There is a common belief that Rent is based on the famous opera, but it’s not. Believe, me, I have studied the opera and the novel and the stage play and Rent. When Rent opened it was an easy shorthand to say it was based on La Bohème, rather than explaining the story’s long actual history, but it’s not true.
If you read the book, you will see that I’m right.
Scènes de la vie de Bohème didn’t begin life as a musical, or an opera, or even as a novel. Writer Henri Murger was an authentic, twenty-something Bohemian (i.e., starving artsy), a poet in Paris in the 1840s. Though he later wrote other novels, he’s most remembered for Bohème. Like his own character Rodolphe (Roger in Rent), Murger edited a fashion paper, the Moniteur de la Mode (Fashion Monitor), and a magazine for the hat industry called Castor. In 1844, Murger joined the staff of the daily paper Le Corsaire (which is French for The Pirate), which was helpfully subtitled, “journal of shows, literature, arts, and fashions.”
A friend and editor of another magazine, L’Artiste, suggested to Murger that he focus less on poetry and instead write stories. But among the Bohemians, prose was for amateurs; true artists wrote only poetry. Still, luckily for us, Murger took the advice to heart. So in 1848, he began to write the serialized stories The Bohemians for Le Corsaire, “autobiographical fiction” about Murger and his starving artist friends, all of them re-named. Among those friends were the famous painter James Whistler, the great poet Charles Baudelaire, the great writer Alexandre Dumas Jr., and the novelist and art critic Champfleury, among many others.
At the crossroads of the Romantic movement and the Realism movement, Murger managed to walk a tightrope in his stories between the two, realistic and cynical enough for the critics and academics, romantic and funny enough for the average reading public. Marvel and Moss write, “Bohème is replete with sentiment but its humor redeems it from being mere sentimentality. Murger knew his Bohemia and he could laugh at it as well as weep over it. Murger’s humor, even today, does not pall. It is essentially modern in its keen sense of the ridiculous, in its grasp of the absurdities of situations.”
His stories caused a sensation in literary circles, but Le Corsaire was a small paper and didn’t reach a huge audience. And yet a Parisian publisher collected the stories into a single volume and sold out 70,000 copies.
The play enjoyed an all-star gala opening night on November 22, 1849. Anyone in Paris who liked the theatre was there. Most of Murger’s real life friends were in the audience to see their fictional selves onstage, and they were delighted. After the huge success of the play on stage, publisher Michel Levy offered to publish the stories as a full novel. So Murger and Levy collected and ordered the stories, and Murger did some revisions. The novel was published in 1851 and was a bestseller.
Murger didn’t invent the world of alternative, unconventional, iconoclastic, artsy “Bohemia,” a world of starving artists and unpaid rent, a world of “art for art’s sake.” But he was the first to write a novel about this community and these people – all based on his own experiences as one of them. Murger died suddenly at the age of 39.
Decades later, composer Giacomo Puccini and his two librettists, Illica & Giocosa, based their 1896 tragic opera La Bohème on the popular stage play, and not the novel, despite publicly saying otherwise. Another composer Ruggero Leoncavallo wrote music to his own libretto and opened his tragic opera La Bohème a year later in 1897. Both were successful, but Leoncavallo’s opera was largely forgotten, while Puccini’s became world famous.
A century and a half later, Jonathan Larson would follow a path incredibly parallel to Murger's, writing about his life and his community, and then dying suddenly at the age of (almost) 36, leaving us Rent. As crazy and wild as Murger’s stories are, they are sketches of real life and real people. These things really happened and these characters actually existed.
A century and a half later, Jonathan Larson would follow a path incredibly parallel to Murger's, writing about his life and his community, and then dying suddenly at the age of (almost) 36, leaving us Rent. As crazy and wild as Murger’s stories are, they are sketches of real life and real people. These things really happened and these characters actually existed.
When Rent opened, everybody made a big deal out of its connection to La Bohème, largely because the opera is very well-known and the novel is not. But Rent is not an updating of La Bohème. While La Bohème romanticizes suffering and death (which was very trendy in 1896 when it premiered), Rent celebrates life with all its might, as evidenced by all the references to life in the show (the Life Café, Angel’s group Life Support, and others). While Bohème is tragic, Rent is joyous like the novel. While the world of the opera is romantic and poetic, the world of Rent is tough, gritty, angry, and real (again, more like the novel). And of course, where Bohème has the lovely “Musetta’s Waltz,” Rent has the cynical “Tango Maureen.”
Larson used so many details from Murger’s novel. The book is unlike the opera in many ways, particularly in its wonderful sense of humor. The book is funny, first and foremost, and the four friends are much more like the four friends in Rent than they are like the characters in the opera. The book is chock full of rampant casual sex and other delightful decadences, a remarkable thing for a book written in the 1840s. Also in the book, Mimi’s great tragic death of tuberculosis really belongs to a one-chapter character named Francine, who was in love with a man named Jacques, who died of grief soon after Francine.
