2 - Creating Success and Forming Imaginaries: The Innovative Publicity Campaign for Puccini’s La Bohème

Summary

Even when one writes a masterpiece, one runs the risk of being either unheard or pitied. The best thing to do is to wait and see, as a spectator, how this colossal comedy will end, a comedy in which entire nations act like puppets shaken by the strings of publicity.

Alfredo Catalani (1892)

PUCCINI'S La bohème, on a libretto adapted from Henri Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin on 1 February 1896. The opera was preceded and accompanied by a publicity campaign, organized by the opera's publisher Ricordi, which was unprecedented in the history of Italian advertising. To my knowledge, the campaign was not only the first of its kind of such magnitude, but it is also the one for which materials are most accessible today. It also exemplifies Ricordi's marketing efforts in support of Puccini and provides evidence of the firm's experience with advertising campaigns and of its general perceptions of what would attract audiences. Ricordi utilized, in innovative ways, a great variety of new advertising tools: posters, postcards, reproductions of costumes and set designs in the periodical press, envelope seals (‘bolli chiudilettera’) and even a set of porcelain plates, as well as sheet music and scores. Turn-of-the-century Italy was a particularly good environment for developing new marketing techniques and for actively attempting to attract a larger and more diverse audience: Italian opera was going through a period of ideological and economic crisis, and the social, economic and political changes of the time were contributing to a widening of the existing opera audience. There were strong prospects for rejuvenating the image of Italian opera while targeting a previously underexploited revenue stream. Ricordi, the main Italian music publisher of the time, was in an especially privileged position for exploring such opportunities, since the firm owned publishing and performing rights to the music that it published and also served as an agent (in the modern sense) for the composers it had under contract. For these reasons, the publisher was invested both in promoting the genre of opera and in selling its own related products.