera’s music, context and history. Puccini by Mosco Carner (Duckworth) Magisterial biography of the composer. Moulin Rouge (2001), film directed by Baz Luhrmann, with Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Set in Bohemian Paris, with a touch of consumption. La bohème (1988), film directed by Luigi Comencini, with soprano Barbara Hendricks. La bohème (1926), impassioned silent movie directed by King Vidor, with Lillian Gish.