Lots of small details in Rent come from the novel: the importance of Collins’ coat, their regular restaurant where they often order nothing and don’t always pay the bill, the burning of manuscripts and letters for heat, Marcel/Mark’s decision to sell out his art, and the structural significance of Christmas Eve. The novel makes a strong (and constant) point of the fact that the four bohemians are irresponsible, selfish, and immature, a complaint leveled by critics against Larson’s character, but they’re also endlessly clever and charming.
In the book, Rodolphe is able to write his one great poem only after Mimi has left him, paralleling Roger’s song “Your Eyes.” And just as the song revives Mimi in the musical, Mimi in the novel sees Rodolphe’s poem in a magazine and it’s (indirectly) what brings them together again. The novel is organized into a couple dozen short stories, so when critics complained about Rent’s structure, they didn’t realize it mirrored the original novel. It’s a legitimate storytelling structure, a series of snapshots, a book of days, that ultimately come together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a rich tapestry of characters, relationships, and truths.
The trick that both Murger and Larson pull off is that the incidents aren’t really random and unconnected at all; they only seem that way. Content Dictates Form, as Sondheim always said. Instead of telling the story of these characters in a conventional, linear narrative, they unfold like a collage, in more of a cumulative narrative. Like Company, Follies, Passing Strange, Pippin, and other shows, you don’t see the whole picture till you get to the end. But there are long arcs of story and character, and we do see our four central characters grow and learn and change over time.
I first read the novel years ago when I first studied and wrote about Rent. I’ve now really studied it closely and I’m so impressed and so entertained by what Murger has done, making us love these incorrigible, selfish, whiny, crazy, whimsical, talented people. Anybody who thinks the book isn’t a novel, just because it began as a serialization, probably hasn’t read it.
And now there's a new edition of the novel especially for Rent fans, more readable, more accessible, and as outrageous as ever. If you love Rent, you'll love the novel. This edition is called La Vie Bohème! and there's an essay of mine in the back about Murger and Rent (from which some of this post is poached).
I've always loved reading novels that musicals are based on. It's such fun for me to see what's the same and what's different, what got left out or changed, what the novel can tell me about these characters that I didn't know from the show, etc. I have three shelves in my bookcase full of these novels, including quite a few I haven't read yet. Some of my other favorites so far are Candide, Be More Chill, Aspects of Love, Pal Joey, High Fidelity, 42nd Street, Show Boat, and Kiss of the Spider Woman.
But I think La Vie Bohème! may be my favorite (although I just call it "the Rent novel"). Maybe because I relate to the four main characters so completely, maybe just because it makes me laugh out loud.
If you enjoy fiction, and you like Rent, give La Vie Bohème! a shot. And let me know what you think!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
Larson used so many details from Murger’s novel. The book is unlike the opera in many ways, particularly in its wonderful sense of humor. The book is funny, first and foremost, and the four friends are much more like the four friends in Rent than they are like the characters in the opera. The book is chock full of rampant casual sex and other delightful decadences, a remarkable thing for a book written in the 1840s. Also in the book, Mimi’s great tragic death of tuberculosis really belongs to a one-chapter character named Francine, who was in love with a man named Jacques, who died of grief soon after Francine.
In the book, Rodolphe is able to write his one great poem only after Mimi has left him, paralleling Roger’s song “Your Eyes.” And just as the song revives Mimi in the musical, Mimi in the novel sees Rodolphe’s poem in a magazine and it’s (indirectly) what brings them together again. The novel is organized into a couple dozen short stories, so when critics complained about Rent’s structure, they didn’t realize it mirrored the original novel. It’s a legitimate storytelling structure, a series of snapshots, a book of days, that ultimately come together like a jigsaw puzzle to form a rich tapestry of characters, relationships, and truths.
The trick that both Murger and Larson pull off is that the incidents aren’t really random and unconnected at all; they only seem that way. Content Dictates Form, as Sondheim always said. Instead of telling the story of these characters in a conventional, linear narrative, they unfold like a collage, in more of a cumulative narrative. Like Company, Follies, Passing Strange, Pippin, and other shows, you don’t see the whole picture till you get to the end. But there are long arcs of story and character, and we do see our four central characters grow and learn and change over time.
I first read the novel years ago when I first studied and wrote about Rent. I’ve now really studied it closely and I’m so impressed and so entertained by what Murger has done, making us love these incorrigible, selfish, whiny, crazy, whimsical, talented people. Anybody who thinks the book isn’t a novel, just because it began as a serialization, probably hasn’t read it.
I've always loved reading novels that musicals are based on. It's such fun for me to see what's the same and what's different, what got left out or changed, what the novel can tell me about these characters that I didn't know from the show, etc. I have three shelves in my bookcase full of these novels, including quite a few I haven't read yet. Some of my other favorites so far are Candide, Be More Chill, Aspects of Love, Pal Joey, High Fidelity, 42nd Street, Show Boat, and Kiss of the Spider Woman.
But I think La Vie Bohème! may be my favorite (although I just call it "the Rent novel"). Maybe because I relate to the four main characters so completely, maybe just because it makes me laugh out loud.
If you enjoy fiction, and you like Rent, give La Vie Bohème! a shot. And let me know what you think!
Long Live the Musical!
Scott
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