Can an opera be so good you'd perform it without its music?

I was thinking about this question as I prepared for a brand-new production of Giacomo Puccini's 1896 La bohème, which kicks off the Houston Grand Opera season Friday at the Wortham Theater Center.

I had the chance to study up at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which partnered with the HGO to present King Vidor's 1926 film La Bohème, starring the resplendent silent siren Lillian Gish.

The rage for what was one of Puccini's best-loved operas provoked the desire to cash in on its popularity. Copyright laws prevented the film from using Puccini's music or sticking close to the plot of the libretto, so the studio invented its own silent La Bohème.

Happily the other night, Joseph Li of Rice University's Shepherd School of Music brought Puccini's heavenly music to the world of film when he gave a stirring performance of a piano arrangement of Puccini's score alongside Vidor's much-altered and unintentionally funny but jarringly brutal version.

Vidor, interestingly enough, was born in Galveston and saw his first film, A Trip to the Moon, at the 1894 Opera House, according to HGO dramaturg Mena Mark Hanna, who introduced Li's performance.

It's hard to imagine Puccini's La Bohème reaching such heights of popularity with the baggage of Vidor's film. Rodolfo's jealousy provokes him to strike Mimi on occasion. Characters in the film pawn their belongings in depressingly packed shops.

Poor Mimi literally works herself to death to support Rodolfo's career, staying up all night to support the household with her embroidery so her genius boyfriend can write. Later she labors for long hours across town while dying of consumption and hiding herself away to prevent him from neglecting his career to tend his dying girlfriend.

Women in opera often sacrifice themselves, but usually it isn't double shifts in a textile factory or regular visits to the pawn shop that do them in.

Puccini's opera was also part of a craze for tales of penniless artists and bohemian philosophers barely getting by in Paris. Puccini beat rival composer Ruggero Leoncavallo whose 1897 La bohème never caught on. Henri Murger's novel in vignettes Scènes de la vie de bohème and a later play he co-wrote with Théodore Barrière offered artists much to work with.

Hanna described La bohème as "one of the most successful Puccini operas because it portrays young love." Certainly, it is that. Aspiring playwright Rodolfo opens the opera by burning his latest play to keep warm. In between carousing with friends and dodging the landlord he meets the embroiderer Mimi. The two fall in love only to be sundered by economic desperation and premature death. After some time with a convenient viscount, the consumptive Mimi returns to her lover just in time to die.

It's odd to think of silent film and opera, but the wordsmith Shakespeare too was also all the rage on the wordless silver screen before the advent of sound. Certainly, the core story matters, which explains this phenomenon.

The pressures of paying bills made for one of La bohème's most popular recent adaptations, the musical Rent, which traces the lives and loves of a bohemian set in New York's Alphabet City. It's hard to imagine, now where starving artists live in either Paris or New York City, since both the Latin Quarter and Alphabet City price out most of the upper middle class.

Perhaps the story of La bohème doesn't ring so true, now, but the music is unforgettable, which is perhaps why a member of the audience at the MFAH called La bohème without Puccini a travesty. Great passages from the opera are some of the most frequently repeated passages of any opera.

The Australian film director Baz Luhrmann couldn't resist Puccini otherwise and turned, after his operatic adaptation Romeo + Juliet and his stylized Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, to La bohème to make a Broadway hit of what a trailer describes as "the greatest love story ever sung."

John Patrick Shanley's Moonstruck makes pure idolatry out of La bohème, with the hapless Loretta and Ronny, played by Cher and Nicholas Cage, attending a performance at the Met but also generally haunted by the unforgettable, swelling force of love.

Cher and Cage will not, we may assume, be in attendance at the Wortham Theater, but audiences will be treated to a Rodolfo by Dimitri Pittas, who last graced the HGO with a rousing performance of Edgar in Lucia di Lammermoor, and a Mimi by Katie van Kooten, who was unforgettable in recent HGO productions of Mary Stuart and Peter Grimes.

We keep coming back to La bohème, even in an age when characters based on artists are less often at the center of anyone's understanding of popular entertainment. We can't seem to resist the entangling of economic and erotic woe in the very music of Puccini's opera. Perhaps it's no accident we sometimes use the same word to describe our emotional and financial lives: impoverished.