One of the central events of the film Moonstruck (1987) takes place in a performance of La bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera. Loretta (Cher) is puzzled by what seems to be Mimì's unexpected death, which takes her by surprise, even though the explanation by her friend Ronny (Nicholas Cage) reveals that she suspects its cause. Most of us will smile indulgently at a first-time opera-goer's ingenuous conflation of character (‘coughing her brains out’) and voice (‘keep singing’). But we might pause for a moment on a more intriguing twist in Loretta's surprise at Mimì's death – the fact that our antibiotic age has largely forgotten the devastating epidemic formerly known as phthisis or consumption.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Association of Teachers of Italian is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Italica. Althoughit is notoriously difficult to generalize about nineteenth-century Italian opera, owing to the wide variety of institutional changes that occur during the course of the period,2 one generally accepted constant seems to be the dominance of the composer over the librettist. Late in the century, however, there are indications of a shift away from a priori submission to purely musical considerations, and the no-man's land between literary source and musical tradition often becomes the battleground for the individual aesthetic of fin-de-sihcle opera. The operas that Puccini wrote in collaboration with the librettist Luigi Illica and the dramatist Giuseppe Giacosa provide suggestive examples of this altered situation. To be sure, the participation of a specialist in texts for opera as well as an independent literary figure in this process is not new--Verdi had already employed Piave for the libretto to Macbeth and then brought in Maffei to refine it. But a constant series of skirmishes and truces within the team, rather than the dictatorship of the composer, now determines the outcome. Indeed, battle metaphors characterize the working relationship of the entire group, Giulio Ricordi, Giacosa, Illica, and Puccini (representing the interests of publisher, poet, librettist, and composer respectively), with Ricordi issuing summonses to decisive fights in his office:3 "sia pure lotta romana o boxe inglese, bisogna finirla una volta!!! ... L'aspetto da me alle 13 e mezza".4The death of Mimi in La boheme exemplifies the principal conflict that emerged at the outset of the collaboration. Whereas Puccini, apparently inviting comparison with Violetta's death by consumption in La traviata, insisted on beginning his last act with his dying heroine in bed,5 Illica protested-successfully-to Ricordi, marshalling the publisher's support for his insistence on fidelity to Murger's novel: "la Mimi di Murger e piiu complessa! Bisogna avere un po' di compassione anche pei librettisti!" (CP 101) As a result of differing literary and musical expectations, the genesis of La boheme involved a series of 654 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 22 Dec 2014 21:32:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PROBLEMS IN THE GENESIS OF AN OPERATIC HERO compromises that characterizes even large structures: Acts I and IV reflect their literary ancestry in a close-knit web of Bohemian themes and episodes that are easily traceable in the novel; Acts II and III, invented by Illica independently of Murger's works, reflect anticipated musical forms-a concertato finale a...

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By all accounts the premiere of Puccini'sMadama Butterflyat the Metropolitan Opera on 11 February 1907 was a triumphant success, with the presence of the composer adding special lustre to the brilliant performance of a distinguished cast. Amidst the general acclamation, however, a foreign visitor named Jihei Hashiguchi raised a dissenting voice in a letter to a local newspaper:I can say nothing for the music ofMadama butterfly. Western music is too complicated for a Japanese. Even Caruso' celebrated singing does not appeal very much more than the barking of a dog in faraway woods.