♥Scenes of a Latin Quarter, Rent, Opera Lecture♥

In “Scenes of a Latin Quarter”, there are obvious themes of poverty, unrequited love, and Bohemianism. Bohemianism refers to a societal movement of people who live with the arts in an unconventional way. In this story, the artists live in poverty and struggle to pay rent due to their careers, but still try to live optimistically. This is directly related to the Bohemian theme, because while art is not considered a “respectable career”, we all need art to live and relate to, which is why many artists are happy to create it.

Similarly to the artists in “Scenes of a Latin Quarter”, another group of artist friends is struggling to pay rent in NYC, and at the same time, are directly affected by the AIDS epidemic. Since Rent is a musical, it was easier for me to grasp than “Scenes of a Latin Quarter”, which I found quite dense at some points. But, both texts share the exact theme of Bohemianism and how it is used as a coping mechanism for different issues, which in this case was the AIDS epidemic, and for “Scenes of a Latin Quarter”, it was poverty and unrequited love.

Finally, I enjoyed how this connected to the Opera lecture. Not too long ago, I went to see Les Contes D’Hoffmann, which was my introduction to opera since I had never been exposed to it before. After learning about Bohemianism in opera, I have even more of an understanding of how opera came to be, and how works like Rent and “Scenes of a Latin Quarter” came to be as well. I argue that Bohemianism is still very evident in our society today, but a lot of it was popularized through these original pieces of work.

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