As the pages of Rodolfo's play crackle into flames near the start of Act I of La bohème, momentarily keeping the bohemians warm in their frigid garret, the bohemians describe an evanescent drama that could be La bohème itself. The opera's nearly permanent place on the operatic stage, where it has remained for over a century, has rendered it so familiar to audiences that its ephemeral qualities no longer surprise. But this succinct tale of brief love extinguished too early has something in common with the synecdochical drama set ablaze, whose capriciousness and brevity are mockingly described. The opera's audience is shown only fleeting glimpses of the unsettled lives of these characters, and the music (beginning with the opening unresolved dominant seventh chord, which is the first link of a sequential cycle) is similarly unstable. As love blooms and dies, as moods change kaleidoscopically, as the frail Mimì passes on, as the bohemians live through this transient stage in their lives, the music follows suit.

The four “tableaux” [quadri] are not “acts,” but partial views of an unpredictable and unaccountable existence, based on events and personages from Henry Murger's life. Much narrative detail is omitted (taking further the episodic structure found in Manon Lescaut) and scenes unseen from La bohème abound. We are not given a chance to see a panoramic view of their Paris—no traditional introductory chorus here to establish time and place. We only hear narrative-within-narrative descriptions of the grey skies and rooftops of the city, the millionaire uncle, Chez Mabille, the pawn shops. And we are made aurally aware of out-of-sight activities, such as Colline falling down the garret stairs, Parpignol the toy seller approaching, Musetta singing from inside the tavern, and church bells ringing on the Avenue d'Orleans.

In addition to the lack of a clear narrative trajectory, the first audiences of La bohème would have noticed something else missing as well: many operatic conventions. Puccini, librettists Luigi Ilica and Giuseppe Giacosa, and editor Giulio Ricordi challenged traditional ways, in a manner not too unlike that of their bohemian protagonists, with the then-progressive aim of making the opera seem as natural as possible.