Christmas cheer

Puccini’s Bohemians really knew how to have a good time at Christmas. Huddled in a freezing cold Parisian garret, Rodolfo is reduced to burning his own play for warmth and has just consigned the final act to the flames when Schaunard bursts in and flings on to the table a shower of coins he has earned from giving music lessons to an eccentric Englishman. Along with Marcello and Colline they manage to get out of paying the quarter’s rent they owe and head off to the Café Momus to celebrate Christmas Eve with a blow-out dinner. Act Two of the opera is a sort of self-contained festive explosion, with conspicuous consumption (rather than the tubercular variety, which makes itself less joyously apparent later on) at its heart. Street salesmen are pressing roast chestnuts, oranges, dates and nougat on passers-by; Mimì lingers longingly over a coral necklace but has to content herself with a pink bonnet; children clamour for toys and, when everyone eventually settles down to eat, they call for a fabulously indigestible combination of venison, turkey and lobster washed down with Rhenish wine.

The ultimate killjoy at Christmas was Werther. The character created by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in 1774, became an unlikely role model for those of a Romantic sensibility and started the phenomenon known as Werther-Fieber. This infected young men all over Europe, who started dressing in the dishevelled and sombre fashion described in the book and, more worryingly, provoked the first-known cases of copycat suicide. In Massenet’s operatic version, the action starts in midsummer, with the local magistrate of the German town of Wetzlar teaching his youngest children a Christmas carol. They get the hang of it in time for Christmas Eve but unfortunately by then Werther has fallen for their older sister Charlotte (who is engaged to someone else), spent a great deal of time brooding and despairing, and chooses to mark the festive season by shooting himself.